From its early modern beginnings, the systematic study of ancient Roman art has concerned itself with various issues of representation – what was represented, how it was represented, and the connections, causality, and historical contingencies linking form, subject matter, and significance. One category of this artistic output – publicly displayed relief sculpture – has historically dominated the conversation, owing, no doubt, to its quantity, degree of preservation, inclination toward often identifiable historical subject matter, and conspicuous presence not only in Rome proper but also in urban centers across the vast expanse of a Mediterranean-focused world that once constituted the heart of Rome’s millennium-long political and cultural empire. The historical study of this massive corpus of imagery has largely concerned itself with a few basic questions. Being historically motivated, a primary concern was inevitably the determination of what was represented – the identities of the people, places, and events depicted and their connection to the literary and epigraphical record of events of the time. Equally significant, of course, as a specifically art-historical objective, is the recognition and analysis of how this subject matter was represented. It goes without saying that the close consideration of relationships between the what and the how goes to the heart of art historical analysis.

Given the subject matter of much of this commemorative relief – largely those military, political, and diplomatic accomplishments on which empires are built, and the various civic and religious rituals and events that took place in Rome and other urban centers in order to commemorate and advertise them – many of these depictions dealt, of necessity, with the challenge of representing individuals (both mortal and divine), armies, buildings, and landscapes in space. As Koortbojian’s (K’s) brilliant new book illustrates clearly and explores exhaustively, while the depiction of figures and objects is relatively straightforward, space is more easily and effectively suggested than depicted. Specifically in the case of relief sculpture, which is the primary subject of this study, he writes (1–2):

This central theme K. then proceeds to explore and illustrate in seven chapters, each of which is devoted to an aspect of the broader connecting theme proposed above.

In chapter 1 (“The laws of relief”), the focus is on the Classical era in Greece, a period in which the problem of three-dimensionality comes to the fore as the transition takes place from a largely two-dimensional Archaic style to the more, and then increasingly, spatially experimental modes of representation in the 5th and 4th c. BCE. The devices used in Archaic art to express three-dimensional form, and thus, of necessity, suggest a three-dimensional space to contain it, which developed in 6th-c. painting and sculpture, developed further in the 5th c. so as to create a more marked distinction between renderings in the two different media. In relief sculpture, this is seen most obviously in a sharper separation of the figure from its still flat (thus “neutral”) background. The effect is reflected as well in red-figure vase painting of the early 5th c. that favors single large (“red”) figures filling each side of the darkly slipped (thus neutral) ground of the vase. In sculpture, at least, and especially carved metopes, this brings with it the concept, articulated by Brunn,Footnote ¹ of an impenetrable but unseen surface in front of the figures that was parallel to the neutral vertical background – Brunn’s so-called “twin-planes” that would continue to play a role in the creation and experience of relief sculpture.

Chapter 2 (“Between two planes”) continues the consideration of Brunn’s concept, applying it to specific works and testing its validity. First is a treatment of expanding or accentuating the limiting quality of the two-planes concept, initially by materializing the no-longer-neutral background by “hanging” objects on it (seen also in vase painting) and by literally framing the relief, a practice that becomes more pronounced as the Classical era progresses, eventually resulting, in the Late Classical, in fully three-dimensional figures set in built naiskoi – not really relief at all but “real space,” as the author terms it. A consideration follows of examples that continue to test the two-planes model, such as overlapping figures (“imbricated” spaces) and figures that “break the boundaries” (including no longer impermeable backgrounds) physically and/or pictorially.

Chapter 3 (“Insistent planarity”) begins with an account by Vasari of Michelangelo’s method of carving large marble figures from smaller models in wax by gradually raising the latter in a vat of water revealing successive contours that are then transferred to the block of stone. The technique suggests that of relief carving applied to three-dimensional sculpture. A “four-sided” approach, as Vasari terms it, recalls what is assumed to have been the practice employed by sculptors of Archaic korai and kouroi, which, as finished products, patently retain the feature of the “rectangular prism” of stone from which they were carved. Quadratic structures, however, did not disappear in statuary of the succeeding centuries but rather persisted into the High Classical period, as in Polykleitos’s Doryphoros, described already by Varro, of course, as quadratus, and, as the author illustrates here, continued down into the succeeding century as well (e.g., Kephisodotos’s Eirene). This quality of “four-sidedness” allows each statue to confront the viewer as apparitional deity, while, by avoiding direct eye contact through its deflected gaze, remaining visible but not present to them. The chapter continues by exploring the effects of planar and quadratic forms in statuary, as for example (from disparate stages of the Classical) Myron’s Discobolos, Kritios’s and Nesiotes’s Tyrannicides, and the Sandalbinder /Jason type, which defy characterization as either frontal or profile, and yet, or consequently, maintain engagement with both the viewer and the surrounding space, by presenting both familiar and innovative points of view.

Chapter 4 (“Manifold forms and styles”) engages with the issue of style pluralism, a phenomenon that has been seen to undermine a traditional structuring principal (uniform chronological stylistic development) of especially Greek but also, although less so, Roman Art. The recognition of style pluralism has more than compensated for this loss by presenting a richer array of strategies for exploring a (or the) foundational process of art historical analysis – the relationships between style and meaning, which become both more complex and more informative once freed from chronological determinism. In this study, however, the pluralism in play is not so much formal (as is usual in stylistic analysis) as spatial.

The author here returns to a relief, already discussed in chapter 2, that C. Weickart presented 1925 as an example of a work that transgresses the two-plane theory in its obvious depiction of elements carved in relief on the upper border, thus physically breaking that foreground plane.Footnote ² This prompted Friedrich Matz’s construction in 1932 of his own categories of spatial depiction (“Multiple kinds of space”).Footnote ³ The first is essentially a closed space, wherein densely packed figures are shown in a shallow space clearly parallel to the relief ground and closed off by frame and background (e.g., the procession relief of the Ara Pacis); by contrast, the second category features an overlapping of diagonally arranged figures suggesting a certain penetration of space toward the relief background (e.g., Tellus Relief of the Ara Pacis; Lagina Frieze); the third is centrally focused on a primary scene while flanking figures recede sharply into the background at either side (e.g., the Spoils relief of the Arch of Titus). His observations and analysis are not locked into a rigid chronological structure, but rather foreground the availability of multiple stylistic options (the drapery styles and figural types of Greek and Hellenistic sculpture and the features and forms of Hellenic and early Italic architecture) as a palette of choices for Roman artists and architects.

There follows a consideration of an issue in the depiction/suggestion heretofore not directly addressed, but implicit especially in the account of Matz’s multiple categories of space, as well as much else that precedes it, and cutting to the very core of the issues the book is dealing with: “Pictorial and sculptural.” K. begins with a modest funerary monument from a cemetery outside Ostia set up by a freedman (P. Nonius Zethos) to serve as the resting place for family and friends, some of whom are mentioned in the inscription. He was a miller, as shown by a relief depicting grain measures, sieves, and measuring rods. A second relief depicts a mule harnessed to a mill. The animal is shown against a neutral background but behind the mill, which consequently is partially carved into the animal’s side. This indicates the sculptor’s intention to show the mule as distinctly behind the implement and in front of the background, suggesting both real recession in space and a non-impenetrable background plane. Anomalously, a whip is carved into the surface of the relief to one side of the primary scene; its location in space is unclear, and it serves to illustrate contrasting depictive approaches – sculptural and pictorial, or physical and conceptual. There follows a broader treatment of the historical co-existence of contrasting kinds of space, or at least various means of attempting its depiction – a phenomenon that can be traced back at least as far as Archaic Greece, where such variations are seen together, for example, on the four separate sections of the Siphnian Treasury Frieze. Later examples include funerary monuments (Trysa Heroon), as well as grave stelai and votive reliefs from across the Greek-speaking world. There is, in short, a plethora of differing spatial approaches across various social strata, categories of monument, and locations of manufacture and use throughout the Mediterranean.

In Chapter 5 (“Differing kinds of pictorial relief”), the author returns to a monument already discussed close to the beginning of the book, the cenotaph of the Julii at Glanum in Provence, and offers new observations that incorporate insights from the preceding chapters. The monument in question is something of an architectural hybrid, consisting of a rectangular socle set atop a stepped base and itself supporting an ornamental four-way arch, crowned by a circular tempietto with a conical roof. It is the kind of architectural confection expected in Second-Style wall painting – imaginative and decorative, yet not pure fantasy. Each side of its socle bears a panel in low relief bearing a subject drawn from the Hellenistic/Roman repertoire of heroizing figuration, including a Boar Hunt, Cavalry Battle (perhaps an Amazonomachy, ostensibly including Roman soldiers), and Infantry Battle (apparently a contest over the body of a fallen comrade). These were subjects from the late Classical/Hellenistic repertoire of subjects and imagery (some figures seemingly drawn from paintings) equally appropriate to myth and history, but their importance here derives from their material qualities, as they display the physical formal projection of relief sculpture, with heavy incised linear outlines of figures and the sculptural “modeling lines” used to bring out features of drapery and anatomy. Moreover, the compositions themselves use features that are well known from painting and mosaic to suggest three-dimensionality and spatial penetration. The effect is both glyptic and graphic. As K. points out, this amalgam of qualities characteristic of two different media led to Alexander Conze’s coining of the hybrid term Reliefgemälde, literally, “relief-painting.”Footnote ⁴

The remainder of this chapter deals first with the scholarly debates concerning such reliefs: their defining features, their probable Classical and Hellenistic sources – specifically in painting and mosaic, their relative Hellenism and Romanism, and the relationship of subject to style and stylistic tradition. While it is observed here that this kind of interaction between the forms of painting and sculpture can be traced back in Greece as far as the 6th c. BCE, that would seem to make it no less important for the questions at hand. The chapter concludes with Reliefgemälde of a different sort, those with pastoral and bucolic scenes, including landscapes populated, unpopulated, and sacro-idyllic. By their very nature, these reliefs also present challenges and opportunities in examining the representation of space. They are, in many cases, so reminiscent of upper-class wall paintings of the early Empire as to perhaps be understood as a sort of fusion of the two media, contributing to the ambiance of their intended settings.

Chapter 6 (“The challenge of depicting cohesive space”) marks a return to the main focus of the book on the representation of space as a conceptual as much as a visual issue, and, in particular, the intractability of space, which, following Wickhoff, results from its being much more capable of being suggested than actually depicted, thus posing the challenge to “make what was ineffable palpable, and to give form to what was by its nature formless.” (203). In short, there seems to be both a tension and an interdependency between the depiction of space per se and of the figures and objects that inhabit it, since although separate from one another, they in fact give substance and reality to one another.

The text, logically, then turns to “Wickhoff’s Exempla” of “a unified and self-contained image of a landscape or an interior” and challenges Wickhoff’s classification as such for each (206). The exempla comprise three late Classical Italic works: the Etruscan Ficoroni Cista, South Italian red-figure vases by the painter Asteas of Paestum, and the mid-Hellenistic “Telephos” frieze of the Pergamon Altar, which is about two centuries later than the first two examples. All three are rejected here as examples of the phenomenon indicated. The first is entirely dominated by large protagonists in the foreground that mainly occlude the rocky setting behind them. The colonnaded settings in Asteas’s vases likely make visual reference to painted backdrops used in stage sets and do not themselves strongly imply inhabited space, and while some strategies for suggesting natural settings occur in the Telephos frieze, the monument as a whole is neither self-contained nor unified.

The remainder of the chapter, as its subtitle, “Landscape without verisimilitude,” suggests, presents a series of individual monuments thought by some to embody Wickhoff’s characterization, quoted above; although several of them do reflect experimentation and innovation (a series of rocky landscapes used as backdrops represent one prominent example), such elements, while successful as artistic compositional devices, do not qualify as convincing representations of the purported subject matter, nor, it seems, was that their intended function. Ultimately, as the chapter seems to conclude, painting, with its potential for active manipulation of light effects, was more suited to the type of illusionism in question than was relief sculpture.

The book appropriately concludes with Chapter 7, “The rejection of space,” an account of art of the late Empire, when, as has long been recognized, the striving for visual verisimilitude that plays such a large role in both early Imperial art and the later Hellenistic art from which it largely evolved, seems to fall by the wayside. Consequently, the representation of space undergoes a transformation not so different from that experienced by the representation of form. The developments in these two realms, the depiction of forms and the depiction of space, appear to take place in much the same way – a de-materialization of three-dimensionality through the substitution of the conceptual for the perceptual – and for many of the same reasons. A number of Roman monuments from various periods are presented to support the now commonly accepted contention, originating in the later 19th and earlier 20th c., that maintains that in Italic and Roman art, especially but not only in its later stages, depictions often deviated from figures and compositions that were perceptually accurate in order to create an image that was more conceptually comprehensible. The first example here is a funerary relief on which the deceased, clearly meant to be understood as lying on her back, is tilted forward so as to make the entire outline of her body visible, but at the expense of denying the extension of her body back into space that would be consistent with her position of lying flat on the funeral couch.

This tendency to abstraction and conceptualism is, of course, what we commonly consider characteristic of the “Late Roman” style, which, in the construction of formalist chronologies of art, constitutes a convenient and convincing link between the striving for naturalism in Greco-Roman art of the Classical, Hellenistic, and Early Imperial eras and the patently de-naturalizing abstract forms of the medieval. But, as has often been pointed out, these kinds of compositions had a very long history in ancient Mediterranean art, going back millennia in Egypt and the Near East, but also much more recently in Greek, Roman, and Etruscan art. Several examples of what are here called “perspectives without space” are presented and analyzed. The remainder of the chapter explores other aspects and examples of works that patently flout the rules of the perceptual – a treatment well informed by the late 19th-c. scholarship on the issue. A separate but similar analysis follows of “the repudiation of space,” analyzing another common aspect of sculptured relief of the time, figures set against an entirely blank background, which seems to have helped effect a transferal of context from the particular to the universal. The chapter concludes, as might be expected, with an account of the Arch of Constantine, which by its date and function, as well as its figure styles, compositions, and iconography, is here seen to epitomize, visually and functionally, the transition from the fundamentally “Classical” world of the millennium following the emergence of a distinctly Hellenic culture in the late 6th c. BCE to the increasingly post-Classical world of the 4th c. CE.

A very useful and thought-provoking concluding section, entitled “Coda,” offers a “stepping-back,” of sorts, from the careful and penetrating study of these monuments and ideas that continue to stand at the crux of our questions and understanding of this most fundamental aspect of Greco-Roman art. These four “take-aways” form a very useful prompt for the reader to reflect on what has been proposed and illustrated throughout the book. These are, paraphrased here in brutally succinct summary:

1. 1. The absence of, or indifference to, in the development of relief sculpture, a precision in the depiction of space such as that resulting from modern perspectival systems for rendering forms in space

2. 2. The role of late 19th-c. scholars in framing accounts of ancient art while applying scientific principles from their own time.

3. 3. The simultaneous use of differing styles of depiction at the same time and on the same monument, which can undermine supposed and proposed models of stylistic development, which seem often to be an expected result of research.

4. 4. The impact of historiographic tradition and the uneasy interaction of later scholars with that tradition, given the imperative to provide original ideas and interpretations. A similar challenge is noted in the creation of art itself.

This book forms a major contribution to scholarship on ancient Greek and Roman art as a whole, and naturally, given its topic, to the study of two-dimensional media in particular. Understanding and conceptualizing the issue of space has played a leading role in this history, as it very often occupied the very core of early attempts to do so. As we see here, this occurs most conspicuously in later 19th-c. scholarship on Roman art, which the author has clearly mastered thoroughly and presents lucidly. Representation of space lies at the heart of some of the most persistent questions that still direct the discipline, including, to name a few: the stylistic change over time in conceptions of space and its depiction; the relationships between space and form as they evolve both independently and in concert with each other; the prominent role of space and its depictions, especially but not exclusively in the historiography of Roman art; and the differences, and similarities, between Greek and Roman conceptions of space as reflected in their art. It is worth noting, as well, that in most accounts of the stylistic development of Greek, Hellenistic, and Roman art, it is form – anatomy, drapery, physical objects – that plays the largest role. A close analysis of this same phenomenon through a consideration of the conception, depiction, and suggestion of space adds a corroborative but distinctly different “perspective.”

The book is, moreover, a masterful work of scholarship, deeply informed on the material evidence, ancient sources, and a massive corpus of both current and much earlier scholarship. Much of the latter is foundational not simply to the study of spatial representation in art, but to the entire discipline of Greek and (especially) Roman Art as it came to evolve in the 20th c. This book goes far beyond the modest claims implied by its title, as it invites and even challenges the reader to think deeply about the ways, both differing and similar, in which the various cultures of the Mediterranean strove to both conceptualize and materialize the intractable entity of space, an entity much more capable of suggestion than depiction. The reader is thereby provided with a means to accomplish much more than simply to understand these cultures’ material products – painting, sculpture, architecture; the book provides a window, so to speak, into those cultures’ experience and understanding of the world around them. It is a rewarding and thought-provoking work, not just for art historians but for anyone engaged in the study of the ancient Mediterranean world.