Temple Decoration and Cultural Identity in the Archaic Greek World (review)

Marconi’s publication of the metopes of Selinus is welcome as a classic archaeological monograph of the very highest caliber, an exemplary example of an honorable genre that seems to have lost its footing somewhat in theory-drenched contemporary scholarship. Despite the suggestive title, the book’s real content is revealed in the subtitle: An updated English-language edition of the metopes of the Archaic temples at Selinus, Sicily—arguably the “city of the metopes” (185)—presented in meticulous fashion, including a catalog of the so-called “small metopes” and the metopes of temple C, accompanied by fine black-and-white photographs along with new line drawings of the fragmentary material by A. La Porta. As if its real subject were not meritorious enough for publication, the book trumpets its main title provocatively, in the end, however, promising more than it delivers. By the first chapter, it becomes apparent that the overarching theme identified in the title is something of a late addition to the project, a habit which unfortunately has become typical with far too many comparably solid archaeological monographs of late, as the pressure to be “theoretical” has become, apparently, too intense to ignore. (The sense that this chapter rightfully belongs to another, larger project mentioned by the author [xv–xvi], is enhanced by its lack of illustrations; granted, many of the buildings discussed are well known, but not all of them are, and the new approach would have been more forceful and convincing if an illustration were immediately to hand and the reader did not have to rely on memory or stop to consult another book.) At any rate, once the theoretical framework is in place, the rest of the book follows as a standard presentation of essential, some of it heretofore unpublished, archaeological material, in context.

I am not sure that “the uses of figural representation in Greek sacred architecture” has been neglected as an area of scholarly attention, as Marconi claims (1), nor is it so obviously separate from the genre of sculpture-in-the-round, as he suggests. I am also not sure that he is not overstating matters when he argues (2) that architectural sculpture has been inappropriately “appropriated” (definition follows) by historians of Greek sculpture. Much extant original Greek sculpture is architectural and art historians would be remiss not to consider this immense body of primary evidence in their treatments of style, dating, meaning, and iconography in the history of Greek art, which of course they do not. Moreover, figural decoration on sacred buildings is by no means new with Archaic Greece, as Marconi seems to imply; it appears throughout Egypt and the Near East at much earlier dates.

These reservations aside, when Marconi really gets underway, his brief discussion, using his newly delineated methodology, of the well-known temple of Artemis at Corcyra (11–14), is impressive, making the more broadly based study mentioned earlier even more highly anticipated. The reader should be aware, however, that neither diagrams nor definitions of arcane terms used by architectural historians are provided; instead, one is expected to know fully the history of architecture on mainland Greece, the major monuments, and the issues at stake in the evolutionary development of the orders, along with the sometimes abstruse technical matters associated with these developments. With chapter two begins the real subject of the book, Archaic Sicily, the domain of Marconi’s special expertise. The presentation of the metopes is undertaken by way of methodical analyses of their style, their technique, and most instructive, Marconi’s main focus, their iconography, an area in which western Greek artists are revealed to have been particularly inventive. A discussion of “hands” is effective (179–84), although fraught with the inevitable subjectivity associated with the enterprise. All in all, Marconi presents a clear and incisive picture of sculptors’ styles and proclivities as reflective of cultural identity in a major Greek colony. Additional authorial tendencies recalling the...