A book that considers and interprets material objects in the light of (nearly) contemporary texts that refer to them is a rare and valuable thing. So Fabio Barry (B.) has produced a volume that many Roman archaeologists will want to read and consider, even if its main themes arise from the author's specialty in the art history of later periods, medieval to Baroque.

Painting in Stone grew out of a 2011 Columbia dissertation of the same title, which contained versions of Chapters 3 and 5–12, while Chapters 1, 2, and 4 form a sort of prequel. Several articles arising from this work have already been published.Footnote ¹ In the dissertation, as in the book, B. eschewed interpretations of lucent stone displays as either conspicuous consumption or imperial domination as “too reductive” (2), preferring “metaphysical commonalities,” for example, texts across time that saw stones as sources of light or forms of natural, divine, or miraculous painting.

Like the Roman authors whose texts he adduces, B. uses the term “marble” not geologically, but to indicate any polishable stone. Indeed, B.'s concept of “stone” is even more expansive: not just ashlars, slabs, and veneers for building and gems for jewelry, but those pulverized for their colors, as well as imitations of stone, including faience, glass, glazed clay, and fresco painting, whether it depicted natural stone or not.

B. avoids many subjects that other scholars of stones are keen on: the technologies that enabled quarrying and working exotic stones; the pinpointing of quarry sources of ancient objects and architecture; and the economy and trade that shipped varied stones of all sizes across the Mediterranean. Studies of these, as well as further articles on the semiotics of stones in various cultures, are available through the published proceedings of regular conferences of the Association for the Study of Marble and Other Stones in Antiquity (ASMOSIA).Footnote ²

B.'s enthusiasm for stones, especially those that are luminous and colorful, is patent, and he draws forth certain recurrent themes by going forward and backward across time and cultures. Stones are petrified water, form gem-carved heavens, represent paradeisos (here a hortus conclusus rather than a royal zoo or hunting park) or contain divine/natural painting. Perfect objects are those (actually or seemingly) carved from single stones.

Whether the people who created the works he references would have agreed with him is sometimes questionable. Though some of the texts B. relies upon had influence and followers (as Hebrew writings influenced Christian ones, for example), they still come from widely divergent milieux. To follow B.'s favored themes across such a wide range of cultures and times, occasionally conflating them in the process, is to risk wandering into Golden Bough territory or pursuing the “Key to all Mythologies.”Footnote ³ Indeed, B. admits that his arguments verge on Jung's “collective unconscious” (334–35).Footnote ⁴ They seem to reflect the author's beliefs and metaphors about his subject as much as those of any other particular culture.

These big ideas often swamp awkward facts that may contradict them. For example, B. discusses (17–18) 1st-millennium BCE ziggurats, whose seven stages were faced with painted plaster or glazed brick in colors that (possibly) represented the seven planets more than they did colored stones. (He shows little interest in color per se, though many of his source texts focus on it, and a closer look at cultural concepts of colors would have been useful.Footnote ⁵) But instead of relying upon texts in the publication that he cites, which place the ziggurat's gold-colored stage at the top, he brings in a text of the previous millennium, where Bel presides in the Middle Heaven in a “lapis lazuli sanctuary” above the Lower Heaven of chalcedony, and places the blue stage of the ziggurat at the top, enthusing that “Marduk's shrine, at the summit and amid the clouds, pierced the chalcedony sky, and in his lapis throne room, the god lit an amber lamp (the sun) to illumine the whole world.”Footnote ⁶ Such magniloquent statements tend to overwhelm strict accuracy as to date or culture. Indeed, much of B.'s prose is purple or consciously clever. Though sometimes amusing, this can become tiresome, or in B.'s own words (185), turns into “a blizzard of stimuli leaving viewers purblind in the miasma.”

That B. cites texts and publications that may not support his interpretations means that one cannot simply trust but must verify his statements by going back to the originals and considering their full literary and historical context. For example, he reconstructs the decor of the Ptolemaic palaces of Alexandria, especially that of Cleopatra (111), and states “if we can trust…Lucan,” quoting a typically over-the-top description in the Pharsalia (10.5.113–26). Then, recognizing how most scholars evaluate Lucan's catalogue of gold ceilings, solid blocks of agate and porphyry, onyx floors, ebony structural posts, ivory walls, and tortoise-shell and emerald doors, he writes (112) that Lucan's description “might be passed off as fanciful hyperbole” if it were not backed up by several Campanian paintings – as if wall painters never exaggerated or invented, as he admits they did (94–95). He tries to identify “opus alexandrinum” paving in the early 3rd-c. CE “Palace of the Caesars in Rome,” but his evidence (111, 350 n. 31) comes from two of the most fictional biographies (“Heliogabalus” and “Alexander Severus”) in the all-too-fictional parts of the Historia Augusta.

The book's chapters are thematic, though broadly chronological; the decor of Late Antique houses, broached at the end of Chapter 5, is not picked up again until the start of Chapter 11, and other themes scattered throughout must be pursued via the index. For that reason, further interrogations are included in the following chapter summaries, which will go into more detail concerning topics relevant to Roman archaeology.

B.'s “Introduction” lays out the purposes, limits, and approaches of the book, as already mentioned, and especially the author's use of poetry, specifically ekphrases, as “the closest textual parallel to artistic intention in the visual arts” (4). But such poetry does more – and less – than simply “reenacting the artifact verbally,” as B. states here. As Simon Goldhill wrote, “Visualization amazes. In so doing, visualization conceals facts.”Footnote ⁷ Goldhill further argued that the intent of ekphrastic poetry was “to produce a cultivated and cultured citizen of Empire.” It was not to inform posterity what objects were actually like, and certainly not what those who created the objects, who were generally not of that cultured class, believed or saw in them.

Chapter 1, “A medium foretold: material synthesis and heavenly stones in the ancient Near East,” begins with Sumer, and associates colors and patterns that were displayed on its earliest temples as inspired by, or copying, various stones. Though B. admits that this area of Mesopotamia had and used little stone, he brings in a painting far off in both time and space, from the Palace of Zimrilim in Mari, Syria, to suggest that the stone-cone patterns of the walls of Uruk's 4th-millennium BCE sacred precincts were “also geometrical notations for stone veining” (6–7). The construction of the “stone-cone” building at Uruk was complex, but used reed mats, bitumen, pounded clay, terracotta, and a type of composite cement, with stone mainly in the unseen foundations. Its wall patterns more closely resembled fabrics or the reed mats than veined stone, as B. contends; later buildings that used this system were not doing it to “simulate stone” (7), but to simulate those colors and patterns, using clay as the material available.Footnote ⁸ But then to B., sun-dried or kiln-fired clay was “the first form of artificial stone” (13).

It is curious, then, that B. does not discuss one of the most important Mesopotamian texts about stones: the Lugal-e (its opening word), where the god Ninurta confronts a mountain antihero, Asag (Akkadian Asakku), who is characterized, when conquered, as a stone. Ninurta allots praise or punishment to various stones according to whether they supported him or Asag, but more importantly, to their natures: enemy stones are cursed to be commonly used or friable, but those that allied with Ninurta – significantly, those that were generally used for royal or sacred objects or jewelry, not building stones – are blessed.Footnote ⁹

Chapter 2, “A medium fulfilled: the emergence of the marble temple,” goes to Greece, emphasizing Greek temples’ white marble over the painted colors that delineated and emphasized their parts (though B. discusses polychromy of stone later, 71–75). His views on temple placement and orientation (25) are founded on Vincent Scully's rather than on more recent studies.Footnote ¹⁰ He seizes upon the idea that marble tiles were translucent, creating “luminous roofs” on Greek temples; this is based upon the unique temple at Sangri on Naxos, which used marble for its roofing rather than the usual forest of wooden beams and battens over a coffered ceiling, and it cannot be taken as typical. He cites but rejects the evidence and arguments against translucent roofs (343 n. 42) as being “only on structural grounds”; archaeologists will be more sympathetic to the demands of structure. Even the modern marble-paneled ceiling of the Lincoln Memorial, B.'s model for the effect he wishes to see in Greek temples, has to be protected by a modern pitched glass skylight above it, which itself requires regular repair.Footnote ¹¹ In this and in his discussion of chryselephantine (splendid, but not stone) cult statues and the akrolithic ones that imitated them, he tends to populate absence with examples, as if all the temples of Greece regularly updated their roofs and cult statues with the rare and expensive features known from only a few.

Chapter 3, “Ancient geology, living rock, and ex uno lapide,” centers on what Greco-Roman writers on natural sciences believed about earth and stone. Though scholars who study how stones were viewed in the Roman world generally depend on books 36 and 37 of Pliny the Elder's Natural History, Pliny was no natural philosopher; B. cites him for many examples, but states (61) “as there is no modern study of geological theory and mineralogy between Theophrastos (315/314 BC) and Agricola (1556), one is compelled to collect diverse fragments to extrapolate any picture of Roman beliefs.” So B. never contends with Pliny as an author with aims and context, but mines him for quotations, as he does many ancient sources; it is not accidental that one of his first citations (2) is Gnoli's Marmora Romana (Reference Gnoli1988), which is made up of such quotations. This has implications throughout the book; works are generally not considered in their full context but are there to provide nuggets of text to support the author's themes.

An interesting excursus traces the trope of large and/or marvelous sculptures being carved of one stone. B. carries it over to buildings, mainly rock-cut theaters, and also pursues its opposite, fine assemblages of stones. This culminates (71) with Cassiodorus's praise of the buildings of Rome because they looked as if they had grown rather than been constructed; oddly, consideration of the “one stone” theme does not include the great monolithic roof of the mausoleum of Theodoric the Great, under whom Cassiodorus served.

In closing the chapter, B. describes the multicolored marbles that cladded the interiors of white marble temples in the reign of Augustus, emphasizing triumphal messages that later faded from attention. There are some confusions: B. seems to conflate the over-life-size, colored-marble-clad standing easterners (Parthians?) from an upper floor of the Augustan Basilica Aemilia in Rome's Forum with a smaller and later monument featuring kneeling easterners (Dacians?) clothed in pavonazzetto (76–77), but he had already distinguished the two in an earlier exhibition review.Footnote ¹²

Chapter 4, “Painting in stone: from Knossos to Rome, from fresco to marble,” is where B. goes out on a conceptual tightrope. Because the few fragments attributed to Middle Minoan frescoes include swirls in red, yellow, gray, and white, and because Early Minoan Vasiliki ware imitated veined stone vessels, “there is an argument to be made that the fresco technique was devised precisely in order to synthesize colored stone” (81), even though Minoan architecture displayed little stone except for gypsum, and that only in certain elite contexts of the later Neopalatial period.Footnote ¹³ Yet for B., clay technology morphs into plaster technology, chronology is passed over, and all paint is just earth, i.e., minerals, i.e., crushed stone, anyway. But what seems arguable to a modern scholar is not so demonstrable in a culture whose writing we cannot read and whose thoughts we can only approach through far later images. Nonetheless, for B., fresco becomes the “stony medium” (84), and all colorful landscape elements in later Minoan-style frescoes represent colored mountains or stones, most of them foreign to Crete. This does not mean that Late Bronze Age decorators did not imitate veined stone in paint, notably on palace floors and in the West House at Akrotiri; but it is unlikely that they, much less those who commissioned or saw their works, thought of all the frescoes on their walls as painted stone surfaces, as B. postulates (80–89), rather than images from their colorful inhabited and imagined worlds.

B. then examines a period with more textual evidence, when Hellenistic and Roman walls were stuccoed and painted, first to imitate ashlar masonry and then to reproduce fictive architecture within rooms, in the first and second Pompeiian styles. He has previously (2017) and in this volume (96–102) quoted Pliny's Natural History (35.1.2–3) for the “painting in stone” metaphor that runs throughout this book. It covers painted imitations of stone, but also images on stones (whether fossil inclusions or natural patterns that resemble things, like the face of Jesus on a tortilla), and then their imitations in painting: he even makes Pliny's references to panel painters’ quick or unfinished paintings swing towards stone, as on 98: “a painter's cursive strokes might resemble marble veining and paint blots marble mottling, and vice versa.” B. uses some quotes (90) to imply that Pliny's disapproval of the unnatural and luxurious use of marbles was mainly a curmudgeonly attitude toward his contemporaries. But Pliny's real venom was aimed back before the time of Nero to the Late Republic, and his poster boy for that age's decadence was M. Aemilius Scaurus, who took four 38-foot Lucullan marble columns from his fabulous temporary theater to his Palatine house in 58 BCE. Whenever Pliny inveighs against luxury, Scaurus is almost always mentioned.Footnote ¹⁴ In fact, Pliny occasionally defended his own times, under stolid Flavian emperors: just after another condemnation of Scaurus's columns, Pliny (HN 36.7–8) stated: “these (events) and those that followed them will show that we are (now) better. For who today has an atrium with such large columns?”

Chapter 5, “Homes fit for heroes: luxury and light from the per a'a to the domus” focuses on stone use in palaces and elite houses ranging from the Bronze Age to the 5th c. CE, and from Persia, Mesopotamia, and Egypt to Greece and Italy. Here ancient Egypt (“per a'a” is an unusual transliteration of Egyptian “great house,” which gives rise to the term “pharaoh”) receives more attention than in earlier chapters. But despite its many splendid native stones used for practical, decorative, and sacred objects from predynastic times onward, B. does not make much of Egyptian stones or their contexts.Footnote ¹⁵ Thus he misses several chances to examine a culture that rivaled even him in appreciating stones. According to inscriptions around Egyptian mines, the power to extract minerals descended from the first gods directly to the pharaoh, and his success in that process was ensured by specific divinities of the mines.Footnote ¹⁶ Moreover, graffiti from Egyptian quarries and workplaces can bring forward the words, practices, and perceptions of non-elite people, rarely noticed in this book; for example, the sculptor who “opened the mouth” to animate stone statues was honored as “he who keeps alive.”Footnote ¹⁷ Inscriptions at the turquoise mines at Serabit el-Khadim even preserve the earliest remains of alphabetic writing yet known, probably as the result of workers from two language groups who met there.Footnote ¹⁸

B.'s accounts of Roman “palaces of light” of course take in Nero's Domus Aurea (though the only remains he cites are those preserved in its Oppian wing) and the Flavian palace on the Palatine, which he miscalls “equally vast” (117–18); again he depends on authors whose objectivity should not be taken for granted, and on information that needs to be updated.Footnote ¹⁹ The restoration and display of stunning book-matched revetments at the Terrace Houses at Ephesos has progressed far since B.'s sentence about them (121), and it is worth noting that the northeast corner of their Insula 2 boasts the installation of a machine for sawing such marbles, including several blocks in progress.Footnote ²⁰ B. laments despoiled marble revetments of the rich houses of Pompeii and Herculaneum (121) but does not comment on how builders and shop-owners benefited by their reuse on bar fronts in the towns’ shops.Footnote ²¹ He also says little about Roman baths, though both private and public ones were prime points for extravagant marble display, and Martial (6.42), Statius (Silv. 1.5), and Lucian (Hippias) all described and praised them.

Chapter 6, “Medieval substitutions in the western church,” is where B. comes into his own, concentrating on western European Christian structures from the Edict of Milan (313 CE) to the Romanesque, with intermittent geographic and chronological excurses. B. traces debates on whether luxury materials or humble ones should be used for earthly churches and cites authors who visualized churches as both containers and sources of light. This, and the presence of a congregation within the building, made windows crucial to Christian sacred spaces, and as B. had already (7–9) classed glass as a type of artificial stone, an examination of windows, whether filled with glass, specular stone/selenite, or other translucent minerals, is not out of place. B. interprets the veined stone windows in the “Mausoleum of Galla Placidia” in Ravenna theologically (141), though he later (145) discloses that they, like virtually all those found in medieval churches today, are 19–20th c. CE restorations; meanwhile, his hope that the selenite window panels of Santa Sabina in Rome are 5th c. CE (142) looks increasingly unlikely, though scientific tests are in progress and have found their stucco frames to have been tinted with Egyptian blue.Footnote ²²

Churches were also seen as representations of Eden, of Solomon's temple, or of the new Jerusalem of Revelation 21, with its 12 gates of pearl set in walls of precious gemstones. But in this period, stone adornment was increasingly limited to spolia, with the rest of the splendor provided by gold and glass mosaic, or even, as in the Euphrasian Basilica in Poreč, Croatia, mother-of-pearl. B. sees spolia as dismal rather than triumphal (148–50), though later they will stud Renaissance façades like jewels (see below, Ch. 10). The dearth of real marbles led builders to depend on painted imitations, using not just knowledge of marbled churches in Rome and Constantinople, but images transmitted by manuscript illuminations (151), though B., in one of his more transcultural moments, would trace chevron patterns from Durham Cathedral back all the way to Sumer (150–52).

Chapter 7, “Hagia Sophia and Byzantium,” the eastern counterpart to Chapter 6, centers on one of the greatest, longest-lived, and most contested monuments now standing; luckily, due to those qualities, a great number of texts that praise and illuminate the building are preserved. B. (171–74) rightly focuses on Paul the Silentiary's panegyric, mostly in Homeric hexameters, which hymned the florid marbles that made Hagia Sophia both pastoral and paradisiacal. B. would like to place Paul's declamation, delivered shortly after the dome's 562 CE reconstruction, in the upper gallery of Hagia Sophia, with orator and audience looking out on the glories described (164–65, 206–7); in this, he again contradicts works that he cites (358 n. 22), and more importantly the lemma to the speech itself, which specifies that the first part was given before the emperor in his palace, and the second part in the “episkopeion,” or bishop's palace, before the patriarch. This desire to set recitation of a literary work in front of its subject seems over-dramatic and modern; there are disappearingly few examples of architectural ekphrases within the described space, and it rather goes against the purpose of ancient ekphrasis, to conjure an absent or even imaginary image with words.Footnote ²³ Though Lucian's On the Hall, which B. takes as such an on-the-spot ekphrasis, has as its first argument that it is right to praise the (unspecified, unidentifiable) Hall that the speaker pictures himself in, that view is challenged by the speaker's sophistic switch (section 14) to arguing the opposite, that words are weaker than sight, and that the supposed audience would be too preoccupied by the Hall's beauties to listen.Footnote ²⁴

There have been several major studies in, around, and on Hagia Sophia since Chapter 7 was written, most notably the 2004–18 archaeological and architectural investigations of the building and its surroundings, including the patriarchal palace and the Proconnesian marble paving of the church's courtyards.Footnote ²⁵ Such paving is the focus of B.'s Chapter 8: “Walking on water: cosmic floors in antiquity and the Middle Ages.”Footnote ²⁶ B. offers good evidence for the metaphor for marble paving as watery, not just within Hagia Sophia, but in other and later churches, and some Islamic palaces and mosque revetments (as sea foam). Unfortunately, the recent reversion of Hagia Sophia from a museum into a mosque has introduced harsh methods of floor cleaning, damaging the marble panels.Footnote ²⁷

Chapter 9, “Relics, tabernacles, throne rooms: painting and marbled architecture in the Renaissance,” examines sacralized marbles and their painted imitations from the 13th to 15th c. CE. The former, mainly spolia, were rare, and their intrinsic qualities and lost contexts allowed them to be re-conceived as relics from the Holy Land of pilgrimage and crusade: they include the stones of Christ's nativity, ablution, flagellation, and unction. Paintings set in that sacred land as well as in the heavens, especially those glorifying the Virgin, also depicted rich marbles. Some of the shallow pictorial reliefs of the time were themselves stone, and their effect was even imitated in paintings: an imitation imitated by the original medium.

B. ends Chapter 9 with the building of Santa Maria dei Miracoli in Venice, ca. 1481–87 CE, which anticipates Chapter 10: “Renaissance chapels and church façades: antiquarianism, gems, and sympathetic magic.” There, he considers the increasing historicism and antiquarianism developing in quattrocento painting and architecture. B. brings out two trends in marbled architecture: one classicizing, which regarded the Augustan arch at Rimini, the Pantheon, or the Arch of Constantine as models, and the other medievalizing, producing façades gemmed like reliquaries. Examination of the latter would have benefited from deeper consideration of the significance and trajectory of spolia such as rotae, colorful marble discs taken from opus sectile floors or sawn from columns; here, B. treats them glancingly (245–58), as he does in discussing Cosmati floors, which often made them their foci (e.g., 160–62 with inscription, 174, 202).Footnote ²⁸ They punctuate the façades of the Scuola Grande di San Marco (233) as they had on Santa Maria dei Miracoli, and make dizzying orbits on the Ca’ Dario, as would be seen in the next chapter; all these projects had the attention of the architect and sculptor Pietro Lombardo, and it is rather disorienting to have to jump from chapter to chapter to follow them simply because some are on churches and some on palaces. Still, B. has a keen eye for the appearances and implications of both real and painted marbles in all these contexts.

The chapter ends (255–60) with an excursus on the magical power of stones, from Theophrastus to alchemical treatises, encompassing around 1,800 years rather than just the 15th c. It presents this mysterious power as the rationale behind a glorious altar in Vicenza commissioned by Aurelio dell'Acqua, who specified in the contract for it that all the many “porphyries, serpentines, jaspers, alabasters, marbles, and fine veined stones” in his personal collection (including many rotae) should be inserted into the altar with great care. But B.'s assumption that Dell'Acqua did this to create a vision of the Jerusalem of Revelation, with its 12 foundation jewels, is largely based on dell'Acqua's acquaintance with Francesco Zorzi, who had written on the subject: only one of the stones named in the contract is actually mentioned in Revelation 21. Though B. calls the flat rotae on the altar “marble globes” and compares them to a manuscript illumination of that heavenly Jerusalem (fig. 10.19), the illumination's translucent orbs more likely represent the famous pearls adorning the heavenly city's 12 gates.

Chapter 11, “Marble mansions and painted palaces in Renaissance Italy,” picks up where Chapter 5 left off, mentioning a few Late Antique houses with revetments imitating stone. Most of the discussion, however, focuses on palaces of the Renaissance, when artists and humanists in Rome informed themselves about the splendors of the ancient city from Classical sites and texts, and poets described how spolia were being grubbed up for new palaces, which now boasted both real and painted marble decor. Perhaps inspired by Byzantine monuments like the 13th-c. Tekfur Sarayı, stone patterning migrated to palace exteriors, such as the diapered pink and cream of the Doge's Palace in Venice and the faceted façade of Ferrara's Palazzo dei Diamanti.

The most revelatory and self-contained chapter of the book is 12, “From gems to cloud architecture: reinventing marbling in Early Modern Rome.” After medieval dearth and dependence on spolia, by the 16th c. newly quarried marbles were lavished on all surfaces, especially in churches and their chapels, and took new, richer forms. Oil paintings on marble slabs used the natural veins for divinely inspired images, and the techniques and sophistication of pietre dure images improved. The culmination (in B.'s prose too) comes with Baroque style, especially Bernini's grand achievements in turning stones and stucco into cloud, light, and heavenly bodies in the Cornaro Chapel and Sant'Andrea al Quirinale. The Chapel's St. Teresa in Ecstasy balances upon a travertine pier “like an angel on a pin”; she lacks a right arm and is “as hollow as a tin mold” (312–13).

The “Epilogue” brings the book to modern times and documents increasing understanding of geology, developments in Victorian building, and the modernist movement (modern artworks appear intermittently in earlier chapters), down to alabaster images of the performance artist Marina Abramović. It's ironic that the products of our own age of worldwide quarrying, transport, and exploitation of colorful stones are more observable in kitchens and bathrooms than churches and palaces, or even the “corporate lobbies and back-lit bars” that B. cites (338).

The book is visually splendid. Its illustrations are abundant, most in the luscious color required by the subject. It has been beautifully produced by the Yale press, and the paperback comes at a very reasonable price (at least at the time of review).

In sum, Painting in Stone should be read for its positive qualities, even if there are negative aspects to those same qualities. Poetry and other contemporary texts indeed offer clues to metaphoric understanding, though they do not have the direct relationship with realia, or even beliefs about realia, that B. wishes they did. He is brave to range so widely in cultures and chronology, and his arguments become more convincing for later periods. Though some of the vivid language palls, it can nonetheless illuminate: on 176–78, B. describes lengthwise-matched sawn marble panels as “accordion-style” and “cardiographic.” Experts may carp at his errors, as I have here. Still, work that dares to go beyond the usual disciplinary barriers is eminently worth doing.

I only wish this book recognized a broader range in the attitudes it assigns to past peoples, rather than assuming that they were those of its author, or of a few ancient writers. Painting in Stone trains its gaze on the aesthetics of works by and for elite classes, especially the buildings they raised for gods, and the palaces they inhabited. The opinions of common men and women who served and sacrificed in and around these buildings are generally not preserved, though they are not beyond conjecture. I wonder, however, whether even the commissioners of these structures were thinking of sheer aesthetics when they called in the builders, rather than the power these works would display over valuable stones, other people, or nature itself. That may sound reductive, but it was likely far more prevalent than heavenly visions of stone.