Classical Art and the Cultures of Greece and Rome (review)

John Onians, Classical Art and the Cultures of Greece and Rome (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1999), 288 pp.

The legacy of classical art is everywhere, even when being denied (as often now), even beyond those countries in the Old and New Worlds that claim the most direct descent from the cultures of Greece and Rome. Classical art is unmistakable, readily defined in terms of the real and the ideal, the emotional and the narrative, the structured and the mathematical. Yet it remains susceptible to myriad interpretations: for Onians, classicism evokes the military phalanx, the orderly, proportioned, agonistic, personal, commemorative—and this is tidy, neat, self-congratulatory, even perhaps predictable. But why should the configuration that Onians describes have cast its influence beyond its homelands? Is it a simple matter of classical clarity; or might some art historian bred outside the classical tradition (are there any?) unlock the real secret to its success and tell us wherein lies its distance from the oriental and the primitive? Might the classical not even seem to some "unnatural," and to conceal emotional depths that the modern world still generally keeps under comparably respectable wraps?