Power, gender and their intersections in the matrix of Roman art have been major themes in the work of Natalie Kampen, and are fundamental to the six studies that make up this book. Here, though, she develops them through a close focus on two particular subjects: the kinds of relationships which, over time, characterized powerful families in the Roman empire, and specific images which represented them.

As Kampen makes admirably clear in her Preface (p xv), what links these topics, in terms of theoretical assumptions, is that both family and visual representation are social constructions and historically contingent. So, as she explains, she has chosen to discuss monuments that best reveal the constructedness of the family, with images exemplifying ways in which ideas about the Roman family were configured. Although these are to come mainly from elite families associated with the imperial court, whose families had a public, political face, her stated goal is to ‘provide some art historical models for thinking about other kinds of family representations’.

This is a welcome move, given how much work has recently been done on the Roman family and (less so to date) on its visual representation. But in discussing the depiction of Roman families the regular challenge is to find a methodological framework that can cope with the potentially wide variety of scenarios involved – not only of individual circumstances, but also in types of social units (such as domus and familia: pp 2–3) and their particular members (such as the marital couple, children, or siblings) and in the wide range of social and artistic traditions across the great spans of time and space that made up the Roman Empire. Thus Kampen’s approach has a lot of promise, and she takes some time and trouble in her section on ‘Historiography and what is missing here’ (pp 7–22) in her ‘Introduction’ to contextualize it both within existing discussions of how power operated in Roman family imagery, and within recent work on the Roman family in various branches of scholarship; she reveals as she does so some of the difficulties in writing about the depiction of the Roman family in general. (It would have been good if the ‘Conclusion’ had returned to addressing the general situation, albeit briefly.) Yet all the monuments she chooses for her case studies are ‘in some sense atypical’ (p 4), and this means that the volume as a whole has an underlying tension between the general and the specific.

One immediate difference from monuments associated with non-elite families is that these families are all well known from other historical sources, which provide a specific context in which to read their images. This is significant, since one of the problems regularly facing art historians writing about the ‘ordinary’ families of the Roman Empire is to identify them either as individuals or as units within their societies. Perhaps the nearest Kampen comes to this difficulty herself is in her final case study, ‘Stilicho’s troubled kinship’, based on the ivory diptych of Stilicho, his wife and son. She uses this image as a springboard to consider some big questions which arise in interpreting visual representations of the family in the later empire, when ‘the number of family images of all sorts … seems to decline, while the media used for the remaining images change’ (p 126). In examining various hypotheses adduced to account for these substantial changes, Kampen looks at a wider range of monuments. Some of these, such as the gold-glass portraits, give little information about their patrons, meaning that we can only make well-argued suggestions about the families whose social identity they construct (p 132).

In this they contrast with another small image that forms the first case, ‘Livia as widow: complicated kinship’, which shows how much can be gained from a close analysis of an image with a well-documented historical background. In this case study, as in the chapter on ‘Severan brothers: doubled value’, Kampen draws mainly on art-historical readings, demonstrating her ability to move easily between theoretical perspectives and close reading of specific monuments. Literary evidence informs the discussion in other chapters, to varying degrees, as in the second, ‘Trajan as father: depicting the Pater Patriae’, in the third, ‘Polydeukion as Trophimus: domus and emotion among the rich and famous’, and the fifth, ‘Tetrarchs and fictive kinship’.

Each of these case studies, therefore, has its own dynamic, depending on the other material it draws in and the sources it uses. But each shows Kampen’s constant attention to methodological issues, her succinct analysis and interest in engaging with other scholarly discussions. This book is well produced and the thought-provoking text well supported in terms of illustrations (including some in colour), bibliography and separate indexes.