This study, dedicated as it is to a single class of Roman sarcophagi, provides a great deal more than a superficial glance at its title would immediately suggest. So many monographs written about Roman sarcophagi are basically no more than catalogues with the interest centred on slight differences of style and the location of workshops. Professor Huskinson deals with what are at first glance the least sculpturally adventurous of Roman tomb receptacles, where the reliefs are confined to the sides and centre panel separated by zones of curving grooves (called strigillation because their curving lines recall the strigil employed by bathers in antiquity) and, where they survive, the separately carved lids. In doing so she not only opens up the field for those interested in style and the minutiae of dating, but also reflects on the art of the group in the light of social history. This history (for it is no less) of strigillated sarcophagi has the same wide narrative and social sweep as that of the best art historians of our age, among them our Fellows Jas Elsner, John Onians and Verity Platt. Huskinson deals not only with the sarcophagi of this type of Roman High Empire and with early Christian sarcophagi but also with their reception: their reuse, copying and adaptation in the Middle Ages, the Renaissance and the modern period. Thus, this book will be read with profit not only by Classical archaeologists but also by those whose main interests lie in much later periods.

Huskinson touches on the varied possibilities for the curved fluting, as an evocation of liminal space, on the boundary between this world and the next, perhaps on occasion representing flowing water; in any case it serves to highlight the central panel, whether a scene from the myth of Ganymede and the eagle, Orpheus playing to the animals, Meleager, Hercules or Bacchus frequently edging towards a salvatory significance and certainly in such scenes as one where Hercules leads Cerberus through a half-open door. Scenes emphasising physical beauty (the Three Graces or Narcissus admiring his own reflection) meld with those emphasising love, Cupid and Psyche or even Venus with Mars, while many sarcophagi figure a deceased couple, together and exchanging the handshake (dextrarum iunctio), a very ancient device and here most often denoting the felicity of the married couple. Huskinson might have noted the ubiquity of this device on marriage gems and rings, at the beginning of a relationship. If on sarcophagi, it might rationally be thought to mark its end, the message of the iconography is that love conquers all.

With the advent of Christianity, the type continued to be popular, which is no surprise in a society that continued to think of itself as Roman. Earlier elements naturally remained in the arrangement of panels with often the central portrait or double-portrait clipeus, or sometimes on sarcophagi where flutes converge in the centre a symbolic device in a vesica-shaped mandorla. Early Christians readily took over the pastoral imagery found on many earlier examples and developed a repertoire of biblical scenes, at first with Jonah and his ketos, then with other scenes such as Daniel or the raising of Lazarus and other miracles of Jesus. Such scenes were of course found on other contemporary works, for instance in scrinia of ivory or metal. There are certainly local elements: remembering that these sarcophagi were a product of Roman workshops, it is not surprising to find that St Peter and episodes connected with him were popular: his denial and his arrest, and the baptism of his jailers. There is a remarkable variety and range of motifs in Christian sarcophagi, which change over time, with full-length figures of Christ or the chi-rho monogram becoming central motifs in the second half of the fourth century.

Although Roman workshops seem to have ceased operating early in the fifth century, there was some production of sarcophagi employing strigillation, sometimes in rather unusual ways in southern Gaul and in North Africa. In Italy, in the Middle Ages and Renaissance, the reuse of strigillated sarcophagi entire as tombs, or their fronts set in the walls of buildings as spolia, emphasised a continuing Romanitas. They were even copied, as attested by a splendid example dated to the mid-thirteenth century in the Camposanto, Pisa. The appeal of the type in later ages in Italy of course, and in France and Britain, is well known. For me the most touching image in the book is the late eighteenth-century tomb of Penelope Boothby by Thomas Banks in Ashbourne Church, Derbyshire, and the most bizarre is the back of a chair designed by Thomas Hope in the Royal Pavilion, Brighton, early in the following century.

The compilation of this book and the search for examples with its thorough discussion of the type in antiquity and its modern reception was clearly the result of Herculean labours. Huskinson has not only provided us with a guide to a particular tomb type, but has shown how such a work can lead on to consideration of much larger themes, which illuminate ancient (and not so ancient) art and life.