Paradoxes introduce Naas’s study of the nature of artist anecdotes in Pliny’s Natural History. Several of these paradoxes are explicit, for example the claim that ‘anecdotes about art and artists in the Natural History are easily identifiable’ (facilement identifiables) even while ‘the very notion [of anecdotes] … is problematic [problematique], because all the terms involved raise questions of definition and scope’ (definition et … champ) (14). N. also notes that ‘each anecdote concerns a particular artist or … work’ (… porte sur tel artiste ou telle oeuvre) even while ‘singular anecdotes refer to timeless patterns’ (des schemas intemporels) (15).

N. declares herself comfortable with these tensions — with the intractability of anecdotes as witnesses to any grounded historical fact, even while their biographical frame would seem to assert this. This is a study of the anecdotes’ literary function. Some might wish for a similar sceptical distance elsewhere in the text, which can seem to assume that the Greek works named by Pliny indeed existed; that they were made by the masters to whose names tradition ties them; and that examples of these masterworks were (as Pliny relates) on view in Rome, rather than reading these as potentially spurious relics designed at some point in their history (whether Greek or Roman) to stand as ostensible evidentiary support for the stories to which they alluded. One might also quibble over the extent to which Pliny’s Greek sources can be confidently reconstructed.

The great strength of N.’s work is in her relocation of the purpose of the anecdotes’ study elsewhere — judging them ‘valuable less as authentic fact than as documents on culture and mentalities’ (document sur la culture et les mentalités) (12). Vitally, she takes the opposite approach — and so stands as a counterpoint — to the landmark 1934 study by Ernst Kris and Otto Kurz, Die Legende vom Künstler. Rather than universalising artist anecdotes as paradigms with their roots in myth, the author reinserts them into their particular Roman context, and situates them within Pliny’s encyclopaedic project.

What follows is an extensive, erudite study of some 390 pages. Fifteen chapters are divided into four parts. The first sets the scene, contextualising the anecdotes’ place in Pliny’s oeuvre (ch. 1) and the history of their modern reception (ch. 2), while also considering the relationship between anecdote and biography at greater length (ch. 3) and wrestling with the definitional boundaries (and arguable overlap) between ideas of anecdote and exemplum (ch. 4). Ch. 5 takes the story of Zeuxis’ painting of Helen as a case study through which to demonstrate the highly porous boundaries between these previously contrasted categories.

This is arguably all by way of introduction, as is the first chapter of the second part (ch. 6) which explores Pliny’s probable sources. We follow the thought process of the author as she more closely defines her topic of interest in each case, though an alternative approach of getting to the meat of her argument sooner might also have carried benefits. The remainder of Part II catalogues the anecdotes in Pliny’s work and the literary purpose they serve. It also demonstrates how the ideological approach of Kris and Kurz meant that many examples were missed in their corpus. Engagement with the conceptual implications for the making and reading of art is deferred to the last chapters of the book.

The core intervention comes in Parts III and IV, with reflections on the evidence these reappropriated Greek anecdotes (in N.’s presentation) provide on the status of the artist (ch. 10), the Roman imperial reframing of Greek art (chs 11–12), their antiquarian interests (ch. 13) and sophisticated forays (chs 14–15) into Greek models of conceptualisation, finding their summation in new Roman values, centred on an imperialistically inspired notion of intellegere — comprehension (ch. 13). Her conclusion is that the ostensibly Greek artist anecdotes in Pliny are at least as much an artefact and product of Roman society and Pliny’s practice of cataloguing and comprising the natural world as they are products of the Greek world from which they purport to stem.

The writing style is occasionally sinuous, even vulnerable to a charge of circularity. For example, on 16–17 N. explains that ‘Anecdotes are linked to biography, but one must not confuse artists’ anecdotes with artists’ lives’ (… confondre les anecdotes d’artistes avec les vies d’artistes). This is closely followed by the (apparently conflating) observation that ‘in … [Pliny’s] Natural History … biographical elements consist above all of anecdotes’ (surtout en anecdotes), itself followed by the conclusion that ‘one thus sees that the boundary between life and anecdote is much blurred — indeed, one cannot separate the two’ (on ne saurait séparer les deux).

But if the author’s level of comfort with paradox might occasionally make the text somewhat intractable, there can be no doubt of the overall contribution of the volume, nor of the timeliness of its corrective to the centuries-old emphasis on the Greek origin of artist anecdotes. This approach mirrored similar taxonomies that since Winckelmann valued Greek above Roman art — a bias that art historians in recent years have been working to correct. Ultimately, N.’s work operates as a resounding answer to the question she poses in the introduction: ‘What if the Romans invented Greece?’ (Et si les romains avaient inventer la Grèce?) (8). N.’s book clarifies that, even in the apparently unlikely case of paradigmatic tales of (already) ancient Greek artists’ lives, we are dealing with a Roman, indeed Plinian, conception still.