K. opens the acknowledgements section of this book by thanking the organisers of a conference on Early Hellenistic Portraiture that was held at the Deutsches Archäologisches Institut in Athens in 2002. I was fortunate enough to be in the audience for that conference, and one can certainly trace the origins of this book to K.’s initial thoughts on Hellenistic Portraiture from the Athenian Acropolis. Indeed, the manner in which K. approaches the material is in many ways similar to her previous work on the dedicatory statues from the Athenian acropolis (‘Early Hellenistic Portrait Statues on the Athenian Acropolis: Survival, Reuse, Transformation’, in P. Schultz and R. von den Hoff [edd.], Early Hellenistic Portraiture: Image, Style, Context [2007], pp. 141–60; The Votive Statues of the Athenian Acropolis [2003]). As with that work, there is a strong emphasis here on analysing the totality of evidence together (statue, inscription, display and historical contexts) in order to provide a rich and nuanced picture of the early development of Greek portrait sculpture. It should be noted (as other reviewers have done) that the title of this work may be a bit misleading. Often the term ‘early Greek’ refers to the Archaic period of Greek history (c. 700–500 bce). The majority of K.’s evidence comes from the later part of the fifth and fourth centuries, so those looking for explorations of Archaic material may be disappointed. If one simply understands the title as referring to the ‘the early phase of the development of Greek portraiture’, however, then the reader will be better prepared for what is an excellent treatment of the material at hand.
What is most refreshing about this work is that K. eschews the traditional path of attempting to pin down when portraits ‘begin to look like real people’ in the hope of tracing a linear development from Roman verism ‘back’ to a Greek source. Rather, K. tries to understand the nature of portraits themselves and why people began to individuate themselves in public in the first place. With her strong interest in epigraphy, it is not surprising that K. places this understanding within a broader social context, seeing the development as akin to an epigraphical (or documentary) habit whereby individuals now wish to have their personal achievement(s) commemorated in stone (Chapter 1). As such it is understandable why early Greek portrait artists and their patrons were not interested in true likeness. The goal was to commemorate a personal narrative that, until now, had been reserved for the gods, and so one did not wish to physically differentiate themselves from images of gods. By placing your own portrait in the sanctuaries and public spaces in which statues of gods found themselves, you naturally illustrated your own excellence (arete) by looking like, and sharing the space with, the gods. The accompanying inscriptions personalised the actual commemoration. Beginning some time in the late fifth century bce, K. charts (Chapter 2) the multivalent meaning of the concept of arete. The first to adopt such portraits are the traditional people in whom excellence is found (martial and athletic victors, kings etc.), but over time this comes to include poets, philosophers, priests and priestesses, all those to whom the gods have given some form of specific arete. Thus the early development of Greek portraiture is not about increasingly individual images, but rather about the character and unique achievements of the individual.
K. traces these ideas through an exhaustive exploration of portraits in the Greek sanctuaries of Delphi, Olympia, the Athenian Acropolis, Samos, Epidaurus and Rhodes (Chapter 3). Though somewhat selective, these case studies well illustrate her central thesis. Particularly germane are her examinations of the material at the sites of Delphi and Olympia, where she carefully walks the reader (through text and image) through the sanctuaries and the contexts and locations of the portraits under discussion. Such portraits subtly elevated the individuals presented by mere association with the gods, whether that association was due to the beneficence of the god and/or by being physically in their sanctuary. Such portraits, however, were often not just about the individual but their communities as well. Like the ‘shared’ glory of victorious athletes, often statues of long deceased individuals would also be erected in order for a state to share in the past glories, or indeed to create new narratives and new glories.
In the final two chapters (4 and 5), K. considers these notions of retrospective portraits. Given that many of the portraits that we have are not contemporary with the subject being represented, understanding the context of these posthumous works is important. K. looks again to a large number of sanctuary (among other) sites to note that portraits of past individuals are often used to glorify a city state or group of people in a current context. Thus a portrait of Arimnestus, the general who commanded the Plataean contingent at both Marathon and Plataea during the Persian Wars, is argued to have been erected some hundred years later by the Plataeans in the Temple of Athena Areia in Plataea to ‘assert the primacy of the Plataians themselves in the events of 479 bc’ (pp. 169–71). Others may have been erected to counter narratives or defame others by glorifying someone else. This all fits within the overarching thesis of these portraits being used for the purposes of arete – one's own or that of a later group looking to create the glories of the past. Lastly K. deals with the portraits from later Hellenistic and Roman perspectives. This section most fully embodies K.’s previous work as she looks at the re-cutting of inscriptions on statue bases. The portraits may have been centuries old at this point, but simply that they were portraits and in important locations kept their meanings alive. Thus a later Greek or Roman could re-inscribe the base and add their name and achievements. This allowed the later individual to simply continue the ‘documentary habit’ of the original with their own story.
The primary value of this work is in the way in which K. has assembled a totality of evidence to consider. This follows from the general trend in sculptural studies to examine the whole viewing context of a piece – its style, inscribed base, location, historical context etc. in order to best understand it. K.’s particular contribution is in her masterful study of the statuary bases and their accompanying inscriptions. Not only are these bases deftly discussed, but they are also illustrated with copious amounts of sharp photos – something only now being done by scholars to examine everything from foot cuttings to inscriptional evidence. As an art historian, I will admit to missing a greater discussion of the style of early portraits – how was the arete of K.’s thesis written on the faces of the individuals? Still, there is some such discussion, and this is a minor point.
Lastly, the whole work is well illustrated with sharp black-and-white photos and reconstructions. Particularly useful are the two tables that list (respectively) all the portrait statues mentioned by Herodotus and the literary sources that discuss the removal of statues from specific Greek sanctuaries from 88 bce–68 ce, as well as the two appendices listing the known portrait statues at Olympia and Delphi from 600–300 bce. For these lists, let alone the analysis on the whole, this book will prove an invaluable resource for scholars wishing to examine pre-Hellenistic Greek portraits. This book will become a standard for both its approach to the material and its conclusions. I fully recommend K.’s excellent treatment on this thorny subject.
