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253 BOOK REVIEWS Marian H. Feldman, 2014. Communities of Style: Portable Luxury Arts, Identity and Collective Memory in the Iron Age Levant. University of Chicago Press, 264 pp. ISBN: 13: 978-0-226-10561-1 $70 (hb). The Iron Age Levant corresponds to territories in today’s Israel, Lebanon, Syria, Jordan and Turkey and it is usually said to cover the period between circa 1200 to 600 BC. This time period and geographical area are not usually covered in most academic or art historical surveys, a dismaying lacuna in our broad understanding of centres of production, art objects, and context of reception for this particular period and regional setting. Irene J. Winter and Zainab Bahrani, among others, have been lamenting this exclusion for years, and have been trying incessantly to bridge ancient Near Eastern art to the rest of the world art historical canon through their work on the image and aesthetics in Western Asian artistic production. With the arrival of Marian H. Feldman’s Communities of Style: Portable Luxury Arts, Identity and Collective Memory, as with Feldman’s previous volume Diplomacy by Design: Luxury Arts and an ‘International Style’ in the Ancient Near East, 1400–1200 BCE, these artistic productions may finally be taken out of the relative obscurity and given the scholarly attention they so rightly deserve. At issue, however, is whether or not this volume will convince its readers that indeed, these portable elite objects could be used as primary sources, alongside texts and royal palace reliefs, to shed more light on ancient Near Eastern history as well as to rid ourselves of unnecessary tags like Phoenician and North Syrian. The present reviewer thinks that it could, and the reason lies in the mastery of the interdisciplinary scholarly apparatus with which Feldman is at such ease in the volume under review. In Diplomacy by Design, Feldman treated art objects from the Bronze Age context of the 14th and the 13th centuries BCE and what she elegantly termed ‘international koine style.’ In the volume under review, however, the author moves forward and looks at the 9th to the 7th centuries BCE, a time when the leading superpower of the Near East was the Neo-Assyrian Empire, centred in the northern Iraqi triangle of Assur, Nineveh and Arbela but with a territorial expanse reaching from the Mediterranean to Iran, and Turkey to Egypt. Rather than taking the grand palace reliefs of the NeoAssyrian kings, Feldman chooses a corpus that comprises figure-marked tiny objects made of gold, silver, bronze and ivory, excavated from contexts as far apart as the outer reaches of the Mediterranean Sea to present-day Iran. In doing so, the author gets the possibility to deconstruct ago-old labels such as ‘Phoenician’ and ‘North Syrian’ with which these objects are commonly tagged, thus moving away from traditional scholarship of Richard Burnett, Georgina Herrmann, and her teacher Irene J. Winter to propose a novel approach to the issue of style. So far, scholarship has focused almost exclusively on style as an indicator of place of production, workshop and distribution and the operative word in most studies is ‘trade’. The most notable of these contributions has been the work of Winter who in the 1970s was able to give quantifiable evidence for the distinction between Phoenician-style objects and those which bear a North Syrian style using distribution patterns that clearly marked a regional basis for issues of stylistic practices (Winter 1976). Winter later went on to produce a more nuanced study which dealt with the flattening of stylistic variability in having to chose an either-or designation; she examined the ivories of Arslan Tash and argued that on the basis of variability, these objects could be assigned to South Syria, specifically Damascus (16) (Winter 1981). In this volume, Feldman, however, argues that style could be employed in order to shed light on elite social practices, rather than matters of regional production and areas of distribution. Style, Feldman shows very cogently, is complicit in producing and reproducing communities, identities and collective memories. In the Introduction, Feldman offers the thesis of this work and gives a synoptic account of the rest of volume. Chapter one ‘Workshops, Connoisseurship, and Levantine...

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