[Authors and titles are listed at the end of the review]
Consider the seven wonders of the ancient world, collected by writers like Diodorus Siculus, Antipater of Sidon, and the aptly nicknamed Philo Byzantius “Paradoxographos” (“recorder of wonders”). A unifying trait of these geographically and aesthetically disparate marvels is their monumentality: in the opinion of these authorities, size mattered. Wonders such as the chryselephantine cult statue of Zeus and the Colossus of Rhodes impressed viewers with their gargantuan stature. Long after the fall of Rome, titanically scaled sculptures have continued to capture the popular imagination. The Eternal City’s medieval residents gave the Flavian amphitheater its more familiar moniker, the Colosseum, given its proximity to the then-standing colossus of Sol. And visitors to Rome during this jubilee year can encounter an intact and enormous Constantine, whose iconic fragments overwhelm the courtyard of the Palazzo dei Conservatori with their scale, thanks to a reconstruction by Factum Foundation.
Although these examples might suggest otherwise, the sculptural output of the ancient Mediterranean was not dominated solely by massive monuments. This world also teemed with small-scale sculptures. The volume under review addresses such works as its subject, contributing to the growing discourse on the role of the small-scale in the aesthetic paradigms of numerous premodern cultures.[1] Greek and Roman small size sculpture originated in a 2020 conference canceled due to Covid-19, this volume embraces media, iconographies, and chronological periods that expand upon this groundwork while offering a productive model for collaboration across different scholarly generations.
The volume consists of thirteen chapters examining statuettes, miniatures, reliefs, scaled-down sculpted motifs, and additional formats preserved in bronze, marble, terracotta, and even just written words. The range of what constitutes “small-scale,” as demonstrated by the breadth of the volume’s subjects, can feel bewildering. Ultimately, though, this variability reflects the lack of a unified taxonomy for ancient attitudes towards the small-scale, in contradistinction to the clearly conceived “colossal.” In a similar vein, the considerable array of stylistic choices employed by authors regarding issues like translation, transliteration, and naming conventions mirrors the heterogeneity of small-scale sculpture in antiquity itself. In the remainder of this review, I will highlight some of the volume’s interventions, small and large, and offer a few suggestions for the future directions of research they intimate.
In the first chapter, Colzani addresses such definitional conundra of the topic while overviewing recent scholarly lenses through which it has been approached, such as miniaturization theory and portability. Discussions of Greek and Latin’s diminutive suffixes, small-scale sculpture’s diffuse settings, and the ranging affective potentials therein effectively demonstrate the subject’s rich disparateness at the lexical, material, and functional levels. Colzani thus sets the stage effectively for the volume’s ensuing variety of approaches. Michael Squire’s contribution stands apart in its expansive consideration of scale’s tensions and subtleties not only regarding sculpture but also in painted and glyptic formats wrought both visually and verbally. By translating his 2016 essay “Sémantique de l’échelle dans l’art et la poésie hellénistiques” into English and updating his extensive bibliography, Squire renders available to an anglophone audience his analysis of the at-times playful, at-times agonistic transmedial discourse of scale. His Fig. 11b, a cast of a Tabula Iliaca in the palm of his hand, critically provides an illustration of scale’s relationality (56).
Évelyne Prioux’s contribution assembles the dominant topoi used to describe miniatures in ancient criticism while probing why they might have been particularly apt to invoke. I found her mention of Cicero’s, Galen’s, and Aelian’s disdain for the diminutive to be an important reminder that prejudice against the small-scale long predated Giorgio Vasari’s elevation of sculpture, painting, and architecture over what came to be termed Kleinkunst (86–87). It brought to mind another passage in which Galen marvels at the remarkable carving of an intaglio whose device is only legible with the keenest of eyesight and the aid of a bright light.[2] That authors could both disparage and esteem small-scale works of art reminds us of the complexity of ancient attitudes towards a topic that could be dismissed as frivolous but, as this volume’s chapters collectively demonstrate, shaped both the material output and literary theorization of art in impactful ways.
In an examination of peplophoroi statuettes from Selinunte whose thoroughness reflects the intimate knowledge of a site whose excavations he has overseen for nearly a decade, Clemente Marconi highlights the need both to attend to small-scale marble sculptures and to nuance leading narratives about such works’ agency (101). The call to refocus energy on specifically stone may feel surprising given the material’s grip on the study of Classical sculpture writ large, but as Marconi notes, within the recent turn towards the tiny, marble miniatures have been somewhat overlooked at the expense of terracotta and bronze figurines. His analyses model how the painstaking reassessment of past claims and meticulous care applied across multiple types of evidence—stylistic, technical, contextual—can result in compelling conclusions even in the face of lacunae in the archaeological record. This method is exemplified, for instance, in his attribution of two statuettes to the same dedication (108), an excellent critical historiography of the excavations (110–111), and a technical assessment that acknowledges the limitations of the sample size and brings in numerous comparanda to reach the most equitable conclusion (114–115). I found the interpretive suggestion that the agency of a marble statuette, with metal attachments that might have impeded portability, could have taken on a different texture than the agency of clearly portable terracotta and bronze figurines to be quite compelling (117–120). On a smaller note, I appreciated the succinct differentiation between Paros 1 and Paros 2 marble types for the reader less versed in the Cyclades’ geologic particulars (112).
Tobias Wild’s study of mold-made bronzes from Ptolemaic Egypt was another highlight. Scholarship reflective of deep expertise, at times inaccessible to broader audiences given its specialized nature, that opens up larger disciplinary stakes is especially admirable. Wild’s chapter is exemplary in making transparent why such seemingly impenetrable research matters. After recapping the subject’s Forschungsgeschichte, Wild hooks the reader by flagging the need to reexamine this corpus outside the shadow of entrenched assumptions. Grasping the sometimes-convoluted technicalities of bronze-casting that Wild details proves worthwhile when the ultimate intervention has wider implications for Hellenistic sculpture. In “breaking [small-scale bronzes] free from their alleged dependency on large-scale sculpture to center issues of their image making on their own terms,” Wild validates the study of the corpus as inherently valuable in and of itself (128). His conclusion that these sculptures were made from assemblages of molds that were creatively combined and thoughtfully reworked at the wax model stage testifies to the fruitful role of malleability in making and shows that combinatory processes were not mere mechanical repetition but means to render “ad hoc images and iconographies” serving the specific circumstances of each act of creation (148).
In his chapter on small-scale equestrian portraits of Alexander the Great, Ralf van den Hoff similarly shines. By identifying his methodological model in Andrew Stewart, who “does not take Lysippus’ lost statue(s) of Alexander as the analytic target…,” van den Hoff makes the case that it is far more rewarding to study extant artifacts for their own sakes than to contort them to serve Quellenforschung (176). By revealing how particular iconographic convergences shaped the small-scale Alexanders and indicating how the legendary leader transformed into a “dehistoricized exemplum virtutis” in the Roman imagination (188), van den Hoff’s chapter not only connects productively to Stewart’s study of Alexander’s images but also to the position that champions evaluating ancient evidence within the context of its own temporal moment rather than harnessing it to chase chimeras.[3]
Anna Anguissola sets up her analysis of Pliny the Elder’s treatment of small-scale sculptures by offering his attitudes towards tiny paintings as a foil. Observing the correspondence between small dimensions and unassuming, even sordid, subject matter, Anguissola’s brief discussion on painting provides a fascinating wrinkle to the discourse on the largely maligned reception of the “minor arts” within the history of art history (200–202). Like Prioux’s aforementioned observation, this is appreciated testimony to how rarely attitudes are clearcut, even as scholars have rightly endeavored to reelevate works implicitly denigrated by the neologism Kleinkunst.[4]
A few adjustments would have made the volume even more valuable overall. As it stands, the structure divides contributions between English and Italian. The volume’s editors have left the reader to tease out connections among chapters to generate larger takeaways (much akin to the productive combinatory bronze-casting process Wild describes). Yet an alternative structure that grouped together chapters focused on literary and poetic treatments of small-scale sculpture (Squire, Prioux, Anguissola, Bonadeo) into a distinct section would have facilitated exchange across these contributions. The regrettable number of typographic errors encountered does not reflect the publishing standard typically expected of De Gruyter.[5] Improved grayscale figures or color plates would have provided illustrations of a quality commensurate of the volume’s intellectual contributions. Lastly, finding the dimensions for the objects illustrated in the figures was as taxing as reading the microscopic text on the Tabulae Iliacae discussed by Squire. Standardized formatting across the volume’s captions would have eliminated the need to scrutinize body text, footnotes, captions, and appendix to locate information inherently critical to a book centered on scale.
This stimulating volume succeeds both in advancing considerations of the small-scale in premodern material culture studies and in laying the groundwork for future avenues of inquiry. Having treated small-scale sculptures in stone, bronze, and literature, the volume invites new research directly addressing aspects of the small-scale’s heterogeneity to which Colzani tantalizingly alludes. I look forward to further work on, for instance, diminutive sculptures in amber, coral, ivory, semiprecious stones, and rock crystal, research that will build on the work of scholars like Faya Causey, Valentina Conticelli, Patrick R. Crowley, Elisabetta Gagetti, and Fabrizio Paolucci. Colzani astutely observes the wide-ranging geographic investment in the small-scale (4, n. 18). I therefore would like to point to a directive offered by a scholar of the ancient Andes as a concluding suggestion. In Scale and the Incas, Andrew James Hamilton eloquently raised awareness to the ways in which modern art history and photographic practices can occlude meaningful comparisons between objects (underscoring that scale is definitionally relational) and showed why art historians should seek to apprehend the scales of ancient cultures emically.[6] How can we recover scale as understood emically in the ancient Mediterranean? In giving measurements in Greek half feet as well as the more conventional (and intelligible) modern unit of centimeters, Marconi gestures to a potential way forward. Integrating culturally specific and semantically-rich units of measurement that mattered to the Greeks and Romans—from the stadion, capturing the distance Herakles could run in a single breath, to the iugerum, the amount of land a pair of oxen could plough in a day— might be an exciting next step to build on the impact of this volume.
Authors and titles
- Giovanni Colzani, Small-Scale Sculpture in Greek and Roman Society: A Reassessment.
- Michael Squire, Sizing up Art: The Intermedial Semantics of Scale in the Hellenistic and Roman Worlds.
- Évelyne Prioux, Small Is Beautiful: The Aesthetic Approach to Small-Scale Sculptures in Ancient Criticism.
- Olga Palagia, Small-scale Cult Statues of the Sixth Century BC.
- Clemente Marconi, Small Statements of Prestige: On a Group of Early Classical Marble Statuettes from Selinunte.
- Tobias Wild, From Mold to Masterpiece: Producing Small-Scale Hellenistic Ruler Bronzes in Ptolemaic Egypt.
- Elena Calandra, A Miniature Myth: About Some Clay Figurines of the Niobids.
- Ralf von den Hoff, Alexander Riders: Small-Scale Portraits of Alexander the Great on Horseback.
- Anna Anguissola, Parvitatis ut miraculum: Pliny the Elder and Nature’s Sense of Scale.
- Alessia Bonadeo, Scripta effigies: un esempio di interazione testo-immagine in Marziale e in Stazio.
- Eugenio Polito, Una statua di Eracle al Museo Nazionale Romano: fra scultura ideale e ritratto.
- Maria Elisa Micheli, Lavorare in scala: derivazioni e metamorfosi dell’Atena Parthenos.
- Fabrizio Slavazzi, Il mito nell’arredo di lusso. Modalità di adattamento di soggetti a tutto tondo nei monopodi marmorei romani.
Notes
[1] This interest extends beyond antiquity; see, for instance, Ivan Drpić’s study on the agency of enkolpia, wearable reliquaries, crosses, and medallions, during the medieval Roman empire. See Drpić, I. “The Enkolpion: Object, Agency, Self,” Gesta 57:2 (2018): 197–224.
[2] Galen, On the Usefulness of the Parts of the Body 2, 17. 1 (4.361–2 K.).
[3] Scholars working with both the literary and material evidence of classical antiquity have championed this position. See, for instance, Sorcha Carey’s call to cease using Pliny the Elder to access lost Greek textual sources and Miranda Marvin’s appeal to transcend Kopienkritik and glean profitably from Roman ideal sculpture insights about contemporary attitudes towards taste, value, and the nature of creativity itself. See Carey, Pliny’s catalogue of culture: art and empire (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003); Marvin, The language of the muses: the dialogue between Roman and Greek sculpture (Los Angeles: J. Paul Getty Museum, 2008).
[4] As advocated by Kenneth Lapatin in his treatment of the sumptuous arts of the ancient Mediterranean. See Lapatin, Luxus: the sumptuous arts of Greece and Rome (Los Angeles: J. Paul Getty Museum, 2015).
[5] The most unfortunate errors are those in the index; for instance, the incorrect spelling “Mymercides,” which occurs as a typo on pp. 10 and 44, is indexed, leaving all instances of the correctly spelled “Myrmecides” unindexed. Typographic errors are not limited to transliterations from the Greek but also occur in English (e.g. p. 23, “Koortbojan”), German (e.g. p. 24, “Korintishcen”), and Italian (e.g. p. 273, “E’ venuta”).
[6] Hamilton, Scale and the Incas (Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 2018).