The advent of Pliny the Elder's 2000th birthday next year has yielded an efflorescence of recent Plinian books, including H. Voetmann's hauntingly strange novella Awake, A.'s 2020 edited collection The Nature of Art: Pliny the Elder on Materials (to which, I note in the interest of full disclosure, I contributed an essay) and now a new monograph from A. There is, of course, a lot of Pliny to talk about, and a lot said already on the books on art in particular; so A. is to be commended first of all for having pared down a potentially vast scholarly endeavour into this little gem of a book. Her focus remains squarely on Books 33–7, though she dives back into previous books on occasion, for example to reference Book 11's discussion of bees in comparison to the hexagonal crystals of crocallis, which Pliny compares to honeycomb, or to consider Book 12's balsam shrub as part of the parade of conquered imports to Rome both living and non-living. The book's core readership will thus likely consist of historians of ancient art, but scholars whose primary interest in Pliny lies outside those final books (among whom I count myself) will also find much to delight them here.

The beautifully written introduction strikes the notes that will resonate throughout the book: the craftsmanship of Nature, the ties between raw materials and the polished objects artists wring from them and the ethics of artistic consumption. Pasiteles and Arcesilaus serve as exempla both here and in the conclusion, chosen as focal points for the way in which Pliny's treatment knits together discussion of their finished products with their processes of making. The rest of the book is organised into two neatly balanced sections of three chapters each. The first section, ‘The Nature of Art’, takes up Pliny's discourse on Nature's skill in creating marvellous materials like rock crystal, the ethics of collecting and consuming both raw materials and finished works of art, and artistic exemplars of technical precision and virtuoso naturalism. The second section, ‘The Process of Art’, addresses the politics of Roman consumption and technological innovation, tales of artists engaged not only in acts of creation but also in the difficult decision to declare works complete, and the creation of spaces at Rome for the quiet contemplation of art. The conclusion crystallises the themes of memory and memorialisation, which are left more fluid in the main body of the book, describing how ‘Pliny approaches Rome's historical past as an instrument to account for the present’ (p. 106).

This book hits a number of high points from earlier discourse on Pliny, including the benevolence of Nature, luxuria and the ethics of art collecting, and Rome as a centre of consumption, all of which have become practically de rigueur for Plinian scholarship. Yet there are also a great many new ideas here. A. makes clear in the first chapter that the eponymous ‘matter’ is indeed right at the core of the project, with a beautifully detailed exploration of Pliny's classification of gems in terms of the multisensory experiences they afford, including visual attributes such as the soothing paleness of amethyst or the eye-like internal refraction of asteria as well as the varied scents of myrrhine or amber. Her study of the balance of sculptors’ technical skill at rendering fine details, their command of appealing symmetry and their diligentia (a virtue that can become a vice if carried too far) turns the tales of artistic achievement that are all too often packaged as trite anecdotes into a thought-provoking examination of artistic process. The same may be said for the discussion of finitude, where Apelles’ unfinished Aphrodite seeds a richly detailed meditation on the resonance of the artist's cogitationes even in certain incomplete pieces, and the ineffable quality of gratia that may reveal to the artist when a work is finished.

A. displays an Apelles-like restraint in crafting a short book about these complex questions. Her writing flows readily and readably; one is always tempted to keep diving back in for more, not unlike the Natural History itself (though obviously on a very different scale). The text reads like a kind of thematic commentary to A.'s judicious selection of themes from Pliny; she includes supplementary references to other ancient texts on occasion, but the focus remains firmly on Pliny's own words. Extensive endnotes to each chapter provide more detailed references to textual parallels, as well as an up-to-date guide to contemporary scholarship on relevant themes. A.'s surefooted confidence in what this book is meant to cover manifests as a striking absence of half-hearted analyses of topics from outside that remit: readers will not, for example, find a critical discussion of whether the term ‘encyclopaedia’ is appropriate, but will find pointers in the endnotes to studies of the question.

The book's images are singularly well chosen, from a luminous icosahedron carved from rock crystal to an agate relief vessel whose images seem to emerge of their own accord from the variegations of the stone. The images are in black and white, which no doubt robs them of some of their sensual detail, but they are detailed and clear. There are three useful indexes: an index locorum of Plinian passages, an index of other Greek and Latin sources, and a brisk general index. The book is quite affordable and would make an excellent textbook for a course in Roman art history aimed at graduate students or advanced undergraduates.