This is an ambitious and thought-provoking volume. As Platt and Squire make clear in their robust introduction, this is a book about the literal and metaphorical limits of visual representation. Although the individual chapters focus on works of art from diverse historical periods and archaeological contexts, they are structured around a common concern: to investigate both the actual frames and the symbolic frameworks that surrounded images in antiquity (p. 3). There is, however, another framework that informs the contributors’ approach to their study of this subject – namely, the post-antique traditions of framing works of art and later interpretative models that inevitably mould the ways in which we look at ancient art today. This methodological ‘double frame’ demands that each contributor take on a delicate balancing act, combining classical images and contemporary theory, ancient visual culture and modern ways of seeing. What keeps the entire project afloat is the contributors’ sustained attention to the formal qualities of the works of art they analyse. Each essay could, indeed, be presented to students as an exemplary lesson in visual analysis. Platt and Squire define this combined attention to the formal qualities of works of art and their metaphorical frames as a ‘neoformalist’ approach (pp. 5–6), thus situating the essays within a broader field of art historical inquiry that (to paraphrase T.J. Clark) sees artistic form and style as tangible traces of a culture's ‘world-making’ (T.J. Clark, Farewell to an Idea [1999], p. 165).

As Platt and Squire themselves avow in their introductory survey of the appearance and function of frames in Greek and Roman art (‘Framing the Frame’), which begins with a discussion of a Minoan pot dated to c. 1500 bc and culminates with a witty reference to Pere Borrell del Caso's Escapando de la crítica (1874, fig. 1.28), the question of ‘what do frames do?’ is not in itself new. What is new, they argue, is the way in which the authors in this volume interrogate ‘the dynamic relationships between the frame's practical functions, aesthetic effects and cultural implications’ in classical art (p. 9). Central to this endeavour are contemporary theories of the frame that are rooted in Immanuel Kant's categorisation of picture frames (‘Einfassungen der Gemälde’) as ‘ornaments’ (‘Zieraten’) akin to the draperies of statues (‘Gewänder an Statuen’) and the colonnades around palaces (‘Säulengänge um Prachtgebäude’) (Kant, Kritik der Urteilskraft [1790]). Equally important to the book's project is Jacques Derrida's later critique of Kant and his reconsideration of the frame or parergon as something that is neither outside nor inside the work of art, but rather touches it, rubs against it and cooperates with its operation (Derrida, La vérité en peinture [1978]). Throughout the book, these two fundamental texts serve not so much as prescriptive methodological paradigms, but as interpretative leitmotifs that recur like a musical refrain in each of the collection's essays.

The book's structure is itself indicative of the editors’ and the individual authors’ desire to think about the frames of classical art outside traditional chronological categories. The book is, in fact, divided into thematic units that largely correspond to the different types of frames delineated by Kant. Thus, ‘Framing Pictorial Space’ focuses both on Greek vase-painting and Roman frescoes. In the introduction to this section Platt sets the stage for further explorations of ancient pictorial frames by revisiting the murals from the Villa of P. Fannius Synistor at Boscoreale (60–40 bc) whose trompe l’œil effects and fictive landscapes anticipate Leon Battista Alberti's well-known metaphor of painting as an open window by several centuries. C. Marconi presents us instead with a playful catalogue of the different forms and uses of frames in Greek vase-painting that highlights the wit and sophistication of ancient artists. G. Hedreen's contribution redirects our attention to the effect of en face figures, such as silens, masks and Gorgons, on the spectator, forcing him or her to engage with the depicted image in ways that negate the frame's function as a boundary between art and experience. Squire's study of Roman ‘still lifes’ contrasts the use of actual, wooden frames for displaying fragments of Roman wall painting in modern museums with the ancient frescoes’ own original, illusionistically painted frames, which (he argues) were intended to signal ‘the power of images both to convince and to delude’ (p. 250).

Part 3, ‘Framing Bodies’, turns our attention to sculpture and the diverse physical and metaphorical frameworks that surrounded statues in antiquity. Squire's brief exordium to this section reminds the reader that both ancient and modern theories of the frame have traditionally been premised on discussions of two- rather than three-dimensional media. He then points to the Kallithea Monument (c. 330 bc) as an example of how ancient funerary statues were frequently nested within interconnected architectural, epigraphic and sculptural frames that were integral to the messages articulated by these complex works of art. N. Dietrich builds on this argument by addressing the fundamental difference between the post-Kantian parerga and the Greek notion of kosmos in a sensitive discussion of the painted polychromy and graphic surface decoration of Archaic statues. A similar concern with the status and function of ‘ornament’ lies at the heart of J. Trimble's essay, which investigates the multiple frames of Roman honorific dedications, ranging from the portrait statue's drapery to its architectural setting. As a coda to this section, Platt's analysis of Roman sarcophagi explores these monuments’ dual function as frames and containers for the body that reify the transformation of the deceased into an imago, both in the sense of a visual representation and a ghostly apparition.

Part 4, ‘Framing the Sacred’, looks at how religious architecture, objects and rituals create and ‘frame’ one's experience of the divine. In this section's introduction, Platt describes how architectural frames (whether in large buildings or in small devotional objects) enact what might be termed a ‘visual theology’, giving form to what by definition can be neither contained nor represented. M. Gaifman explores the architectural trope underlying Strabo's comment that Pheidias’ statue of Zeus at Olympia would have broken the temple's roof if he ever stood up (8.3.30). But instead of focusing on this long-lost masterpiece, Gaifman turns our attention to far more modest late classical Attic reliefs of the Great Mother in which the figure's exaggerated scale in relation to her sculpted naiskos similarly conveys her divine status. R. Osborne takes a somewhat unorthodox approach by considering the political and theological impact of ‘unframing’ the Gauls in the Attalid dedication on the Akropolis – an artistic choice that transformed what had been traditionally seen as an appropriate decorative motif for temple pediments (i.e. the battle between Greeks and barbarians) into a free-standing sculptural display. J. Elsner shifts this section's focus away from architecture to address the question of style. More specifically, he considers how artists from classical antiquity to the modern era frequently juxtapose or frame ‘archaistic-looking objects’ (p. 458) with others rendered in a more naturalistic manner to communicate an image's numinous power. He thus situates the stylistic plurality of certain ancient works of art, such as a scene of classical-looking Lapith women grasping an archaising cult statue on a late fifth-century marble relief from Bassae (fig. 10.1), at the root of a larger Western tradition of visually representing the divine.

‘Framing Texts’, the book's final section, differs slightly from the rest of the volume. Not only does it analyse the material and visual frames of ancient written texts, but it also focuses exclusively on works from late antiquity. Squire launches this discussion of textual frames with a short study of one of the carmina cancellata (‘gridded poems’) attributed to Optatian, a fourth-century author whose verses were often presented as an interwoven lattice of letters, strongly resembling modern word search puzzles. C. Roby considers the illustrations of ancient technical treatises, calling attention to the close relationship between these images and the texts they were designed to illuminate – a relationship that belies the modern tendency to attribute a subsidiary function to these so-called ‘marginalia’. Lastly, S. Leatherbury examines the frames of mosaic inscriptions in late-antique churches and synagogues, especially the tabulae ansatae (‘tablets with handles’) and what he calls ‘object’ frames, i.e. frames in the shapes of vessels, crosses and architectural facades. For him, these long-overlooked elements of mosaic compositions reveal an intense interest in surfaces and materials in late Roman art that was itself framed by specific theological concerns.

R. Zorach's ‘Envoi’ is a fitting bookend to this collection. Written from an early modernist's point of view, Zorach's pithy epilogue considers how the Renaissance ‘used antiquity as a framing concept for the notion of art itself’ – a notion that in turn transformed antiquities into art objects, removing them from their ‘own’, ‘proper’ frames (p. 600). She is especially interested in the role of printmaking (a medium that, as she points out, does not figure in Kant's discussion of the parergon) in this process. Beginning in the sixteenth century, prints re-framed ancient architectural and sculptural monuments as objects of aesthetic and scholarly interest to be collected and consumed by an increasingly diverse audience of artists, academics, travellers and dilettantes. These early modern practices of framing the classical past, which include the creation of museums and museum displays, the conventions for graphically representing works of art and the very discipline of archaeology, are all deeply entrenched in our own ways of seeing. Yet, as Zorach argues, this is not a unidirectional phenomenon: past and present continuously infect and frame one another. Platt and Squire's book is, in many ways, a celebration of this contagion. What few reservations any given reader might have about this collection, and in a book of almost 700 pages one is bound to have a few, these essays will undoubtedly prove a productive catalyst for new work in classical art history. Unlike Pere Borrell del Caso's mischievous youth, we should not try to escape these frames – we should jump right in.