M.'s book, which is based on her dissertation project, makes a useful addition to the growing scholarship on the body in ancient art and society. Focusing on the Hellenistic period, M. aims to use the body language – that is, gestures, postures and body actions – represented in art to recover and elucidate aspects of the society in which the art was produced. M. asks how social expectations of body language were managed, reinforced, nuanced, or even challenged through artistic representation. To answer this question, she attempts a social study of artworks that is deeply influenced by anthropological models. Her rich introduction makes the case for both her chronological focus and methodological approach, but the result falls somewhat short of its potential from an anthropological perspective. Nevertheless, the discussions of various ‘body language repertoires’ are detailed and insightful, comprising a kind of handbook of Hellenistic body language. While the book is clearly aimed at an academic audience – M. herself remarks on its usefulness in helping to reconstruct and/or identify the subject of Hellenistic artworks (p. 315) – much will be accessible to advanced undergraduates. M. draws on literary sources when possible, but the bulk of her evidence is material culture: primarily large-scale freestanding sculpture, statuettes and relief sculpture, but also coins, mosaics, vases and even painting.
The book is organised into three parts (‘Kings and the Civic Elite’, ‘Lower-Status Groups’ and ‘Synthesis’). Part 1 examines the body language of Hellenistic kings and queens (Chapter 1), elite men (Chapter 2) and elite women (Chapter 3). Part 2 deals with ‘genre’ figures (Chapter 4) and ‘grotesques’ (Chapter 5). Part 3 (Chapter 6: ‘Body Language in Hellenistic Art and Society’) provides a brief but welcome analysis of the enormous amount of information that is presented in the first five chapters. The book concludes with two useful appendices, an extensive bibliography and a thorough index. It is generously illustrated with 156 black-and-white figures generally of good quality. Readers should note, however, that figure 2.11 is incorrectly labelled, and is not the image M. refers to in the text.
Each chapter examines in detail the ‘body language repertoire’ of certain types of figures, outlining the major poses (kings, for example, might be depicted standing, sitting, or fighting) and the range of variation within each (i.e. head, arm and leg positions). M. thoughtfully demonstrates how these elements and their different combinations likely shaped the way the figure was viewed and understood, pointing to larger patterns of representation. M. occasionally mentions the effect of production on form, pose and the relationship between figures in group compositions (see, for example, pp. 154–5, 208), but her contention is that social expectation influenced the way bodies were positioned more than production process. The reader might wish that M. had considered this topic at greater length, taking into account recent studies of marble statue production in antiquity (J. Trimble, Women and Visual Replication in Roman Imperial Art and Culture [2011]; B. Russell, The Economics of the Roman Stone Trade [2014]).
Chapter 1 revisits how the body language of Hellenistic kings was used to articulate personal qualities and to express the ideal body of the ruler. The discussion builds on R.R.R. Smith's argument that, despite the apparent borrowing from other genres of statues (i.e. athlete portraits and divine statues), the body language of a ruler portrait makes it readily identifiable as such (R.R.R. Smith, ‘Kings and Philosophers’, in A. Bulloch et al. [edd.], Images and Ideologies: Self-definition in the Hellenistic World [1993]). This distinction, according to M., does not hold for queens, who are often indistinguishable from non-royal elite women. The majority of the discussion of royal females, then, focuses on the depictions of a single queen whose portraits are identifiable through personal iconography: Arsinoe II of Egypt. M. sees the lack of a distinctive body language repertoire for queens as indicative of their (lower) status relative to kings, though this is surely not the only possible explanation.
In Chapter 2, M. considers the common types of elite male portraits – orators, intellectuals and equestrians – from the perspective of their body language. As M. acknowledges, these portrait types have been well studied, but her detailed discussion of the body language repertoires serves to underscore the high level of individuality that could be achieved through even minor variation in pose and gesture. Two of M.'s observations deserve particular attention. The first is a distinction between what M. labels ‘civic’ portraits of intellectuals (which drew on established ways of representing the older civic male, readily seen on many late classical funerary monuments) and ‘heroized’ portraits (which displayed a personal iconography based on depictions of gods and heroes). The different modes of body language seem to distinguish retrospective (historical) portraits from those set up during a person's lifetime or soon after his death. The second is a shift in the focus of funerary reliefs from private to public life. Hellenistic stelai are ‘dominated by the narratives of civic activity’ (p. 120), but readers are left to draw their own conclusions as to why public life became so important a subject at this time.
Chapter 3 focuses on the depiction of elite women, returning to the examination of gender roles and social power that began in Chapter 1. A notable strength of M.'s anthropological approach is that it enables her to reconsider common interpretations of familiar poses, such as the Pudicitia type (pp. 128–30), often refining or elaborating their cultural meanings. This reader could not help but wish that M. had included in her discussion the bronze female portrait in the Archaeological Museum of Kalymnos, as it is a rare surviving example in this material. In addition to life-size statues, M. also discusses Tanagra figurines, observing that their non-portrait status allowed for a different (and much more active) repertoire of body language.
The discussion of ‘genre’ figures in Chapter 4 is particularly rich, as is the discussion of ‘grotesques’ in Chapter 5. For M., genre figures include Africans, servants, paidagogoi, fishermen and peasants, and old women and nurses; grotesques here are limited to dwarfs and ‘cripples’. Her astute observations regarding each type are numerous, and she re-evaluates the body language of both familiar and lesser-known works, teasing out patterns of representation among lower-status groups. While this material includes ‘social groups who are excluded from honorific and political material culture’ (p. 315), the identity and cultural expectations embedded in the body language repertoires are etic, as M. herself admits (p. 204), and hardly representative of the whole of ‘ancient experience’ (p. 315).
In Chapter 6 M. brings the isolated repertoire studies into conversation with each other, highlighting five major trends that consistently appear across the varied groups: asymmetry of bodily arrangements (with particular emphasis on limbs), incongruity between body language and subject, an emphasis on movement, gendered display (meaning different body language repertoires for men and women) and social conformity. Ultimately, little seems to have been ‘recovered’ of Hellenistic society through the study of body language (as the brevity of the synthetic chapter might suggest). Asymmetry, for example, may be a defining visual characteristic of Hellenistic art, but what does it tell us about the society in which it was produced and viewed? Body language may confirm the lower social status of certain groups, but the lower status of servants, peasants and the physically deformed was hardly in question. Still, M.'s interpretative interventions make a valuable contribution to the study of Hellenistic art, and this book will no doubt serve as a useful reference for scholars interested in the representation of a wide range of figural types.
