Antiquity in Print by O. is an ambitious and attractive monograph in Bloomsbury’s New Directions in Classics series. Despite the book’s relatively short length at 273 pages (plus notes, bibliography and index), it offers a vast survey of Enlightenment art history with a focus on the visual reception and critical reading of the prints in eighteenth-century illustrated volumes, accompanied by 89 black-and-white reproductions. O.’s expertise in classical literature and knowledge of the ancient sources provide a unique perspective on the various engravings from frontispieces to fleurons, which can often be an overlooked element of these works, particularly in scholarly responses to J.J. Winckelmann’s History of Ancient Art (1764 [original German edition]). Owing to an approach that appreciates the aesthetic and artistic value of the prints as objects in their own right while employing the works to develop more of a historiography, Antiquity in Print negotiates the pitfalls of many previous scholarly interactions with the period as those often prioritise one methodology over the other. In its lengthy cast list of creators, connoisseurs and adventurers, it captures an essence of the chaos and complexity within the world of the contemporary art market. The book surfs (un)comfortably across the disciplinary boundaries between Classics, Art History and Archaeology, which O. so often critiques, and will find an interested audience in each area.

The volume is divided into three chapters framed by a hefty introduction and a short epilogue. The chronology spans the long eighteenth century and interacts with two primary pressure points in the period, namely the Quarrel of the Ancients and the Moderns in the first half of the century and the Graeco-Roman controversy originating in the 1760s. The introduction opens with an in-depth discussion of the iconography of the first vignette in Winckelmann’s History depicting an archaising relief, which encapsulates O.’s point that ancient Greece can look simultaneously Etruscan, Egyptian, Roman and Greek, often confounding viewers over the centuries. While the first two chapters focus on the visualisation of antiquity in the imagination of antiquarians who never actually ventured to Ottoman Greece, the third chapter turns to explore contemporary travellers, artisans and adventurers who visited Athens and other sites of antiquity in the broader ancient Greek world encompassing ancient Etruria to Egypt and Rome to Ionia. The first chapter, ‘Achilles’ Shield and Vico’s Frontispiece’, explores early depictions of the description of Achilles’ shield in Iliad 18.498–608 with a focus on Jean Boivin’s Apologie d’Homère et bouclier d’Achille (1715) and the hieroglyphic frontispiece to Giambattista Vico’s La Scienza Nuova (1744), showing a statue of Homer with a divine figure emanating a ray of light at the bard. Chapter 2, ‘Visualising Philhellenism’, has the most coverage of the printed content across a range of media in works by Montfaucon, Mariette, Caylus and Winckelmann. It is here that the bulk of the visual analysis occurs with some 57 figures reproduced from the antiquarian texts. The third chapter, ‘Putting Ancient Greece into the Picture’, opens with Grecian Revival regulars, James ‘Athenian’ Stuart and Nicolas Revett recording monuments in the orthographic drawings for their Antiquities of Athens (1762) contrasted against the richly illustrated Les Ruines des plus beaux monuments de la Grèce (1758) by Julien-David Le Roy. Via a brief comparative detour to Rome for a look at Giovanni Battista Piranesi’s publications, O. concludes with a close study of Pierre-François Hugues d’Hancarville’s volumes revealing the Collection of Etruscan, Greek and Roman antiquities from the cabinet of the Honourable William Hamilton (1766) to a broader audience and art market for the first time. O. then circles back to the Homeric subject matter of the first chapter in a brief epilogue with an assessment of Angelica Kauffmann’s Penelope at Her Loom (1764) and a companion discussion on the agency of the artist against the antiquarian scholar, which motivates much of the book’s debate.

O. is honest in the intention to examine the questions he sets out to address rather than to seek definitive answers. Such an outlook is perhaps understandable given the quasi-Ciceronian deluge of questions with which O. punctuates the introduction. This comes with the caveat that many are contemporary concerns reflecting the context of each individual actor. Nevertheless, if we take one representative example regarding d’Hancarville (p. 38), ‘he epitomized the precarious complexity of the antiquarian’s position in the mid-eighteenth century. Was he a scholar or an artist? Could he be both? How was the relationship between scholarship and art to be adjudicated and understood? D’Hancarville and the other figures in our story provoke difficult questions about what was at stake in being a scholar: what is the value of the ancient world? What is the relationship between intellectual worth, on the one hand, and aesthetic and monetary value, on the other? How does an understanding of the relationship between the material and the intellectual underpin that question?’ The almost 50 questions across the introduction elucidate O.’s thinking and set out the methodology for the remainder of the work. Yet, with such a decentred and multi-layered reading of what can often prove inconsistent and contradictory sources, it risks alienating readers and losing direction, where a more concise framing at the outset would aid the clarity of communication. Elsewhere, the introduction offers excellent commentary on the visuality of ancient Greece and the visibility of the artist and author in the period with a particularly profitable seam investigating the relationship between ancient events and the role of archiving as an event unto itself. It largely offers an overview of the work as a whole and quotes liberally from modern scholarship but is symptomatic of its vast scope with O.’s indebtedness to M. Bernal’s Black Athena (1987) included with little embedding at the end.

Like Winckelmann, with whom Antiquity in Print opens, the analysis peaks in its discussion of place and the corresponding positionality of each individual actor with regard to their visualising of ancient Greece. Both Athens and Naples are situated within these liminal spaces, which were at once the central subjects of both academic and artistic representation, but resided at the edge of the European experience of antiquity. The works of Le Roy and d’Hancarville emerge as products of these cultural and intellectual entrepôts in the most engaging sections of the book’s source criticism within the third chapter. Their exchange of ideas and aesthetic values is accompanied by detailed reproductions of the engravings from their works. These are largely placed in close proximity to the discussion, but the economical captions can leave readers wondering exactly where the emphasis is placed for some of the figures, especially when the commentary appears earlier on in the text. O. is an inheritor to Anthony Griffiths’s scholarship, which appreciates the technology, industry and investment that went into the artistic output that illustrated these almighty antiquarian tomes, avoiding an unrepresentative fascination with the author of the work alone.

O. eschews a single narrative and carefully avoids a teleological account of a generic ‘material turn’ to celebrate instead the complexity and often confusion in each individual episode of reception. Like the manifold antiquarian authors he studies, it means the cohesion can sometimes be eroded under the pressure of so diverse a cast of critics and connoisseurs. O. excavates the anxieties and tensions that abound in their accounts, which often render ancient Greece in the eye of the beholder or subjective gaze of the absent scholar or artisan. To embrace the anarchy, O. is constantly spinning plates to try and keep pace with the primary material, but his original analysis rewards readers’ patience. It is difficult to encapsulate the enormous story it tells within a review, but the book benefits from a thorough read and paves the way for future exploration of these diverse and valuable sources.