The Invention of Art History in Ancient Greece: Religion, Society, and Artistic Rationalisation (review)

In his introductory chapter, Jeremy Tanner quotes J. J. Winckelmann's eighteenth-century description of the Apollo Belvedere: "Among all the works of antiquity which have escaped destruction, the statue of Apollo is the highest ideal of art . . . In the presence of this miracle of art, I forget all else, and I myself take a lofty position for the purpose of looking on it in a worthy manner" (6). Tanner makes it clear that Winckelmann, widely regarded as the founder of modern art history, was not simply recording a personal reaction. Instead, Winckelmann's notion of artworks as autonomous objects of aesthetic experience was deeply rooted in the transformation of the basic institutions of art during the Enlightenment. These included changes in patronage and production, and the introduction of the new philosophy of aesthetics. The new conception of art as a form of individual expression was tied not only to the notion of personal liberty but also to the growing obsession with national identities. Winckelmann's rapturous response to the Apollo Belvedere is understandable only as a part of this broader set of social and intellectual currents.

The kinds of art history that Tanner is concerned with in this book are quite distinct from Winckelmann's and belonged to profoundly different cultural networks. Tanner lays out three goals for the book: first, to analyze art as a form of material culture that was both shaped by society and, in turn, helped to shape society; second, to develop an analytic framework for comparing classical and modern art history without conflating the two; third, to move art history to the explanatory level, exploring not only how classical art developed over the long term, but why. Tanner's approach is sociological, drawing especially on the work of the once influential American sociologist, Talcott Parsons (1902–1979) and the semiotics of Charles Sanders Peirce (1839–1914). As a result, Tanner shifts from the traditional focus on artists to the interaction of artists, patrons, and viewers.

In chapter 2 ("Rethinking the Greek Revolution," 31–96) Tanner addresses one of the central problems in art history, the apparently sudden transformation from abstraction to naturalism in Greek art in the beginning of the fifth century B.C.E., famously described by E. H. Gombrich as "the Greek Revolution." Why, after generations of continuity within the Archaic style, did Greek artists, alone among the artists working in the broader Middle Eastern tradition, develop the naturalistic style of art represented in, for example, Polykeitos's Doryphoros? For Gombrich, the "Greek Revolution" was fundamentally a matter of artists breaking from ingrained patterns and attempting, as individuals, to match the appearance of their statues with the natural world. Other writers, including several contributors to Diana Buitron-Oliver, ed., The Greek Miracle: Classical Sculpture from the Dawn of Democracy (Washington, D.C., 1992), have described the change in terms even more deeply grounded in Winckelmann: the revolution in style was a product of the birth of individuality and personal freedom that accompanied the birth of democracy in classical Greece.

Tanner is specifically concerned with what the "Greek Revolution" meant for cult statues. While he rejects the simplistic equation democracy = naturalism as an explanatory device, Tanner nevertheless holds that political changes, marked by the Kleisthenic reforms, had profound effects on both the makers and the viewers of art. Through most of the sixth century B.C.E., the aristocracy was in firm control of religious art. Through the forms of the kouros and kore, aristocrats merged their identities with those of the gods. Through their sponsorship and control of the sanctuaries, they controlled the access ordinary viewers had to images of the sacred. While the immediate effects of the Kleisthenic reforms may have been more complex than Tanner implies, over the course of a generation the authority of the traditional aristocracy declined, and the sponsorship of cult images was...