Ancient Greek Portrait Sculpture. Contexts, Subjects, and Styles (review)

The book under review, a revised version of Dillon's 1994 Institute of Fine Arts dissertation, promises a timely English-language treatment of the evidence for the portrait statues of ancient Greece, as they were and as they lived on in Roman copies made for Roman contexts. It is neither a comprehensive study of ancient Greek portrait sculpture, nor an introductory survey, as the title might lead us to expect. What the book does offer, however, is a creative study centered on what can be inferred about the lost art of Greek portraiture from a catalogue of 108 portraits of unknown Greek subjects, most of them Roman "copies" executed in a Classical or Hellenistic Greek style by unknown sculptors, presumably working for Roman patrons. The result is a sharply focused contribution of sophistication and insight, equipped with dense narrative footnotes.

While acknowledging the importance of Gisela Richter's three-volume 1965 catalogue The Portraits of the Greeks as a foundation and a resource (it is now available in a revised one-volume version edited by R.R.R. Smith), Dillon at the same time rightly observes that Richter's principal of reconstructing lost Greek bronze portraits of famous men has limited the scope of inquiry into whom Greek portraits really represented, what they looked like, and what both the Greeks and the Romans did with them. Though some of the Greek "anonymi" whose portrait images are surveyed here probably did represent famous subjects, we have no way of knowing who they were because the Roman versions did not include inscribed name labels. More surprisingly, perhaps, Dillon argues against the approach of Paul Zanker in his Sather Lectures (published as The Mask of Socrates: The Image of the Intellectual in Antiquity [Berkeley/Los Angeles 1995]). In Dillon's view, Zanker is wrong to conclude that the Greek sculptors of the Classical period tried to make their portraits look alike, in the interest of presenting all male portrait subjects as illustrations of the ideal citizen. He also puts too much faith in our ability to arrive at precise stylistic dates for either the lost Greek originals or their Roman marble copies. Dillon, basing her observations upon careful autopsy of the material in her catalogue, demonstrates a willingness to move beyond these two approaches to Greek portraiture, which arguably have far more to do with what modern scholarship would like Greek portraiture to have been than what the realia (bronze originals, inscribed statue bases, and Roman marble copies) show it to be.

After the introductory chapter laying out the author's goals, Chapters 2 and 3, "Making Portraits of the Greeks" and "Displaying Portraits of the Greeks," approach Greek portraits in what may seem like reverse order, by starting with what we know of them from Roman copies and contexts; in fact, this is a more honest method than traditional approaches, in which claims are made about Greek portraiture while trying to acknowledge as little as possible the role of Roman evidence. Dillon first illustrates through three detailed case studies her approach to the typological and stylistic grouping of anonymous portrait heads in marble. After a brief consideration of what we know about Hellenistic Greek portrait galleries (very little indeed), Dillon proceeds to single out the collections of Greek portraits displayed in two Roman villas for closer analysis. The large collection of portraits of 36 Greek subjects in the Villa of the Papyri at Herculaneum may have been atypical in its subject selection, with several one-of-a-kind portraits and some portrait subjects that still cannot be identified. The collection of portrait herms from the Villa of Cassius at Tivoli, on the other hand, showed a marked preference for portraits of the most popular Classical Greek subjects, but the different formats of the herms in the collection suggest that it was built up of pieces acquired at different times and from different sources. The selection of portrait subjects in...