Image and Text in Graeco-Roman Antiquity (review)

Squire's ambitious book on the complex relationship between the verbal and the visual both opens and concludes with instructive readings of modern advertising campaigns and their exploitation of the rich communicative capabilities of mixed media; while the advertising industry seems to understand clearly the symbiosis between words and images, most classical scholarship has mistreated this fundamental link, he argues. The counterintuitive frame of the contemporary is appropriate, for this is a provocative book that is currently relevant and sure to excite fruitful debate and future research—for classical philologists, classical art historians, art historians at large, and the interdisciplinary range of scholars engaged in word and image studies. With sweeping reviews of the theological and aesthetic histories of images and texts grounded by expertly developed case studies, Squire sets forth strategies for approaching the interrelationship of the seeable and the sayable in general, and offers critical insights into Graeco-Roman examples in particular, some familiar, and some essentially untreated before now.

The book is divided into three main parts. It begins by teasing out the origins of the word-image divide that has led many scholars to ask the wrong kinds of questions, in particular of antiquity (part I, 15-193). Squire's premise is deceptively simple and methodologically profound: the sixteenth-century Reformation privileged the verbal over the visual and asserted the necessity of reducing the visual into purely verbal terms as a means of knowing the divine. Ever since this theologically informed separation of form from content, Squire elaborates, scholars of images and texts—from the German aesthetic theorists Hegel and Kant to the historians of art Winckelmann and Lessing—have operated from this fundamental Lutheran premise of division, often unwittingly. This new critical approach gets us away from ill-formed treatments of images as simply "illustrating" texts (122-39), or of ecphrastic texts as purely verbal, literary phenomena (139-46), as recent scholarship has tended to do. Squire moves us toward readings that are sensitive to the interconnection and interdependence between visual and verbal cultures, that resist privileging one medium over the other and assuming a bipartite separation between them in the first place (189-90).

Part 2 divides into two chapters that focus on inscribed texts in the same physical space as images, the full verbal-visual contexts of which have been largely neglected until now—a carved epigram amidst the sculptural groups in Tiberius' grotto at Sperlonga (202-38) and the epigrams alongside the paintings in the so-called "House of Propertius" at Assisi (239-93). Squire demonstrates, for example, how the audience viewing the paintings in the "House of Propertius" as a collection in turn would have read the appended epigrams as an assemblage as well—a process that pulled the reader-viewer in multiple programmatic directions and thus opened up potential responses rather than shut them down (291). The two chapters of part 3 shift slightly to examine how texts and images in Graeco-Roman antiquity that did not literally share the same space nonetheless still worked "through and against each other in related ways" (11). Here, Squire proves the point by analyzing as "iconotexts" various ecphrases of Philostratus' Imagines alongside Campanian wall paintings, first of Polyphemus (300-56), and next of food and other subjects categorized in antiquity as xenia and currently as "still life" paintings (357-428): readers of Philostratus' ecphrases of Polyphemus paintings would have brought their visual repertoire of actual paintings of Polyphemus to the experience, resulting in a multilayered reader-viewer response to Philostratus' tableaux as well as Polyphemus' own fraught history of viewing (352). Thus, xenia paintings, anything but "still," actively engaged Roman discourses about reality and representation, nature and art that invited careful navigations of what was real and what was not (e.g., 372).

Squire's thesis about the multidirectional exchanges between images and texts persuades this reader. Some readers will want more than the relatively brief discussion of scholarship on word and image that...