In this learned and wide-ranging book, Daniel Orrells provides a fascinating study of eighteenth-century representations of Greek art in print. The interest in Greek art and the construction of the classical Greek ideal in this period were not, Orrells shows, the result of a straightforward material turn, but emerged out of complicated debates and contests about representation and viewing. Through close attention to the frontispieces, vignettes and illustrations in some of the key art historical publications of the eighteenth century, Orrells demonstrates how these images are never simply illustration or scientific documentation, but are part of a visual rhetoric that consistently threatens to take on a life of its own, representing the subjective position of the artist or scholar or generating new artworks in print. The book is not exactly a history of the representation of classical Greek art of the period, nor is it a genealogical account of these material interests. Rather, Orrells gives what he refers to as a “history of exemplary episodes” (37), which display a plethora of complexities and tensions among artefact, image and viewer. By showing this variety of functions, purposes and effects of antiquarian prints, the book seeks to excavate “the anxieties about the material and the visual which have structured and framed the discipline of classical studies” (37).
The introduction provides the historical and disciplinary context for what is to come. It opens with a discussion of the vignette above the preface in Johann Joachim Winckelmann’s History of the Art of Antiquity (1764): an engraving of a relief (now known to be Roman) representing four deities in procession. Winckelmann thought the relief, though late, contained much of the beauty of the classical style and therefore took it to be the product of a Greek master living in the Roman Empire, who looked back at the style of earlier periods and therefore used an archaizing style that blurred Etruscan and Greek forms. For Orrells, the vignette questions the narrative of Greek uniqueness and autochthony in Winckelmann’s story. It becomes an example of how the illustrations in his History contradict and refuse the neat division of art history into periods and national styles that Winckelmann promotes in his text.
The vignette is important in Orrells’ story because it frames Winckelmann’s division of ancient art, so influential for the discipline of classics, as an abstraction, evidence of his preference for text over image, thought over matter. His ideal of Greek classical beauty is so abstract that it becomes invisible (10). Winckelmann thus comes to personify an inherent tension between text and materiality in Classics as such. Quoting James Porter, Orrells suggests that “classics is as much a matter of matter as it is fundamentally a repression of this fact” (11). This repression is founded in the eighteenth century along with the discipline itself, when print technology made it possible to reproduce images of ancient Greek art and thus “triggered a set of fraught and complex debates which continue to challenge the discipline of classical studies” (13). It is this tension and complexity that the book under review excavates.
The first chapter centres on Homer as a central figure in the debates over the nature and origin of ancient art, the relationship between text and image, and the relative authority of the ancient and the modern in the early eighteenth century. It takes us from the quarrel of the Ancients and the Moderns in the French Academy and the subsequent battle over Homer to its central discussion of two prints that respond to the debate in very different ways. These are Nicholas Vleughels’ visualisation of (Jean Boivin’s reconstruction of) the shield of Achilles, published in 1715, and the frontispiece to Giambattista Vico’s New Science (1730), an allegory in which Homer is represented as a statue in order to symbolize Vico’s own historical explanation of Homer as a mere idea, the name given by tradition to a long historical process. These are quite different images, then: Vleughels’ picture is meant to depict the object described by Homer in Iliad 18, while Vico’s allegorical frontispiece is meant to illustrate his own, modern, explanation of the reality behind the name Homer. And yet, Orrells’ discussion, especially of the shield, shows how these images can change status and be the subject of different ways of seeing. Vleughels’ engraving was used by Jean Boivin not only as proof of Homer’s reliability (everything he describes could in fact be fitted into one shield) and Homer’s own painterly quality of description, but also proof of the advanced state of Greek art already at the age of Homer. It thus illustrates both Homeric poetry and the object described. Yet, if it counted as proof of the earliest history of art for some—influencing Alexander Pope, the Comte de Caylus and many others—it merely highlighted the modern construction of the ancient past for others, thus taking on more of the allegorical quality of Vico’s frontispiece. There is a constant tension between the image as a truthful and immediate depiction, and the symbol in need of interpretation and explanation, the object and image as a mere sign of a different history and its ability to provide immediate access to what it presents.
In his second chapter, Orrells turns to the new and ambitious attempts to write histories of ancient art that divide the material into chronological periods and national styles, beginning with Bernard de Montfaucon’s L’Antiquité Expliquée (1719-25) and continuing with Pierre-Jean Mariette, Caylus and Winckelmann. The merit of this chapter lies in the way it draws out the paradoxes inherent in these historizing and totalizing views of ancient art, which at the same time seek to extol a particular style as a model for contemporary taste. Orrells brilliantly points out how the engravings in Mariette’s Traité des pierres gravées (1750), on the one hand provide a new history of art by using cameos as a way to visualise the history of sculpture, while, on the other hand, they seem chosen to reflect the values and positions of Mariette and his modern readership, just as the engravings themselves, made by the famous artist Edmé Bouchardon, come to constitute new works of art in print. Thus, just as the ancient pieces are reified as signs in a universal history about the development of art, so the engravings of the gems hover between documentation and creative artistic production for a new age. This tension is more strongly emphasised in Orrells’ discussion of the images in Caylus’ monumental Recueil d’antiquités (1752-67), also made by Bouchardon, where the scientific illustrations of the artifacts have the accuracy of anatomical drawings and thus treat the objects as evidence of a history of art and taste, while its frontispieces and vignettes are artistic pieces that frame the presentation for the modern viewer: archaeologists labouring in the ruins as well as allegories of Time as an old man and Study as a weary woman.
The engravings in Winckelmann’s History (1764), discussed in the final part of the chapter, are fewer and seem focused on Winckelmann’s connoisseurship and ability to place pieces correctly in the history of art. Rather than engravings of the Greek masterpieces, the culmination of art in Winckelman’s story, we get Etruscan gems and Roman copies, placed in between chapters. Orrells adds to the paradoxes already mentioned in the Introduction, pointing out how these images constantly blur the boundaries of Winckelmann’s story. They thus “repeatedly emphasize how ancient art did not so much as fit into these categories as in between and across them” (155). As with Mariette and Caylus, Orrells has a keen eye for the way in which Winckelmann can use these images to represent himself and his readers. Orrells ingeniously points to the ways in which the illustrations of Etruscan and Roman, rather than Greek art not only reflect the inaccessibility of Greek art but also position Winckelmann’s readership as modern Etruscans and Romans, who in Winckelmann’s account, could only strive to attain the Greek ideal. Winckelmann’s images thus represent “ancient objects and modern portraits of his neoclassical readers” (162).
The third chapter turns to images of architecture and the reproduction of ancient Greek monuments in print, focusing especially (but not exclusively) on James Stuart and Nicholas Revett, Julien-David Le Roy, Giovanni Battista Piranesi and Pierre-François Hugues d’Hancarville. Orrells points out how the engravings in Stuart and Revett’s The Antiquities of Athens (1762) on the one hand offered detailed drawings and monuments, abstracted from their surroundings in a “search for timeless, natural laws of beauty through the collection of meticulous measurements” (205), while on the other hand included engravings of the monuments’ dilapidated state in their current, Ottoman surroundings. This is aptly contrasted with the aesthetics of Le Roy’s Ruins (1758 and 1770), which, Orrells shows, highlights the subjective experience and therefore reflects his own impression at seeing the ruins. Rather than a scientific reproduction of the ancient Greek monuments, Le Roy’s focus on subjective taste, itself subject to change, led him to a more creative rather than reproductive view on the use of the ancient monuments in contemporary architecture. On Orrell’s reading, his aesthetics resembles those of Piranesi, who praised the Romans over the Greeks for being the great innovators rather than upholding a static ideal; Piranesi’s prints of Roman architecture reflect the changing position of the viewing subject and, furthermore, the priority given to the artistic rather than scholarly understanding of architecture and beauty.
The final part of the chapter focuses on d’Hancarville’s catalogue of William Hamilton’s vase collection (1766-67), emphasising how this work seeks to bridge some of the dichotomies of the eighteenth- century debates about art touched on in the preceding chapters. Reading d’Hancarville’s frontispieces and vignettes, Orrells shows how he not only challenges Winckelmann’s history of art in his text, but also merges the opposition between art and text, past and present, scholarship and art, combining the Philhellenists’ view of Greek art’s exemplarity with the Romans’ emphasis on creative continuation and development to amalgamate the connoisseur with the artist.
As this summary shows, the book’s episodes articulate a variety of ways in which eighteenth-century print culture presents and negotiates the relationship between object and image, image and viewer. All the chapters summarised above contain elaborate introductions that place the discussions in a wider intellectual landscape. Orrells certainly manages to show that there was no “straightforward material turn in eighteenth-century antiquarianism” (32), or any simple birth of classics as an intellectual discipline, but that the turn to ancient Greece in the eighteenth century “established foundational debates, contests and schisms” (270). It is thus not one coherent picture that emerges from this book, nor is it meant to be. Orrells’ book presents an array of people who both individually and collectively show the plethora of tensions that the book disinters: the relationship between past and present, materiality and textuality, image and object, artist and scholar, objectivity and subjectivity, restoration and ruination, replication and creation, revelation and mystery, aesthetic and monetary interests. Underneath these tensions, other, political ones are lurking—between East and West, Greece and Rome, France and Germany, British and Ottomans. The book should be read for its attention to these differences and contradictions and the way it refuses to tell a single story.
Orrells is well-read in and appreciative of existing scholarship, frequently referring to and quoting the work of other scholars. I generally found this affirmative use of the secondary literature sympathetic, but at times a little more discussion, especially of views and interpretations with which Orrells disagrees, would have been helpful. The disagreement is generally with a more anonymous ‘standard view’ of the material turn in the eighteenth century and the prehistory of classics as a discipline.
It is inevitable, though probably unfair, that one would want more from a book that covers so much. Nonetheless, I would have liked to read more about aesthetic theory—a topic that is not discussed in Orrells’ book but seems relevant to many of the contrasts and tensions to which it points. The construction of the Greek ideal in the eighteenth century goes hand in with a new conception of beauty. Winckelmann—and the story leading up to him—was foundational in describing beauty as that which, in Immanuel Kant’s later formulation, pleases universally without a concept. The contrast between the massive learning and quest for understanding in eighteenth-century antiquarianism and the conception of immediate beauty at which it arrives are also part of the paradox on which classics is founded.