T.'s monograph – stemming from a recent Oxford D.Phil. – takes as its corpus artworks produced in the Hellenistic and the early Roman eras depicting animals and plants: the Praeneste Nile mosaic (Chapter 2), the Apollophanes tomb (Chapter 3), the Artemidorus papyrus (Chapter 4), Hellenistic palatial mosaics (Chapter 5), Roman fish mosaics (Chapter 6) and garden paintings (Chapter 7). T.'s central thesis is twofold: first, that, despite their differences in medium, chronology, location, quality and purpose, these artworks were all informed by developments in Hellenistic biology and, second, that these artworks in turn reveal the cultural reach of Hellenistic biology across the Mediterranean and over four centuries’ worth of political change. Sometimes the lines of influence are sharply drawn, as in Chapter 1, where the Praeneste Nile mosaic is claimed to be a copy of a lost Ptolemaic court painting, whose labelled catalogue of exotic animals reflects contemporary practices in Alexandrian zoology, namely the description and classification of Aethiopian creatures that were newly encountered during royal expeditions southwards in the third century bce. At other times the lines of influence are more faintly traced, as in Chapter 7, where Roman garden paintings are claimed to be informed more generally by naturalistic representations of plants and birds that emerged earlier in the Hellenistic east as part of broader ornithological and botanical programmes sponsored by the royal courts. Across the book, we find not only Hellenistic and Roman royalty representing natural science for cultural capital and political clout (Chapters 2, 5 and 7), but also provincial aristocrats in the Levant (Chapter 3), urban planners in Praeneste (Chapters 2 and 6), wealthy homeowners in Pompeii (Chapters 6 and 7) as well as a humble, Egyptian student/scholar (Chapter 4), whose motivation appears more purely academic.
This is an ambitiously interdisciplinary book, and T.'s grasp of the archaeological, papyrological, epigraphic, literary and scientific material is impressive. T. writes with exceptional clarity and handles his (often patchy) material with sensitivity, always cautious about imposing definite conclusions when unwarranted (in the conclusion, however, he playfully experiments with writing a bold, ‘maximalist’ account of the book's argument that forgoes the customary caveats, pp. 291–4). The central claim – that biology and the visual arts were interdependent disciplines in the Hellenistic and Roman eras – is persuasively made and demands the serious attention of historians of Graeco-Roman art and science alike. Rather than further summarise the chapters’ arguments, whose interpretative nuances require reading on their own terms, I shall raise three critiques aimed at the overall project and offered amicably as testament to how engaging this excellent book is.
My first point regards theology. T.'s picture of ancient biology is surprisingly secular and risks anachronistically replicating post-Darwinian disciplinary boundaries that keep biology and theology separate. Ancient biology, from Aristotle on, however, was fundamentally embedded in complex religious, cosmological and teleological systems. Crucial here is the Stoics’ pantheistic theory of natura, which has every animal, plant and rock play an integral role in a ‘sympathetic’ universe, wholly permeated and regulated by god's immanent presence. This theory undergirds much Hellenistic and Roman biological writing, not least Pliny's monumental Natural History. Recognising the theological inflection of ancient biology – including its debts to Stoic natural philosophy – would have allowed T.'s corpus to provide philosophical reflection on the nature of divinity and the divinity of nature through its very engagement with natural science. Chapter 6's fish mosaics, for example, might be taken as commenting on theology through ichthyology, especially since Roman philosophers so often called on marine biology to advance arguments for providential design (see, e.g., the aquatic examples, such as the ray's stinger, that Cicero's Stoic spokesperson Balbus deploys at Nat. D. 2.120–30). This theological potential is especially latent in artworks that frame their representations of nature with religious iconography, such as the Cave of the Lots mosaic, which, as T. notes (pp. 239–42), depicts a coastal shrine alongside its catalogue of fish. Pushing this book into the changing religious landscape of late antiquity, where scripture rubbed up against science, might have thrown these theological questions into starker relief (what does it mean, for example, for the Aquileia Basilica to insert into its fourth-century ce fish mosaic a picture of Jonah being eaten by the whale?). Engagement with V. Platt's recent work on the influence of Stoic natural philosophy on Pliny's art history (especially his anecdote about Protogenes and the sea-sponge) and the decorative programmes of Roman houses more generally would also have brought to light the theological stakes of T.'s argument (cf. V. Platt, ‘Of Sponges and Stones’, in: Ornament and Figure in Graeco-Roman Art [2018]; ‘Ecology, Ethics and Aesthetics’, Journal of the Clark Art Institute 17 [2018]).
The Protogenes anecdote leads to my second point. T.'s insistence on biology as the explanatory principle informing his corpus overlooks how these artworks also resounded against an anecdotal tradition about master painters rivalling nature in representing flora and fauna. This omission is felt acutely in Chapter 5 on Hellenistic palatial mosaics and in Chapter 7 on Roman garden paintings, which both feature birds approaching or pecking fruit (and often framed by theatrical elements such as masks). T.'s insistence on Hellenistic ornithology as the guiding principle neglects how these representations also reverberated against the famous anecdote (unmentioned by T.) about Zeuxis painting a bunch of grapes so skilfully on a stage building that it tricked real birds into pecking them (see M. Squire, Image and Text [2009], pp. 384–9, uncited by T.) Contextualising these artworks alongside such an anecdote raises different questions to those T. asks – questions about the relationship between reality and representation, and nature and naturalism. Philostratus’ Imagines – a text T. is uninterested in (too late?) – reminds us that ancient viewers were capable of viewing pictures of nature through the lenses of both biology and art history. In the ecphrasis of ‘Islands’, for example, Philostratus’ sophist reflects on the illusionism of clusters of grapes to which birds flock (whether painted or real birds remains ambiguous) in ways that riff off the Zeuxian anecdote (Imag. 2.17.8); the next moment, however, the sophist offers an ornithological excursus on the cooperation of the tern and seagull (Imag. 2.17.11).
My third point regards medium. While T. persuasively shows how the natural sciences informed the production and interpretation of subject matter in Hellenistic and Roman art, there is no discussion of what bearing they had on the manufacture and understanding of medium. With regards to painting, it must be significant that authors like Theophrastus and Pliny so often embedded in their scientific exegeses of rocks, plants and animals commentary on the different pigments that can be derived therefrom. By integrating discussion of the natural science of pigment into his argument, T. could have further highlighted the entwinement of ‘art, science, and the natural world’ in antiquity, especially since he so often hypothesises Hellenistic paintings as the prototypes for Roman mosaics. But I also wonder how far the medium of mosaic related to the taxonomic tendencies of Hellenistic and Roman geology, and the cultures of collecting marbles and gems that the Hellenistic and Roman empires participated in. T. comments on how the different coloured gems represented in the rocky landscape of the Praeneste Nile mosaic reflect Ptolemaic interest in mining and geology (pp. 83–5), but I missed discussion of how these gems might function as self-conscious commentary on the mosaic itself as an arrangement of diversely sourced stones.
As will be clear, this is a genuinely stimulating book that is set to inspire further interdisciplinary enquiries. Although T. humbly refrains from using such strong language, this monograph is a rallying cry to dismantle the disciplinary boundaries that keep the historians of art and science separate in the modern university. Its conclusions appear especially remedial at a time when the UK government is fomenting a culture war between the creative arts (useless, self-indulgent, expensive) and STEM subjects (useful, beneficial, good value), not least by siphoning off funding from the former to the latter. T. shows that science and art have always been disciplines more complementary than competitive.
