The best piece of advice I received when writing up my thesis was ‘Remember, it's only a draft’. V.’s biography of classical art is based upon the idea that a definitive or final version of the subject is impossible. The lives of classical artworks have and will change as society changes around them, but, it is argued, they continue to provide a measure against which contemporary art and values may be measured. The volume provides a wealth of examples, many beautifully illustrated, chosen by V. from a very broad range of scholarship to emphasise the complexity of influences on classical art and its viewers. The focus is on sculpture, although other media also appear.

J.R. Clarke's Art in the Lives of Ordinary Romans (2003) includes as figure 3 an invaluable model for the reception of visual art in ancient Rome. Many of the factors he identifies in this model recur when the same piece of artwork is viewed by individuals in later eras, such as the announcement of status or wealth or civic benefaction. V. extends this method of understanding art in its ancient context to illustrate the complexity of factors in succeeding eras which inform(ed) subsequent viewing and scholarship. As her work finishes with the contemporary presentation of classical art in the physical space of museums such as the Fitzwilliam, Metropolitan and Mougins Museums, it prompts further questions about the choices made by individuals in virtual galleries. If anyone with access to a museum's website can, like Isabella d'Este or Thomas Howard, choose their favourite pieces, which will they choose? V. repeatedly describes how the combination and collocation of examples in physical spaces did not simply affect but enhanced a viewer's enjoyment. How will this change when viewing pictures of isolated individual pieces in a slideshow, on the same device as personal photographs or desktop backgrounds, and with the technology to make the viewer's own adjustments of arrangement or colour? In her later chapters the question recurs of whether the popularisation of classical art affects its cachet.

V. draws attention in both her introduction and concluding chapters to the impact of school curricula on the way in which classical art has been viewed since the development of mass education in the nineteenth century. In Britain this, in practice, means the importance of the examination questions set by the one remaining board offering Classical Civilisation. Now that an Oxbridge academic has demonstrated the importance of considering the varying lives of sculpture and vases after their display in (usually) classical Greece, perhaps this exam board will devise questions that reward knowledge of these lives. The sample paper for the new specification instead asks, with depressing predictability, why Eirene and Ploutos are typical of fourth-century sculpture and for a comparison of how aesthetically pleasing two pots are. To what extent do such questions move on the next generations of scholars from the approach of A. Wherry in 1898 ‘wedded to a chronology and a Winckelmannian vision of “Rise and Decline”’ (p. 186) with which V. starts her discussion of the nineteenth century in Chapter 8?

Frustrated students would benefit from reading V.’s discussion of another familiar example from the syllabus, the Tyrannicides, which forms a focus for the introductory chapter. In interrogating the problems inherent in the usual caption for this piece and then tracing its differing interpretations, including as gladiators, V. identifies different questions to ask students of classical art. The discussion in Chapter 9 of the approach of the modern museum extends this to the impact of the classical on contemporary art such as the Doryphoros of Matthew Derbyshire and the forms of Venus by Picasso, Warhol and Klein displayed in the Mougins Museum of Classical Art. It should be noted, however, that in the intervening chapters, the multitude of examples cited requires the reader to have good existing knowledge of both the changing canon of classical sculpture and the different contexts discussed, such as the politics of imperial Rome or the collection at Kedleston Hall in Derbyshire.

From Chapter 2 onwards, the material is set out in broadly chronological chapters describing classical art in the contexts of the Hellenistic World, Rome, Renaissance Italy, European courts, English Country Houses and the last two centuries. There is an increasing British focus to material in the later chapters. V. acknowledges her debt to previous scholarship in the choice of examples she presents and is often content to let others have the final word, such as S. Settis on sculpture as subject. The ‘overly anxious’ bibliography runs to 42 pages and represents a considerable resource in itself.

In grouping her material in broadly chronological chapters, V. nevertheless jumps across, and between, different periods to emphasise the complexity of influences on viewers of classical art, the realities of how the canon was formed and re-formed, and the increasing emphasis on educating popular taste. Inevitably, not all observations can be fully explored within individual chapters in this arrangement, but the recurrence of some themes is worthy of further discussion. V. notes in passing how individuals with money used their collections of classical art to negotiate boundaries of gender, society or religion both in the Renaissance (Isabella d'Este and Andrea Odoni) and later (Charles Townley). Although the question about repairing or restoring, and thus reimagining, ancient artworks is explored through the work of Guglielmo della Porta in the Renaissance, Antonio Canova from the 1770s, and the in-out-in-again restorations of Bertel Thorvaldsen on the Aegina pediments in Munich, there are only hints of debates about the use of colour on classical statues (see Ny Carlsberg Glyptotek's Tracking Colour project and K. Nichols, ‘Marbles for the Masses’, in V. Coltman [ed.], Making Sense of Greek Art [2012], pp. 179–201). Casts were not only influential for education and research, but proficiency in copying them was a prerequisite for the use of art in manufacture in the nineteenth century by students at the School of Design in Somerset House (M. Goodwin, ‘Objects, Belief and Power in Mid-Victorian England: the Origins of the Victoria and Albert Museum’, in S. Pearce [ed.], Objects of Knowledge [1990], pp. 9–49), increasing the sheer volume of re-interpreted classical imagery in the public gaze.

The volume gives emphasis to the different influences over time on pieces of classical art after their creation and display in the ancient world. The effect of these influences on our understanding of the ancient use and value of these pieces has been demonstrated repeatedly in terms of their material, place of creation and method of publication.Footnote ¹ The book demonstrates how slippery a term ‘classical’ can be, and sometimes there is a temptation to suggest that a piece is considered classical art because it survives from a certain period and the right person bought it. Whether or not the reader considers them art, objects from the ancient world continue to engage and influence modern scholars. V.’s study allows us to judge the impact of two millennia of investment on our understanding of these objects.