Change is what keeps the study of classical art and archaeology in business. The stories that we tell of ancient material culture – about form, function, and modes of response – are premised on the continuities that we trace, no less than on our evidence for rift or rupture. In each case, historical analyses of how things developed coalesce with critical attempts to explain why they did so. Answers shuffle and shift. But the project of describing and interpreting change remains constant.

In a book that has been twenty years in the making, Robin Osborne tackles this theme of transformation head-on (‘it is not change itself but patterns of change that demand explanation’ [207]).Footnote ¹ The topic is Attic vase-painting between the late sixth and mid-fifth centuries bc, more specifically ‘the significant change in subject matter that accompanies the change from black-figure to red-figure’ (13). Where classicists have tended to privilege change in representational form over those of represented content, Osborne proposes an alternative framework: ‘The big claim in relation to art history is that style and subject matter cannot be treated separately’ (249; see also 13, 22, 26–36).

The essential argument here is twofold. On the one hand, the book proposes that fifth-century Athens witnessed a ‘transformation in how the world is seen’ (147): this is manifested not just in the ways that artists came to depict between 520 and 440 bc, but also in their choices of the subjects depicted. On the other hand, and ‘in a way that complements and reinforces’ a previous monograph (xvii),Footnote ² Osborne suggests that vase-painting supplies our best historical evidence for that cultural, political, and social change: ‘pots…offer a much better glimpse of the way Athenians, and I maintain Greeks more generally, viewed the world than any text can do’ (xix).

Osborne unpacks his thesis in eleven masterful chapters, organized into three overarching sections (xvii, 22–5, 207–8). First, he surveys the historiography of Greek vase-painting, justifying his interest in ‘overall patterns of imagery’ (50). Second, a series of meticulously researched chapters track iconographic shifts in the imagery of ‘athletics, warfare, sexual relations, relations with the gods, and the drinking party and its aftermath’ (xviii): taken together, these correlated and coordinated changes point to ‘something close to a complete revolution’ in fifth-century imagery (204) – an introspective turn that homes in on the individual, behavioural ethics, and above all interpersonal relations. After exploring how the subjects of classical imagery changed, the third and final part of the book seeks to explain why those changes took place – with a view first to morality, politics, and aesthetics, second to the parallel histories of classical Greek sculpture, and third to ‘the transformation of art’. ‘To describe in these terms the change in the way of seeing the world is to make clear the parallels between what is manifested in Greek pottery and what can be observed in other areas of intellectual endeavor’ (250), Osborne concludes. ‘The way in which classical artists saw the world, and saw beauty in the world, was not simply a feature of the history of art: it was a feature of Greek history’ (256).

The book looks set to be as revolutionary as the subject it describes. Specialists may wrangle about minutiae, pointing to examples that contradict the proposed iconographic shifts, or proposing alternative thematic subjects. But Osborne has already mounted his defence: his interest lies in ‘coordinated trends in Athenian imagery’ (48) – that is, in ‘what happened “generally and for the most part”’ (36). In methodological terms, however, some larger questions remain. For one thing, I was left wondering quite how ‘independently’ the book treats its various materials, above all visual and literary ‘sources’ (xvii). For another, Osborne arguably underplays the ways in which his own views of this material have been mediated: could we ever hope to see as ancient Athenians saw, and what is at stake in framing an approach in these terms?

One site of mediation strikes me as especially important. Throughout, Osborne insists on the innovations of his project: ‘this book aspires to rewrite the history of classical Greek art’ (xvii – note the slide here, as in the title, from ‘Athenian’ to ‘Greek’); ‘the approach to understanding change in the visual arts adopted here is not one that has been previously taken by those studying ancient Greek art of by those studying ancient Greek history’ (7). Osborne packs his polemic with a programmatic punch. But I wonder whether the thesis stands up to scrutiny. In insisting on the associated transformations of Greek aesthetics, philosophy, and religion (‘Classical art offered a means by which to visualize the world of changed values’ [248]), this book in fact resurrects a long-standing Idealist history of (ancient) art. However unwittingly, Osborne's story ends up retelling a narrative first told some two centuries ago in Hegel's Lectures on Aesthetics – one that has subsequently been repackaged by various Germanophone ‘critical historians of art’.

Osborne makes little reference to this debt – to how his own views about ‘classical seeing’ reverberate against the history of critical aesthetics. Understandably enough, his analysis is framed in terms of what Ernst Gombrich famously called the ‘Greek revolution’: indeed, much of the book takes aim at Gombrich's respondents in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries (not least Jaś Elsner and Richard Neer). Gombrich himself was a stern critic of Idealism, of course. But he was also candid about his intellectual debts, above all to the philosopher whom he dubbed ‘the father of art history’: Gombrich's interest in this art historical ‘revolution’, as in others, took its lead from Hegel's Geistesgeschichte.Footnote ³

Not that everything in the book could be described in Idealist terms. Osborne's talk of ‘ways of seeing the world’ (31) eschews Hegel's language of art and beauty (der Geist im Sinnlichen erscheinend; das sinnliche Scheinen der Idee, etc.) – and for that most will no doubt be grateful. But the intellectual core of this book – its narrative about ancient art, philosophy, and religion – mirrors Hegel's account to the letter (‘The big claim in relation to Greek history is that the ‘Greek revolution’ in art was also a historical revolution’ [249]). The parallels apply to almost every aspect of Osborne's macro-scale picture (e.g. ‘politics and religion were not separate spheres’ [215]; ‘ways of seeing…are necessarily part of, and inseparable from, ways of cognition more generally’ [251]; ‘the changes in social and moral attitudes were also a matter of aesthetics’ [252]; ‘the drawings and sculptures [the Athenians] produced…themselves contributed to the social conditioning…of Greeks over a much wider geographical spread…and also of some non-Greek people, particularly the Etruscans’ [251]; ‘the viewer of classical art learns to view beauty in the world’ [253]; etc., etc.). Interestingly, the analogies also apply to some of Osborne's most brilliant miniature vignettes: in his comparison of the respective histories of Greek sculpture and drama (associating the generic physiognomies of later fifth-century statues with theatrical masks [242–8]), for example, Osborne's mirroring of Hegel is uncanny.Footnote ⁴

None of this necessarily undermines Osborne's achievement. In so far as I would dare mount a challenge, my critique wouldn't be about due acknowledgement: Idealism may be a hobby-horse of this reviewer, but few classical archaeologists would feign interest. No, the problem here is not that Osborne hasn't thought about Hegel (who would care?). Rather, it is about how this unspoken – and highly selective – Idealist debt leads to problems in argument. Leaving aside the ghost of Geist, Osborne's Geistesgechichte does not think hard enough about history, in my view. This explains a methodological inconsistency at the heart of the volume: for all his insistent historicism when it comes to fifth-century Athens, Osborne is curiously ahistorical about the genealogy of his own ideas.

To recognize this Idealist debt is also to raise questions of consequence – in every sense of the word. Consider the way in which Osborne ends his book, with its puzzling call to ‘beauty’ (252–7): ‘there needs to a be a place not just in the history of Greek art but in the history of classical Greece for what happens when artists begin to see and show classical beauty in the world’ (256). There is long-standing precedent for this rhetoric, especially in British aestheticist circles: a tradition of going bleary-eyed before Grecian urns, stretching back, via the likes of Beazley, Wilde, and Pater, to Keats (‘O Attic shape! Fair attitude!…Thou, silent form, dost tease us out of thought / As doth eternity’). Many classical art historians might approve of this aestheticizing manoeuvre. But Hegel most certainly would not: above all, he would have insisted on the need to acknowledge historical remove. This is why, for Hegel, ‘classical’ images (in Osborne's adopted terminology, the ‘affordances’ of classical Greek form) need to be understood against the ‘symbolic’ and ‘romantic’ – that is, in relation to those Kunstformen which are said to have anticipated and succeeded them: reflecting on consequence goes hand in hand with considerations of cause.

The contrast with Osborne's approach is revealing. In good Idealist tradition, Osborne wants to stage the ‘Greek revolution’ in the grandest possible cultural terms: it amounts to a defining moment in human history; something from which we are still reeling; a ‘transformation of art’ (249–57), no less. I have nothing against such grands récits.Footnote ⁵ If such arguments are to stand, however, we have to reckon with both the before and the after. This is where the book seems to falter: ‘The [classical] revolution…was a way of seeing that came to be widely appreciated’, Osborne declares, adding in a footnote that ‘it would later be…reactivated in the Roman world by Augustus’ (226). But what would ‘reactivating’ mean here? Once enacted, could a ‘revolution’ ever be undone (still less, repeated at whim)? How does one transformation – in art, in viewing, in contemplating the world – contain within it the seeds for another? These questions are embedded in the Idealist tradition to which Osborne's book is indebted. But they are themes which Osborne ultimately sidesteps: the result risks amounting to Idealism-lite (Hegelianism minus the dialectic, one might say). Osborne is absolutely right to declare that ‘how we see the world has moral, political, and indeed theological implications’ (226, with n. 44). But to acknowledge as much must be to heed the dangers of positivist historicism: on the one hand, it means paying careful attention to the derivation of our ideas; on the other, it involves some difficult soul-searching, above all about where – morally, politically, and, yes, theologically – those ideas lead.

Dissent here by no means betokens disapproval. If nothing else, the length of my comments pay testimony to the book's various stimulations. Anyone with even a passing interest in painted pottery, classical art, or, for that matter, Greek history will want to read it for themselves.

A smaller quibble, this time directed to the press, concerns the quality of pictures: despite the sixteen colour plates, Osborne's black-and-white illustrations are sometimes blurred and grainy (e.g. 38, fig. 2.5), and often too small for purpose (e.g. 145, fig. 5.21). This is not a criticism that could be levied at Milette Gaifman's handsome monograph on The Art of Libation in Classical Athens.Footnote ⁶ As with Osborne's book, Gaifman's subject lies in Attic vase-painting of the fifth century bc; like Osborne, Gaifman also returns to the respective historical contributions of visual and verbal media (see esp. 6–8). Rather than tackle the variable of chronological development (compare esp. 152–4 and 166–7 of Osborne's book), however, Gaifman adopts a synchronic approach: ‘in exploring libations, we…explore the intersection between the visual, daily life, and religion’ (14); ‘ultimately, this volume highlights a visual discourse concerned with a simple act that permeated every aspect of Greek culture, a discourse that stretches from the Acropolis to the individual home, from the banquet to the grave, from the realm of mortals to that of the divine’ (15).

Quite apart from providing a stunning visual compendium, the book's achievement lies in its methodological underpinnings. In good French Structuralist tradition (one senses the influences of Paul Veyne and François Lissarrague in particular), Gaifman demonstrates the ‘interactive nature of classical Athenian images’ (13; see also 121), centring her discussion around close analysis of selected case studies: even though ‘images referring to libation may not reflect reality,’ ‘they tell us about perceptions and representations of the ritual of libation in classical Athens’ (7). This explains the book's four-part structure, discussing libation imagery in relation to animal sacrifice, the domestic sphere, funerary ritual, and divine performances of the ritual. Gaifman's last chapter, asking ‘what is the place of libation among gods and how does its presentation relate to depictions of mortals engaged in the rite’ (15), is arguably the most ambitious, not least in its connections between the ‘outpour of sound and the outpour of liquid’ (141–5).Footnote ⁷

On now to the fourth century, and to William A. P. Childs's exploration of Greek Art and Aesthetics. Footnote ⁸ Following in the footsteps of two previous twentieth-century surveys,Footnote ⁹ Childs aims to shed ‘light on the underlying meaning of the art of the fourth century and clarif[y] the relationship of primarily the Athenian intelligentsia to the contemporary art’ (xxiii). The book furnishes us with our best – and most splendidly illustrated – single-volume anthology of art in the fourth century (or better, fourth-century sculpture). At the same time Childs frames his magnum opus around an overarching argument: namely, that ‘the fourth century is hardly a period of decline’, but ‘a natural and creative successor to the fifth century's abstract idealism’ (xxiii; see also 1–24). Much of the book is spent rebutting nineteenth-century aesthetic prejudice (‘the general impression of the period as an unappealing amorphousness’ [5]). By contrast, more recent studies – including most things published in the twenty-first century – go without reference. The author admits as much in his foreword, explaining how he began the project in 1988 and completed it in 2002 (‘the fifteen years intervening resulted in…only sporadic updating of the bibliography’ [xxiii]). This poses little problem in points of detail (as, for example, with Childs's recourse to Overbeck's 1868 collection of ancient literary sources on Greek artists rather than the impressively expanded Der Neue Overbeck of 2014). I wondered, though, whether it causes a more substantial challenge to Childs's ‘aesthetic’ framework, which is reliant on classical archaeological work from the 1970s and 1980s (3–5). But rather than return to changing frameworks of aesthetics – or the aesthetics of change – let us move on…

In slowly transitioning from Greece to Rome, I add four briefer notes about books received. First, to ensure that they are on the radar, allow me to mention two important archaeological surveys: on the one hand, Brice Erickson's survey of Protogeometric through Hellenistic materials from Lerna in the Greek Argolid, focused above all around the history of ceramics;Footnote ¹⁰ on the other, a useful photographic reprint of what is now a classic work on the archaeology and topography of ancient Kythera (designed, we are told, to accompany the reopening of the island's archaeological museum [10]).Footnote ¹¹ Second, it was a pleasure to re-read Tonio Hölscher's short history of the ‘social life’ of Greek art – based on a cycle of lectures at the Louvre, published in French in 2015, but now available in the original German Fassung.Footnote ¹² Third, when it comes to new editions, particularly important is a revamped version of Jaś Elsner's 1998 monograph (formerly known as Imperial Rome and Christian Triumph).Footnote ¹³ This reissue comes complete not only with a revised title but also with new colour images, an updated bibliography, and a sparkling new chapter on the Eurasian contexts of Roman art: there is no finer introduction to the art of the first to fifth centuries ad. Fourth and finally, those working on Roman ‘water culture’ may wish to consult Dylan Kelby Rogers’ neat scholarly survey – a well-produced (albeit unillustrated) booklet, which doubles up as the first issue of a new ‘journal’ on Ancient History: archaeologists will benefit from Rogers’ review of ‘categories of water usage’, while the chapter on ‘water culture and its implications’ explores the multiple currents (as it were) of ‘power’ ‘aesthetics’, ‘spectacle’, ‘religion’, ‘consumption’, and ‘pleasure’.Footnote ¹⁴

And so to Rome – and to the structural supports of Roman sculpture.Footnote ¹⁵ Struts may seem like an uninspiring lens for viewing Roman visual aesthetics. Indeed, so extraneous have classical archaeologists judged these devices that many have sought to expunge them altogether: nineteenth-century plaster casts frequently dispensed with the supporting struts of Roman Idealplastik; by extension, scholarly photographs often removed them from view.Footnote ¹⁶ Even in the late twentieth century, the thinking finds expression in one's scholar's recommendations for displaying the sculptures from Sperlonga: namely, that the struts of the Polyphemus and Scylla groups should be ‘sealed off by wrapping them with black velvet’.Footnote ¹⁷

The scholarly backdrop makes Anna Anguissola's volume on Supports in Roman Marble Sculpture all the more remarkable. On the one hand, the book offers a meticulously researched survey of figural and non-figural supporting devices. On the other, it uses this as a springboard for launching into more interpretive questions:

Far from serving as merely utilitarian devices – for supporting marble versions of bronze subjects, for example, or transporting materials across the Roman Empire – struts are shown to ‘require a more complex explanation’ (221). In offering one such explanatory framework, this book brings formalist traditions of (German and Italian) classical archaeology into fruitful dialogue with Roman cultural history: no serious research library will want to be without it.

It is the breadth of Anguissola's study that impresses most. Few scholars could rival the author's mastery of materials and their historiography. Still fewer, I suspect, could match her comparative perspectives: along the way, Anguissola looks not just to antiquity but also to (among others) Michelangelo, Bernini, and Canova, illuminating both similarities and differences in aesthetic approach and practical technique. Above all, the volume showcases the sheer creativity with which ancient artists strutted the stuff of struts – whether to emphasize bodily movement, materiality, and virtuoso skill, or else to embellish figurative subjects in non-figurative ways. It is for this reason that ancient sculptors sometimes implemented structural supports within miniature versions of statues where they were no longer needed (see e.g. 132–4, 191–4); it is also why struts could be harnessed as meta-visual devices, underlining ideas about the ‘statuesque’ (see 128–67; also 208–16 on ‘visible signifiers’). Anguissola's concerns are first and foremost historical, focused around Roman cultural modes of response. But she does not shy away from transhistorical questions. Consider, for example, her analysis of the ‘framing’ functions of struts – that is, in Kantian terms, their supposed ‘parergonal’ aesthetic value (19–20, 134–9): there are rich connections here with another recent Cambridge volume here, omitted from my round-up for obvious reasons (see 132 n. 6).Footnote ¹⁸

The themes explored in Anguissola's book deserve a wider readership than her title might suggest. Although centred around sculpture, for example, her comments about Wollheim-ian ‘seeing as’ and ‘seeing in’ (a ‘two-foldedness by which we see both the artwork with its material and technical features, and the person or object represented’ [218]) take us to ancient aesthetic experience writ large, as resonant with recent work in classical philology as it is relevant for classical archaeologists.Footnote ¹⁹ Changes in the use of structural devices, no less than in cultural responses to them, also loom large: hence the discussion of an evolving ‘fondness for exquisitely intricate patterns’ in later Roman antiquity (197). Anguissola does not claim to have all the answers (‘the lack of a single explanation for the set of questions, ideas, and interpretive problems…should not discourage us from further exploration of the subject’ [221]). But her study looks set to spur others in turn: one area where I was left wanting more was with pictorial representations of sculptures and their supports, above all in Roman wall-painting.Footnote ²⁰

The relationship between different representational media was something that I was also left pondering after reading Glenys Davies’ long-awaited monograph on Gender and Body Language in Roman Art.Footnote ²¹ Truth be told, Davies’ title is a little misleading. For ‘Roman art’, read honorific sculpture, above all free-standing marble statues, and primarily those from the Italian mainland (see 11–13, 269): media like wall-paintings, mosaics, mosaics, silverware, and gems rarely get a look-in. Davies’ objective is to explore bodily deportment in male and female sculptural subjects, not least against ancient literary sources (31–81): ‘the obvious place to start looking for the representation and significance of body language in the Classical world is the visual arts’ (xi). ‘Roman society was notoriously patriarchal’, the author frequently reminds us (269; see also xi, 28, 60, 259). In asking what ancient bodily language might have ‘to tell us about contemporary society and social attitudes’ (xi), moreover, Davies offers a straightforward answer: ‘The gender differences seen in Roman art and society are not so very different to what we see around us in daily life and the media in contemporary Britain and America’ (270).

Davies’ book offers a useful survey of ‘modern body language studies’ (1), as well as their potential relevance for approaching the bodily configurations of Roman portraiture. Few scholars, I suspect, would take issue with the conviction that ‘statues of men and women…participated in the construction of gender at Rome’ (81). But I wondered whether the gender politics fought out here risk looking outdated: witness, for example, Davies’ discussion of scholarship on the Knidian Aphrodite, which seems to posit an essentializing transhistorical difference between male and female responses (82–9, 118). Perhaps I've been spending too long in my university's gender-neutral toilets. But in an age of celebrating the fluidities of gender – of defiantly parading the ‘T’ and ‘Q’ (not to mention the ‘+’) of ‘LGBTQ+’ – the categorical predeterminism struck me as awkward: if nothing else, the book speaks of a gaping generational difference between its publication date in 2018 and the theoretical work from the 1970s and 1980s to which so much of it is indebted (by Marianne Wex, Allan Pease, Nancy Henley, and others – no doubt among ‘those of us brought up in the mini-skirt age [who] were constantly being reminded to sit decorously with knees together’ [201]).

A bigger issue, I think, lies in the inherent interconnections between Davies’ ‘ancient’ and ‘modern’ categories. Classical antiquity is not just any old ‘past culture’ (xi). Rather, ancient materials – and Graeco-Roman images first and foremost – have moulded the whole history of Western bodily figurations: for better or worse, our modern ideas about ‘gender and body language’ are married to those of antiquity.

This is a sentiment that suffuses every page of Caroline Vout's ‘life history’ of classical art.Footnote ²² At the core of Vout's project lies the challenge of defining its neat title:

The chapters that follow take the form of a ‘biography or travelogue’ (243), organized in ten chronologically structured parts. This longue durée approach (13) – sustained by frequent talk of a ‘march’ (e.g. 219), ‘journey’ (e.g. 25), or ‘travel’ (e.g. 132) – seeks to explain how ‘the value of classical art as a category resides in the realization that it has evolved over two millennia’ (13).

With its detailed notes, extensive bibliography, and appealing visuals, this book will speak to anyone interested in the formation and reception of classical visual traditions. As Vout is quick to acknowledge (e.g. 211, 243), the analysis is particularly strong on matters of English emulation and response. But the volume has much to say about issues of pan-European reception, and Vout narrates her documentary with an eye to holding the reader's attention (‘We shall be getting inside the libraries of Alexandria and Pergamum…’ [73]). There are likewise some rich and mutually enlightening resonances with the volume discussed at the beginning of my round-up (also published by Princeton): note, for example, Vout's closing talk of ‘affordances’ in classical form (244), or her interest in evolving visualities (‘By learning about past ways of seeing, we see how our own are culturally contingent’ [228]).

As an account of how ‘classical art’ has been transformed through the ages, and an impassioned defence of its continuing relevance, the book strikes an appropriate note on which to close. ‘Classical art is still with us; and still evolving, contributing to culture, and discussions of what constitutes culture, as it does so’ (242). Mutatis mutandis, we are in one sense back where we started: what better manifestation of the constant of change?