‘An anonymous product of an impersonal craft’: that is how Rhys Carpenter characterized Greek sculpture in 1960, and it's an assessment that has long dominated the field.Footnote ¹ Carpenter was challenging the traditional workings of classical archaeology, not least its infatuation with individual ‘masters’. While responding to past precedent, however, his comments also looked forward in time, heralding a decidedly postmodern turn. From our perspective in 2020, six decades after his book was first published, Carpenter can be seen to anticipate what Roland Barthes would dub the ‘death of the author’: ‘the birth of the reader must be ransomed by the death of the author’, as Barthes put it.Footnote ²

Carpenter's work has had a profound influence on attitudes to Greek sculpture, and indeed on attitudes to Graeco-Roman visual culture more generally. Not only has his approach shaped ideas about the ‘artists’ that made ancient materials, it has also made us challenge underlying modern assumptions about ‘art’: his book helped underline the cultural difference between ancient thought and practice on the one hand, and anachronistic post-Enlightenment ideas on the other. But the critical tide today seems to be tentatively turning. If the late twentieth century gave rise to an overriding concern with viewers, the early twenty-first has fostered renewed interest in makers and producers. As the teens slide into the twenties, the whole issue of Greek ‘artists’ – and of artistic production at large – is firmly back on the classical archaeological radar.Footnote ³

This critical shift forms the backdrop for a timely new anthology of essays edited by Kristen Seaman and Peter Schultz.Footnote ⁴Artists and Artistic Production in Ancient Greece seeks to show why ‘ancient Greek artists (or craftspeople, or artisans) were important social agents and cultural producers who could play significant roles in the ancient Greek world’ (xv). No less importantly, the volume attempts to sketch a broader cultural history of Greek (and to some extent Roman) art, redefining ancient terms like technê and ars. Such words ‘do not speak to display, viewing, and assigning cultural value’ – ‘in other words, how society defines what “art” is’, we are told:

After a short historiographic overview and a survey of ancient texts (both by Seaman), nine chapters follow – dedicated to Greek sculptors (Stewart, Palagia, Schultz), vase-painters (Neils, Bolmarcich, and Muskett), mosaicists (Martin), architects (Miles), and dye-cutters (Pafford – by some way the most innovative in the volume). Jeffrey H. Hurwit rounds off the volume with a well-pitched reply (‘I have taken the opportunity to reflect upon a number of the issues these essays raise in their reevalutation of the nature of Greek artists and our constructions of them’, 198); as a ‘response’, this final chapter also summarizes Hurwit's important monograph of 2015 (which the editors describe as having been ‘published after we had submitted our essays to the press’, xvi).Footnote ⁵

The book leaves little doubt as to the overriding scholarly agenda, which is here framed as both premise and conclusion. ‘The time has come…for us to study the status of artists within their historical contexts – mining the texts for information… – and to ask whether Greek artists were really as humble, unschooled, indeed irrelevant, as many twentieth-century scholars asserted’ (12). ‘This line of scholarship…never vanished’, one editor insists, ‘but it is now conducted by an increasingly smaller number of people, and scholarly interest by and large has generally shifted away from the Greek artist… The result is a gap in our historical understanding’ (3).

Cynics might point to a slight disingenuousness here. Citing ‘discussions…enjoyed as graduate students at the American School of Classical Studies at Athens’, Seaman and Schultz claim to have started from a ‘healthy scepticism about many “traditional” attributions of sculpture, vase-painting, and architecture to “ancient Greek masters”’; similarly, or so the editors claim, contributors were ‘inspired by the rise of theoretical work on ancient authorship, personhood, and agency’ (xv). But, for better or worse, there is little ‘theoretical work’ in what follows. Far from considering ‘artists’ from any broader art historical or interdisciplinary perspective, the book does not engage with comparative or cross-cultural approaches to ‘authorship, personhood, and agency’. Instead, it falls back on twentieth-century disciplinary models: ‘it is now possible to study Greek artists with appropriate caution’ (7), we are told, since ‘the “death of the artist” [has been] greatly exaggerated’ (52).

Readers will make up their own minds. But I am not convinced that this is a forwards step. For one thing, there is minimal engagement with broader aesthetic, intellectual historical, and anthropological debates about ‘art’ or ‘agency’ (most of it conducted far beyond the disciplinary confines of classics, never mind classical archaeology). For another, there is little nuance when it comes to chronology – the way in which Greek and Roman discourses developed over time, or for that matter how they changed with regional variables (hence the book's flat talk of ‘the Greeks’: for example, ‘Greeks from different walks of life acknowledged and evaluated authorship in visual culture’, 1).Footnote ⁶ Given the wide range of materials treated in the book, it might have been worth considering whether discourses fluctuated with medium: was there an overriding medial hierarchy, with different sorts of practitioners consequently valued more highly than others? At the very least, readers might also have expected engagement with a wider range of work, especially scholarship from the last two or three decades (footnotes like 121 n. 1 are typical: ‘Discussion of art history and art criticism in antiquity: Pollitt 1974, 1990’). Above all, one wonders about ideas of visual agency in relation to those of writerly authorship and rhetoric – the changing significance of artist inscriptions, for example, or the phenomenon of ‘self-portraiture’ (fleetingly introduced at 166).Footnote ⁷

There is a bigger problem here. For if the book demonstrates anything, it is the disciplinary isolation of so much classical archaeological scholarship – in relation to larger frameworks of classical studies, but also so much work in the field of art history and visual culture. Nowhere is the point clearer than when it comes to using Greek and Latin texts (above all, in Seaman's opening survey of ‘The Social and Educational Background of Elite Greek Artists’).Footnote ⁸ One might respond that, to have any hope of making sense of changing concepts like technê and ars, it is necessary to consult a much wider range of materials than those usually suggested by classical archaeologists (think of the prologue to Callimachus’ Aetia, for example, or the cultural framework of Ovid's Ars amatoria).Footnote ⁹ If scholars have to think carefully about which texts to prioritize, there must surely also be a question about what to do with them: classical archaeology has a long history of raiding literary ‘sources’, but it's still markedly less adept at critically reading them.

This is where the book really gets into difficulty. For some, the talk of ‘mining the texts for information’ (12) might already sound the alarm, hinting at unreconstructed Meisterforschung. But where nineteenth-century scholars at least examined their sources carefully, much of the material mined here goes without scrutiny. Take Seaman's claim that art historical subjects were ‘incorporated into the curriculum’, so that ‘art history and artists, too, were featured in the classroom’ (19). I assume that the author means in the Late Imperial world (despite her wholly generalizing argument – about ‘universal exposure among élite Greeks during childhood’). But be that as it may, the grander claim is unsubstantiated. Chasing up the reference in the endnote (22 n. 74), readers are taken to three Greek textual passages. Yet none of these in fact supports the stated inference: on the one hand, lines from the Laterculi Alexandini [sic], edited by ‘Diehls’ [sic] – which ‘lists’ the names of painters, sculptors, and architects alongside those of many others (the rationale remains very much contested);Footnote ¹⁰ on the other, two sections from the imperial Greek Progymnasmata of Theon and Aphthonius – the first in fact a treatment of rhetorical ekphrasis, the second a general preface to rhetorical educational exercises (for all the discussion of e.g. diêgêsis, prosopopoeia, and paraphrasis, there is no treatment of ‘art history and artists’ here).Footnote ¹¹ One can only wonder: has the author actually examined the nuggets that she has quarried?

All in all, then, the book seems to me to mark an opportunity missed. I for one am sympathetic towards the approaches that contributors champion: the need to think harder about manufacture (think of Will Wootton's inspired recent project on ‘The Art of Making’Footnote ¹²), for instance, or the critical role of formalist analysis, not least attribution (consider the sheer brilliance of scholars like Adolf Furtwängler and Sir John Beazley!). The book does have its moments (as with Schultz's own lively discussion of Kephisodotos). Ultimately, however, it lays bare an unpalatable truth: to have any hope of tackling an issue as complex as the emergence, development, and rationalization of ideas about artists, we need radically to open up the critical workings of the discipline.

Reflections on the past and future of classical art and archaeology also loom large in Tonio Hölscher's latest book, derived from his 2007 Sather Lectures at Berkeley.Footnote ¹³ The book is classic Hölscher, developing for an Anglophone audience long-standing arguments about Greek and Roman ‘Bilderwelten’ and ‘Lebenswelten’: ‘reality and art must not be understood as fundamental opposites’, we are reminded, since ‘the primary field of visuality…, whether of images or of real things, is in social life and communication’ (9). What has long made Hölscher's work on ‘visual power’ so engaging is his insistence on a more anthropologically nuanced approach – the aim of raising ‘general questions of cultural visuality that go beyond classical antiquity’ (10), since ‘the ancient Greeks and Romans lived with images perhaps more than any other societies in world history’ (254). That said, in disciplinary terms, there remains a residual reticence to approach such questions in broader visual cultural terms – above all, perhaps, on account of Hölscher's misgivings about modern anachronistic ideas of art (‘The decisive theoretical challenge is to avoid misleading antithetical concepts of viewings works of “art”… Although such concepts developed to some level of aesthetic and intellectual complexity, they mostly remained – explicitly or implicitly – subordinated to the themes and functions of the works of art’ [297; see also 299]).

To two books now on the history and material culture of the Levant – more specifically, on the eastern province that Roman archaeologists know as Judaea. The first volume is an ‘illustrated history of the Holy Land’.Footnote ¹⁴ As the title makes clear, a chief virtue lies in treating a single geographical area from a multi-millennial vantage point, covering some three thousand years between remote antiquity and the collapse of the Ottoman Empire. Classicists will perhaps reach first for the essay on ‘the Hellenistic and Roman era’ (by John J. Collins), as well as a chapter on Babylonian and Persian cultural interactions (by H. G. M. Williamson). But the real highlights come in the more thematic chapters (as with that on ‘Pilgrimage’ by Peter Walker and Robert G. Hoyland, as well as the essays on ‘Sacred Spaces and Holy Places’ by Richard S. Hess and Denys Pringle, and on ‘Scripture and the Holy Land’ by Adam Silverstein). The volume is at its best when it adopts more diachronic approaches: on the one hand, interweaving the segregated religious histories of Judaism, Islam, and Christianity; on the other, situating them against a shared topographical backdrop. A foremost aim in all this is to provide an accessible introduction (hence the lack of footnotes, and the single list of ‘further reading’ at the back: 373–85). But, in exploring ‘sacred texts’ alongside material cultural perspectives, the book also drives home a more programmatic point: ‘Our greatly increased knowledge of the ancient world both from archaeological discoveries and from newly discovered texts of ancient Israel's neighbours shows that we have to tread carefully when assessing the Bible from a purely historical point of view’ (3).

A second volume – this time, a sole-author monograph – is dedicated to a single ‘Holy Land’ site: the ancient fortification of Masada, occupying a rocky plateau to the south-east of the Dead Sea.Footnote ¹⁵ Jodi Magness takes her readers on a whistle-stop tour of the excavations (quite literally in the case of her epilogue: 201–4). At the same time, she explores how the archaeology of Masada relates to the famous story about the site preserved by Josephus (in the seventh book of his Bellum Judaicum): namely, how in ad 72–3, during the so-called First Revolt, 967 Jewish rebels occupied the fortress – and went on to commit mass suicide rather than surrender to their Roman oppressors.

As with The Oxford Illustrated History of the Holy Land, this is a work of supreme scholarly synopsis, and one orientated towards the ‘general reader’. The context explains some of the frequent asides and generalizations, which can sometimes grate (e.g. ‘ancient histories are much like stories’, 194; ‘ancient peoples…did not believe that the gods dwelled among them’, 91). Magness is at her most compelling when relating the ‘Masada myth’ (196) to the excavations of Yigael Yadin between 1963 and 1965: we are shown how the archaeology of Masada, in the Southern District of a new nation-state, became ‘a symbol of modern Israel’, above all ‘in the wake of the Holocaust and at a time when Israel's population felt embattled’ (3).

Inevitably, perhaps, the ultimate question is whether archaeology can corroborate Josephus’ account. ‘Is it possible that Josephus fabricated the mass suicide as a literary device to make the story of Masada…more gripping?’ (194). Magness’ response is decidedly non-committal, but nonetheless considered: namely, that ‘this is not a question archaeology is equipped to answer’, since ‘the archaeological remains can be interpreted differently as supporting or disproving Josephus’ account… – a matter that I prefer to leave to Josephus specialists to resolve’ (196). Along the way, the nine chapters showcase Masada as a particularly rich ‘lens to explore the history of Judea in the late Second Temple period (mid-second century bce–first century ce)’ (3). In archaeological terms, the fourth and eighth chapters perhaps have the most to offer, dedicated to ‘Masada and Herod's Other Building Projects’, and to ‘The Rebel Occupation of Masada’. We are reminded, for example, how the fourteen cisterns to the north-west of the fort had a capacity of almost 1.5 million cubic feet (‘each cistern held enough drinking water to sustain a thousand people for one year!’, 69). There are some fascinating analyses, too, of Herod's northern palace complex, and its relationship to earlier Hellenistic and Roman precedent (61–3, comparing frescoes ‘in the Second Pompeian Style’).Footnote ¹⁶ Still more evocative is the discussion of the supplies stored in the camp. Quite apart from correcting certain aspects of Josephus’ account (168–170, 192, 195), archaeological analysis points to a wealth of produce, much of it preserved by the arid climate: legumes, for example, not to mention seeds, nuts, and fruits. Magness tells how ancient supplies soon suffered an infiltration of beetles, weevils, and moths: ‘by the time Masada fell to the Romans, the food supplies were infested by pests’ (170).

Roman Judaea furnishes a pleasing link with our next title: Gardens of the Roman Empire.Footnote ¹⁷ Of the many intriguing specimens that are illustrated in the book, few can compete with Figure 17.12. On first inspection the photographed sapling may look unpromising – little more than a houseplant, its fronds splayed across a conservatory. But, as the accompanying text explains, the photograph actually shows a date palm named ‘Methusala’ [sic]. The variety was until recently deemed extinct. This is a case, then, of archaeology quite literally bringing the past back to life: ‘It was a great surprise when a desiccated date pip from Massada, carbon 14 dated to the time of Herod, germinated in 2008 using a plant growth medium’ (477).

Gardens of the Roman Empire is the result of a lengthy research collaboration, and has been eagerly awaited by archaeologists, historians, and literary scholars alike. More than that, the book is the culmination of a lifetime's work by its leading editor, Wilhelmina F. Jashemski (1910–2007). Jashemski, readers hardly need reminding, effectively invented the discipline of ‘garden archaeology’ among classicists, thanks to her pioneering work at Pompeii.Footnote ¹⁸ ‘To the end of her life on Christmas Eve 2007, she continued to manage Gardens of the Roman Empire and had the manuscript at her side to the last, anticipating the annual meeting of the editors the following week’ (9). The result is ‘slow scholarship’ at its best: if large swathes of the volume derive from a conference in 2003 (8–10), ‘the research and production for this book took place from 1954 to 2016’ (xxxvi).

The book approaches its subject thematically, and offers the most comprehensive guide to Roman gardens currently available. Following a short historiographic introduction, there are eighteen chapters (including three by Jashemski, on ‘Produce Gardens’, ‘Gardening Practices and Techniques’, and ‘Plants of the Roman Garden’). Contributors make for an impressively international crew, organizing their essays into three structural sections: ‘The Main Types of Gardens’ (the weightiest part of the book, accounting for around half its length), ‘The Experience of Gardens as Revealed by Literature and Art’, and ‘Making the Garden’. In keeping with its horticultural subject, the book also blossoms with photographs (most of them in colour), as well as archaeological diagrams and reconstructions.

There are many highlights – too many to list here. Let me mention just three. The first comes in K. Sara Myers' chapter on ‘Representations of Gardens in Roman Literature’, with its ‘aim of investigating the ways in which Romans used garden descriptions in their culture, especially literature, as forms of self-representation’ (259). Another – from a very different perspective – is the contribution by Elizabeth Macaulay-Lewis, which challenges the way in which ‘many scholarly studies of villas and their gardens have tried to equate archaeological remains with written descriptions’: ‘Rather than looking to the ancient written sources as the primary guide to understanding and interpreting Roman villa gardens, this essay focuses, instead, on the pertinent physical remains’ (87). Third, for art historians, Bettina Bergmann's discussion of ‘Frescoes in Roman Gardens’ is a must-read, discussing the ways in which framed wall-paintings and gardens ‘both depict highly cultivated spaces where nature is ordered and boundaries are paramount’ (286).

This edited anthology in fact forms only the first part of a horticultural double bill. What we have here is a collection of thematic essays, intended to sustain ‘the interdisciplinary future of garden archaeology’ (492). But accompanying this ‘traditional print volume’ (10) will be a catalogue, surveying more than 1,200 Roman Imperial gardens, and arranging them topographically: by continent, province, and Roman local name (see xxxiii, 12–13, 481–2; ‘in creating this record, many a garden site that might have been lost forever will be rescued’, 13). ‘Volume 2 keeps the graphic format and content for entries that Wilhelmina Jashemski originally designed, but as a whole it is more experimental and entirely digital’; ‘designed to be updated frequently, it brings the full corpus of known garden sites to scholarly attention for the first time as a free, open access reference work’ (10). Scattered references to this accompanying project underline the enormous extent of its task. While the concluding chapter notes that the first and second volumes were ‘completed simultaneously’ (482), it is also striking that the digital database is yet to go public: the table of contents lists a CUP website with ‘additional resources’ (ix; see also ii), but that page declares the project to be ‘under construction until August 2018’, sending readers to another (non-active) site.Footnote ¹⁹ Given how Jashemski ‘encouraged development of a systematic archaeological approach to garden sites throughout the Roman world’ (481), it can only be hoped that the success of this first book will not distract from the completion of that larger task.

Another important edited volume – no less keenly awaited, and also published by Cambridge – tackles the ‘Roman villa’, specifically from around the Mediterranean basin between the Late Republic and early Christian periods.Footnote ²⁰ As reference work, the book looks set to become a standard go-to volume within advanced undergraduate and graduate courses: on the one hand, it brings together an impressively international array of experts (who here provide a handy English-language overview of their given topics); on the other, the editors have succeeded in crafting a user-friendly product, providing not only an ‘index locorum’, ‘index topographicum’ [sic], and ‘index verborum’, but also a handy glossary (490–5). But this is no simple textbook: the volume advances a major research agenda in its own right. For one thing, it invites us to categorize villas in new sorts of practical and topographical ways (for example, in the chapter on ‘Maritime Villas and the Resources of the Sea’). For another, chapters frequently offer new interpretative angles (as with the discussion of a Roman villa at Apollonia in Israel – said to have ‘served…as a mansio along the Jaffa–Caesarea road built to ensure Roman military movements during the First Jewish War 66–73 ce’; 313–15).

With a topic as expansive as this one, a predominant challenge must have been structure. The twenty-five chapters (excluding introduction and conclusions) are principally organized geographically, presenting ‘Roman villas in a Mediterranean-wide perspective’ (xxix). But chronology also looms large, with the final five contributions dedicated to late antiquity, ‘Christianization’, and legacy. After two introductory chapters (the first ‘an overview’ by the editors, the second a survey of ‘definitions and variations’ by Ursula Rothe), the remainder of the book is organized into four parts (see xxx–xxxiv): ‘Roman Villas on or near the Bay of Naples and Maritime Villas’, ‘Roman Villas in the Mediterranean’, ‘Roman Villas: Late Antique Manifestations’, and ‘Roman Villas: Later Manifestations’ (with Kenneth Lapatin's excellent discussion of John Paul Getty's re-creation of the Villa dei Papiri in Malibu). A well-formulated set of ‘conclusions’ provides the editors with a right to reply, tackling ‘the diversity, but also the remarkable homogeneity, of the Roman “villa” phenomenon’: ‘Local preferences and adaptation to terrain and circumstances could exist in parallel with the inevitable homogeneities of an international and transregional hegemony, but villas were a strong solvent for making the Mediterranean recognizably Roman’ (485).

Let me end this round-up with two recent exhibition catalogues, the one in German, the other in Italian. Mykene. Die sagenhafte Welt des Agamemnon accompanies a lavish show held at the Badisches Landesmuseum at Schloss Karlsruhe (1 December 2018–2 June 2019) – surely among the most ambitious exhibitions on Mycenaean culture ever to have been staged outside Greece.Footnote ²¹ There must have been a politics to this project: the director of the museum writes in his foreword that the museum's return of two Cycladic objects in 2014 ended a decades-long argument with the Greek Ministry of Culture and Sport, ‘and paved the way for an intensive collaboration’ (10). In any event, the catalogue makes clear just how many pieces travelled to Karlsruhe from the Archaeological Museum in Mycenae: witness the book's final section, with entries on all 315 displayed objects (266–363). To call the preceding contributions ‘chapters’ might be pushing things: texts are remarkably short, and there are fifty-six of them in total. While the accompanying bibliographies at times feel outdated, these short essays nonetheless offer informative introductions to key themes and materials.

The only thing missing, in my view, is an upfront discussion of historiography. Readers may or may not agree with the volume's take on Heinrich Schliemann: ‘ein Genie’ (‘a genius’, 24), who belongs to the ‘modernen Helden der Archäologie’ (‘modern heroes of archaeology’, 10). But the silence about twentieth-century legacy is conspicuous, not least given the racist ethnographies of the 1930s and 1940s. Despite fascinating exhibits such as a reproduction of the ‘Mask of Agamemnon’ from the 1930s (‘Württembergische Metallenwarenfabrik WMF’: 267, no. 8; see also 52–5), one wonders about the nationalist and political stakes – above all, how ideas about Agamemnon's ‘legendary world’ have fluctuated at different times and places over the last 150 years.

Issues of reception lie at the heart of a second exhibition, this time staged by the Museo Nazionale Romano in Rome (Palazzo Massimo and Crypta Balbi, 4 December 2018–12 April 2019): Il classico si fa pop. Di scavi, copie e altri pasticci (‘Pop goes the classic: of excavations, copies and other “mess-ups”’).Footnote ²² The exhibition is centred around Giovanni Trevisan (1735–1803), the excavator-cum-engraver whose atelier was discovered within the Monti district of Rome in 2010. Better known as ‘Volpato’ (from volpe, ‘fox’), Trevisan owed his reputed slyness to an effective cornering of the ‘Grand Tour’ market: he manufactured souvenir reproductions of ancient materials (not just in engravings, but also ‘biscuit porcelain’ figurines), selling them to northern European visitors. Hence the idea of the ‘classic’ becoming ‘pop’: Volpato inaugurated a mass-marketing of antiquity still very much with us today.

This provides the backdrop for both the show and catalogue. Like the exhibition, the book sketches Volpato's eighteenth-century context: it surveys souvenirs from Enlightenment-age Rome (especially in ceramic, lithograph, and painting), exploring the organization of Trevisan's studio in particular. At the same time, it investigates longer traditions of reproducing, commercializing, copying, serializing, and miniaturizing ancient works – not just in the eighteenth century, but also earlier, and right up to the present day.Footnote ²³ On the one hand, the exhibition delighted in kitsch gallery interventions, featuring some exquisitely creative twenty-first-century responses to ancient works (a highlight was Francesco Vezzoli's Self-Portrait as Apollo del Belvedere's Lover, 2011). On the other, the lavishly illustrated catalogue seeks to explain the rationale. There are thirty-one short essays (including sixteen chapters on exhibited objects), whether adopting diachronic perspectives, or else exploring themes from a more squarely classical archaeological angle. Among other essays, there are solid introductions to ‘originality’ in Greek bronze-casting (Carol C. Mattusch), polychromy (Vinzenz Brinkmann and Ulrike Koch-Brinkmann), and the issue of Romans ‘copying’ Greek originals (Anna Anguissola).

For this reader, at least, the most delicious take-home has to do not just with ‘biscuit porcelain’ but also with the etymology of ‘pastiche’. English-speakers today prefer a French term over the Italian, following a tradition that stretches back to the late nineteenth century. Originally, however, the ‘altri pasticci’ of the exhibition's title take us to a particular Italian culinary context – applied to figurative ‘mix-ups’, but literally referring to the hotchpotch contents of a pasty or a pie. Will pasticcerie ever be the same again?