With this new Oxford Handbook, Clemente Marconi has done a wonderful job of communicating the breadth and diversity of scholarly work on ancient Greek and Roman art and architecture. This is a vast field, partly on account of the geographical and chronological spread of the subject matter, but also because (as Marconi explains in his Introduction) several modern nations have invested heavily in the study of ancient art, resulting in a set of relatively self-contained discourses, each with its own complex internal histories and conceptual frameworks. One of Marconi’s stated aims, then, is to open up debates across national boundaries, and his translation of several chapters from German and Italian provides a valuable service in bringing that work to new audiences.

The emphasis throughout the volume is on reception and historiography. The book opens with a quote from Hans-Georg Gadamer, and the Introduction presents that philosopher’s ideas about hermeneutics as a theoretical underpinning for the whole volume. The Introduction also provides some interesting commentary on such tricky terms as ‘Art’ and ‘classical’, as well as interrogating the relationship between Greek and Roman material culture. The volume’s chapters are then organised into five sections, starting with a set of ‘Pictures from the inside’: that is, a consideration of ‘emic’ reflections by ancient authors and artists on the art and architecture that surrounded them. The subsequent three sections roughly follow the ‘biography’ of ancient artefacts from their manufacture (‘Greek and Roman art and architecture in the making’) to their functions in antiquity (‘Ancient contexts’) and their reuse in later periods (‘Post-Antique contexts’). A fifth section on ‘Approaches’ considers how ancient art intersects with broader themes, such as gender and reception studies, and these later chapters will be particularly well-suited for graduate reading groups of art historians and classicists.

All thirty essays are of a high standard, and the overall range is impressive too: the Handbook covers most of the standard topics (eg Roman ‘copying’ and the architectural orders) as well as providing some innovative explorations of issues of great contemporary relevance, such as museum displays and the repatriation of ancient artefacts. The chapters do occasionally seem a little over-compressed (so, for instance, we get ten centuries of post-Antique receptions in just seventeen pages), but individual authors do a very good job of picking historical highlights and providing helpful further bibliography. One small criticism concerns the book’s rather abrupt ending with a reference to Bourdieu’s theories of habitus at the end of Tonio Hoelscher’s fascinating chapter on ‘Semiotics to agency’, where it might have been preferable to have a separate, more general Afterword looking towards the future of the discipline.

And what about topics that have been left out? The editor stresses in the Introduction that the volume makes no claim to be comprehensive, thus going some way towards pre-empting criticism on these grounds. At the same time, one might argue that any review of a ‘Handbook’ really needs to question the conceptual boundaries of the volume (certainly that would be one of the first exercises I would set for a student reading group!). So, personally I would have liked to see some engagement with new digital technologies for studying ancient art and architecture, from the powerful analytical tools that allow us to work with ‘big data’, to the online repositories of artworks and digital reconstructions of ancient monuments and cityscapes that are changing the ways in which we all conserve, interact with and think about ancient Greek and Roman art and architecture. This may be a relatively young trend in the study of ancient art, but it is unlikely that any future handbook will be able to omit digital technologies from its road-map of the subject.