‘The longstanding tradition of close study of material remains in archaeology may have sharpened our eyes for seeing in detail’, write the editors in the introduction to this anthology; ‘but, as a side-effect, it has caused us to overlook broader perspectives on Graeco-Roman art within the field of image studies’ (p. 2). Scholarship on ancient sculpture and inscriptions is presented here as a case in point. While ‘the subject matter of this edited volume does not initiate a wholly new field of research’ (p. 1), the aim is to bring together different areas of expertise, without privileging ‘any single disciplinary background’ (p. 6); above all, an objective lies in balancing more theoretical approaches to ‘the archetypical paragone of the arts of image and text’ (p. 1) with the ‘corpus of materially preserved statue inscriptions’ (p. 5).
The general programme of research will be familiar to many. The book derives from a conference at the University of Heidelberg in April 2019. More importantly, the volume is among the latest ‘outputs’ of a much larger interdisciplinary research project on ‘Material Text Cultures’, funded by the German Research Foundation (DFG: ‘Collaborative Research Centre 933’). The project ran in Heidelberg from 2011 until June 2023: it has resulted in 38 edited books and monographs, all published ‘open access’ in the De Gruyter series of the same name. While some of these volumes offer diachronic and transcultural perspectives (e.g. T. Meier, M.R. Ott and R. Sauer [edd.], Materiale Textkulturen: Konzepte – Materialien – Praktiken [2015]), others have focused on Graeco-Roman archaeological and literary historical topics. Relevant titles include: A. Sarri, Material Aspects of Letter Writing in the Graeco-Roman World, c. 500 bc – c. ad 300 (2017); P. Lohmann, Graffiti als Interaktionsform: Geritzte Inschriften in den Wohnhäusern Pompejis (2017); C. Ritter-Schmalz, R. Schwitter (edd.), Antike Texte und ihre Materialität: Alltägliche Präsenz, mediale Semantik, literarische Reflexion (2019); A. Kraus, J. Leipziger, F. Schücking-Jungblut (edd.), Material Aspects of Reading in Ancient and Medieval Cultures: Materiality, Presence and Performance (2020); K. Bolle, Materialität und Präsenz spätantiker Inschriften: Eine Studie zum Wandel der Inschriftenkultur in den italienischen Provinzen (2020); C. Caputo, J. Lougovaya-Ast (edd.), Using Ostraca in the Ancient World: New Discoveries and Methodologies (2020); F. Opdenhoff, Die Stadt als beschriebener Raum: Die Beispiele Pompeji und Herculaneum (2021); and C. Schmieder, Bild und Text auf römischen Mosaiken: Intermediale Kommunikationsstrategien im Kontext der Wohnkultur des 3.–5. Jahrhunderts (2022).
Like many of the edited volumes in the series, the book under review is a compilation of German- and English-language papers: of the twelve contributions, five are in German, seven in English. The book forms part of a specific ‘subproject’ (A10), under the auspices of the two editors, on ‘Text and Image in Greek Sculpture: a Case-Study on Athens and Olympia from Archaic to Imperial Age’. That context is important. As an edited anthology, this miscellany of papers follows an earlier output – again masterminded by the two editors, this time in collaboration with a former postdoctoral researcher at Heidelberg: N. Dietrich, J. Fouquet and C. Reinhardt (edd.), Schreiben auf statuarischen Monumenten: Aspekte materialer Textkultur in archaischer und frühklassischer Zeit (2020).
So much for the backdrop. But what of the argument? The editors set up the parameters in a short introduction. While German classical archaeological scholarship has long concerned itself with the study of inscriptions and literary Schritftquellen (‘written sources’), we are told, there has been an unfortunate side effect: such textual materials have effectively been ‘instrumentalised’, ‘so that the “weaving in” of ancient literature into our knowledge of ancient sculpture has paradoxically led to a further distancing of philology from archaeology as essentially complementary, yet more and more separated methodological approaches’ (p. 5). Take the case of Der Neue Overbeck – a mighty five-volume compendium of literary and epigraphic texts for the study of Greek sculpture published in 2014, albeit renewing the original project of Johannes Overbeck in 1868 (not 1857, as the authors claim: p. 5): ‘one might argue that the easy availability of relevant texts exempts scholars of Greek sculpture from actually reading the texts themselves’ (p. 5). One may or may not agree (cf. M.J. Squire, ‘Ars revixit? In Search of the Ancient Artist’, JRA 28 [2015], 522–36). But most will welcome this corrective, ‘counteracting an ongoing divergence between archaeology, philology and epigraphy in their ways of dealing with what may be called the “iconotexts” of Greek and Roman inscribed statue monuments’ (p. 1).
What follows is a set of eleven chapters, each (with the exception of the last) presented as a complementary pair within six thematic sections. The sculptural case studies extend across a large chronological remit, from the Archaic Greek world to, if not quite the late antique, materials from the second to early third centuries ce (in the two contributions by A. Reinhardt and C. Reinhardt). Within the ‘Graeco-Roman’ remit of the title, Greek materials certainly outweigh Roman. But contributors were allegedly instructed not to ‘discriminate between those praised masterworks of sculpture … and more humble and (often, though not necessarily always) aesthetically and semantically less complex works of the “minor arts”’ (p. 1).
Part 1, ‘Sculpture and the (Material) Art of Epigram’, consists of two chapters by A. Petrovic and C. Reinhardt: Petrovic surveys the ‘cognitive tension’ (p. 35) at work in inscribed and literary epigram, while Reinhardt focuses on a statue-group erected in the Athenian Agora during the second century ce, with an inscribed elegiac couplet below and statues of Homer, the Iliad and Odyssey above. In Part 2, ‘A Portrait and a Name: Problematizing a (not so) Easy Match’, C.M. Keesling and R. Krumeich turn respectively to unnamed portraits in the classical and Hellenistic periods and to fifth-century portraits that were re-inscribed in the early imperial world (the practice of so-called metagraphê). In Part 3, ‘Inscribed Sculpture in Space: the Moving Gaze’, Fouquet shows how Archaic and classical inscriptions could kinaesthetically ‘choreograph a particular sequence of bodily movements’ (p. 154) in time and space, while K. Lorenz examines visual-verbal relations in three inscribed classical/Hellenistic statue groups at Delphi. Part 4, ‘Exploring Image and Text beyond Grand Sculpture’, moves from monumental free-standing sculpture to reliefs, while also expanding discussion into Roman materials: C. Maderna surveys (mostly) Hellenistic and imperial female funerary monuments, while A. Reinhardt probes ‘Bilder einer intermedialen Inszenierung’ in the context of the altar of M. Cocceius Iulianus (from the theatre of Itálica in southern Spain). ‘Inscriptions, Painted and Scratched’ is the topic of Part 5: on the one hand, an essay on writing in the architectural and bodily figures of Greek vase-painting (by G.S. Gerleigner and the late and sorely missed F. Lissarrague, who ‘passed away shortly after having received the proofs of this article’ [p. 296] and to whose memory the book is dedicated); on the other, a chapter by P. Lohmann on the arrangement of writing in Roman schematic portrait and gladiatorial graffiti. In Part 6, in a stand-alone chapter within the theme of ‘Inscribed Monuments in the longue durée’, Dietrich examines the interplay of sculpture and inscribed text in relation to four case studies from Olympia.
There is much to admire here. The editors have ensured that papers at times talk to each other (more so, certainly, than has become the norm in German Sammelbänden). De Gruyter has also done a fine job with the illustrations (including 25 in colour): the quality of the paper and printing helps justify charging the hefty price for a physical book that can be freely downloaded online.
Inevitably, perhaps, the calibre of contributions is uneven. Some chapters (especially those by Krumeich and Maderna) are essentially example-led, surveying materials with minimal reference to the editors’ intellectual brief: this is ‘Klassische Archäologie’ very much in business as usual. In the case of Lohmann's chapter, too, the key contribution lies in summarising in English some of the key findings of the author's German monograph of 2017 (Graffiti als Interaktionsform: Geritzte Inschriften in den Wohnhäusern Pompejis): here opportunities for rethinking (as the chapter subtitle puts it) ‘text and image in Roman graffiti’ were missed, not least when it comes to ‘image and ornament’ (pp. 304–6); ultimately, I was also left wondering how such pictorial graffiti relate to ‘intermedial perspectives on Graeco-Roman sculpture’ specifically. In terms of the larger conceptual framework Dietrich and Fouquet give us much to mull on – not least in their short but provocative review of the field (esp. pp. 2–6). But not everything in the introduction will convince everyone. Take the claims about ecphrasis and ecphrastic epigram (a ‘self-contained art-form which was significantly detached from the actual appearance and materiality of the corresponding statues’, p. 4): is it really fair to say, as the editors do, that ‘reading these epigrams does not require any material acquaintance with the corresponding statue’ (p. 4)? As rhetorical trope, I would say, ecphrasis probes precisely what might be meant by ‘material acquaintance’ – and in highly sophisticated and self-referential ways, themselves seeped in long-standing epistemological debates about sight and insight.
The strongest chapters are very strong indeed. A number attempt something wholly new and original: not only do they cut across traditional disciplinary boundaries between ‘Klassische Archäologie’, ‘Klassische Philologie’ and ‘Alte Geschichte’, they also build a bridge between the best traditions of Anglo-Saxon ‘Classics’ and German ‘Altertumswissenschaft’. The three chapters by Fouquet, C. Reinhardt and Dietrich provide a case in point. Indeed, it is surely no coincidence that this triumvirate was responsible for the research subproject from which the book derives, co-authoring the monograph Schreiben auf statuarischen Monumenten that it accompanies. So it is that Fouquet shows how changing practices in placing inscriptions tap into larger shifts in viewing between the Archaic and the early classical periods, with a profound change in ‘dynamic bodily relation between image and recipient’ (p. 172) – indeed, I would add, in conceptualising the representational ‘frame’ of the sculptural field. By extension, what is most impressive about Dietrich's chapter, centred around four Delphic case studies, is the effortless move from extant material culture to the detailed responses of Pausanias in the second century ce; Dietrich ends on a still more ambitious note, relating his findings to ‘a major development concerning strategies of monumentalisation …, namely the rise of historiography as a new generic tradition … as a foremost medium for cultural memory’ (p. 350: here the influence of another Heidelberg scholar looms large, as acknowledged in n. 350, and brilliantly pitched against recent work by T. Hölscher: J. Grethlein, The Greeks and their Past: Poetry Oratory and History in the Fifth Century bc [2010]). For this reviewer, the stand-out chapter was that of C. Reinhardt, also the longest in the book: not only for the classical archaeological reconstruction and analysis of an inscribed statue-group of Homer with personified (and cuirass-clad) Odyssey and Iliad, but also for its literary analysis of the epigram (esp. pp. 47, 62–6, 70–8), in turn understood as an elite ‘Diskursobjekt’ (p. 80), contextualised against a Second Sophistic literary backdrop.
Chapters like these – and numerous others might be cited – deliver on the ‘intermedial’ promises of the introduction. More than that, they demonstrate, as Petrovic puts it, a ‘cross-fertilization and syn-acticity of text and image’ (p. 17). Taken as a whole, the book may not quite break down certain entrenched subdisciplinary boundaries. But the volume does make considerable headway in working across them.
