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

In the six chapters of this ambitious volume, Tanner offers "a sociological framework for the understanding of Greek art" (19), discussing the development of naturalism in the "Greek revolution"; portraiture; "the value, status, and agency of visual artists in classical Greece" (30); the effect of art-historical thinking on the production of Hellenistic and Roman art; and other major subjects that have long occupied students of classical art. His approach is of the kind characterized in some critiques of the social sciences as "method-driven," rather than "problem-driven." Internally consistent explanations that conform to particular methodological principles are not, however, inevitably applicable to the phenomena they ostensibly analyze, and the worth of theories relating to the visual arts must be judged in terms of their capacity to account for the material in question. Tanner's book is not on solid ground with respect to either primary evidence or secondary interpretations.

The author relies too confidently on concepts and conclusions formulated by other scholars at the expense of close examination of the material discussed. General notions like the "aura" of works of art (especially chapter 2) and "the axial age societies" (192) do not necessarily transfer axiomatically from the contexts for which they were developed. Tanner subscribes to common views of Winckelmann's methods and conceptual originality (3–7) without seeing that those views fundamentally misunderstand the emergence of modern writing on classical art. His discussions of ancient material similarly give the impression of piecemeal reliance on particular scholarly treatments, not of a thorough and independent synthesis. For example, in discussing the familiar phenomenon of "recycled" iconography, he points to the well-known case of the Tyrannicides, specifically the Attic cup on which the poses of Harmodios and Aristogeiton are used in scenes showing the deeds of Theseus (184–87, fig. 4.6). Yet, he had just explained the stag-hunt mosaic at Pella (170, fig. 4.4) in the strictly formal terms of a "geometrical" structure that produces a certain impression of space and articulation of the bodies and did not mention that the hunters take the poses of Harmodios and the equally standard axe-wielding Theseus seen on the cup, although surely there is a significant iconographic component in these compositional choices. Much of Tanner's discussion focuses on sculpture, again with difficulties. Even when statues produced in Roman contexts are flagged as "Roman copy after Greek statue of" such-and-such a date (passim) (and even more so when they are not, as in the identification of the Apollo Belvedere as a "Roman copy" after a fourth-century "original" [fig. 1.3]), they cannot be used so confidently as evidence for earlier Greek works, attributions to specific Greek artists, or overall artistic practice. Tanner does not seem fully to have understood how profoundly our ideas about Roman "copies" have changed or the ramifications of those changes.

Although Tanner insists on the close tie between social context and the practice of art and the development of ancient writing on art, his arguments too often lack historical specificity. One result is that the importance of particularly Roman ideas is lost in favor of the long-established consensus view of a fundamentally Greek literature of art.

The author's familiarity with the scholarship is similarly insufficient to sustain his claim of offering a comprehensive revolution in approach. For example, the importance of medical, physiognomic, and rhetorical texts in the practice and analysis of classical art is by now well established, not new. Omissions and misreadings are frequent; it is surprising, for instance, given his emphasis on Stoicism as a key element in ancient thought on art (e.g., 236–38), that he does not mention M.-A. Zagdoun's important study, La philosophie stoïcienne de l'art, published in 2000. The numerous errors in citations, especially of non-English sources, are disquieting. His negative...