The topic of this monograph, published in Cambridge University Press’ Greek Culture in the Roman World series, is the fictive panel, i.e. the painting of a painting, a common motif in the design of the painted Roman wall from the Second Style onwards. Fictive panels, which may be sacro-idyllic landscapes, still life or figural mythological scenes, have long existed in the imagination as stand-alone artworks due to the historical practice of excising them from their walls for display in galleries and museums; the National Archaeological Museum at Naples, for example, displays many excised painted panels grouped by subject matter (e.g. still life). Even within the original wall, however, as J. demonstrates, the painted panel appears as a framed-off, ‘autonomous’ artwork, thus drawing attention to its own fictitiousness within the wall's overall play of illusion. Furthermore, J. argues that the autonomous painted panel was coded as culturally Greek; its presence on and within the Roman wall, therefore, calls up the complex reception of Greek art within Roman visual culture. The book provides a comprehensive and detailed consideration of the aesthetics of these fictions on the painted Roman wall, and explores what this play of fictions can tell us about Roman art and, in particular, its ethical dimensions.

In Chapter 1, ‘Winckelmann and the Cultural Dynamics of Painting’, J. sets out some of the historical ambiguities and visual paradoxes that will shape this study. Since antiquity the precise relationship between the ‘Greek’ panel and the Roman wall has remained unresolved. J. begins with Winckelmann, who, following the textual evidence of Pausanias, Pliny the Elder and other ancient writers on art, distinguishes classical Greek panel painting as the apogee of ancient art. In the absence of extant material examples, Winckelmann looks to four framed Campanian paintings, intended to be embedded within the design of a wall at Herculaneum, as representative stand-ins for the lost Greek masterpieces. J. argues that this moment of indeterminacy both delineates and blurs together the ideas of Greek panel and Roman wall for the subsequent art historical tradition.

Chapter 2, ‘Disrupting the Frame’, explores the aesthetics of the framed panel painting as a self-reflective text, the fiction of a fiction. J. gives a historical survey of the ‘meta-pictorial act’ (p. 57) in the Greco-Roman world across media (classical painted pottery, reliefs, coins) to show the variety of ways in which ancient artists have reflected critically on the nature of representation in visual art. J. also adduces inventories of temple dedications on Delos whose terminology includes a variety of types of panel paintings in the Greek tradition (e.g. panels without shutters, framed panels, pierced panels, panels on wood, on pedestals, embedded and so on); J. suggests visual counterparts for these from among the surviving wall paintings. The chapter demonstrates that Roman muralists were not simply copyists but worked with a broad repertoire of forms to play sophisticated games of framing and illusion on the wall.

Armed with this vision of the aesthetic range of the fictive panel, we move into Chapter 3, ‘The Ethics and Politics of Art’, which places panel painting into larger Roman cultural discourses on luxury, Greekness and power in the late Republic and early Imperial period. This chapter floats the idea that rather than be censured for privately displaying expensive Greek paintings, aristocratic Romans of the first centuries bce and ce could display culturally authoritative Greek art in their homes via the relatively cheap fictive panel. The chapter looks closely at murals in three houses on the Palatine, the ‘House of Augustus’, the ‘House of Livia’ and the ‘Aula Isiaca’, in order to seek out the motivation for the aristocratic inhabitants to display these painted versions of Greek paintings. J. finds that the display of the Greek panel within the Roman wall was not overtly political, but rather reflected an ethical gesture of moderation and an engagement in the broader cultural negotiation that characterised the contemporary Roman paradoxical embrace of and contempt for Hellenism.

Chapter 4, ‘Transparent and Opaque: Medium and Materiality on the Roman Wall’, returns to the aesthetic and takes a more technical look at the play of fictions in the Roman mural. J. borrows terminology from media studies: the panel was not simply transferred to the wall but was ‘re-mediated’ or re-fashioned within a different medium (p. 138). He argues that Roman muralists used the painted panel to give a sense of transparency or immersion into the perspectival illusions of the wall, particularly when deployed within a scaenographical wall or one framed by an aedicula (sacred shrine). At the same time, the fictive panel could insist on its opacity, as a solid object highlighting its own fictive materiality as wood, marble or cloth and its relation to the physical surfaces of the wall. This tension is particularly well illustrated by J.'s analysis of the use of monochrome in wall design; the colour white in the tablinum of the House of Livia, for example, is used in the upper register of the wall for the transparent, infinitely receding atmosphere behind architectural features, and also within the central mythological panel, which depicts Io, Argus and Hermes, as both the immaterial atmospheric background within the scene and simultaneously as the surface material support of the panel, as painted wood (pp. 138–50).

In the final chapter, ‘Paradigms, Ensembles, and Anachronisms’, J. seeks to combine aesthetics with ethics. Rather than seeing the fictive panel in a dichotomy of Greek original and Roman replica, J. makes the case for what he calls the ‘paradigmatic model’ (pp. 195–7) in which the Greek-ish paintings on Roman walls share pertinent features that relate them to the ‘super-genre’ of Greek panel painting (p. 132) but without any pre-determination of the nature of that relationship. J. argues that Greek art is not necessarily displayed in a simplistic way as the spolia of a conquered culture; rather, throughout the visual and aesthetic games of Roman muralists, informed as they were by the ethical considerations of aristocratic Roman self-presentation, the Roman relationship to Greek art remains open-ended. J. makes his strongest case in his analysis of the fictive panels from the walls of the Villa Farnesina, read as a self-consciously art historical collection of Greek masterworks from the fifth to the third centuries bce (pp. 204–15). After a brief theoretical consideration of collection and its ability to manipulate time, J. demonstrates that, via the illusionistic imitation of the Greek panel, the Farnesina ‘collection’ both encapsulates the history of Greek painting and also anachronistically participates with it in a single paradigm that includes the Roman mural.

J.'s conclusions remain ambiguous and paradoxical, seemingly by design, although he certainly makes the case that Roman visual culture stages ‘Greekness’ in ways related to but ultimately distinct from textual culture. The book is extremely well documented, with 47 pages of works cited. The lavish and beautiful illustrations must also be noted here; the 15 colour plates and 75 black-and-white illustrations make for a rich reading experience accessible to anyone. That said, the book at times assumes an omniscient viewer or artist for the ancient murals; there is little consideration of the lived reality of viewing experience or of the social dynamics of the decoration of the aristocratic house, concerns that have guided much recent work on Roman wall-painting that similarly aims to push beyond formal analysis. This is a choice, not necessarily a flaw, but has led to a problematically monolithic use of ‘Greek’ and ‘Roman’ as descriptors that blunt the argument in places. Ultimately, this book is highly successful in bringing the aesthetics of the fictive panel to life and using theoretical tools from media theory and contemporary aesthetics to illuminate the dynamics of pictorial illusion on the Roman wall.