The Afterlife of Greek and Roman Sculpture: Late Antique Responses and Practices by Troels Myrup Kristensen Lea Stirling

BOOK REVIEWS/COMPTES RENDUS 199 Ragusa (ch. 47) includes finds from sites discussed elsewhere in the volume, especially prehistoric material, a collection from Camarina, material from indigenous sites of the archaic and classical period (including Monte Casasia and Rito), finds from Hellenistic sites including Scornavacche, and late Roman sites including Caucana. The author discusses notable acquisitions to archaeological museums in Sicily (ch. 48), among them field notebooks from P. Orsi’s excavations, and the B. Pace collection of material (ch. 49). The advent of the antiquarium at Camarina is discussed in chapter 50, and the section is capped off with a discussion of cultural heritage protection at Camarina (ch. 51). The final section focuses on the history of archaeology at the site, including the work of Paolo Orsi (ch. 52, 54) and Konrat Ziegler (ch. 53). P. Pelagatti is the institutional memory for the site, and her updates, appendices, and additional notes transform the book from a collection of articles to a thorough narrative of the archaeology and the history of archaeology of an important Greek city. Collectively, the contributions constitute a comprehensive history of investigation. It is a masterful presentation from a scholar with unparalleled understanding of the site and territory. This is a career capstone as much as a retrospective and it will be an essential reference book on the territory of Camarina for a long time to come. McMaster University Spencer Pope The Afterlife of Greek and Roman Sculpture: Late Antique Responses and Practices. Edited by Troels Myrup Kristensen and Lea Stirling. Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press. 2016. Pp. 424. As any ancient art historian who has taken their spouse or parent to a museum knows, one of the things that makes them different from us is their attention to the fact that all the classical statuary is broken. We, on the other hand, have been conditioned to look right past the missing limbs and heads, the shattered noses and genitals, and to focus instead on the carving, the iconography, the date. These priorities reflect our field’s ongoing fixation with the moment of an artwork’s creation—the skill of the artist, the intent of the patron, etc. The volume under review asks us to consider instead what happened to classical statuary centuries after its creation; and it puts damage—and the “social practices and natural processes” (5) that caused it—squarely in the center of our field of vision. The emphasis on harm and loss is also a striking departure from the sanguinity that pervades the recent studies that do consider “afterlives” of classical material. Focusing on spolia—the visible reuse of old materials in new settings—these works are often characterized by an optimism that is revealed by the number of words beginning with the prefix “re-” (e.g., renovation, renewal, reinvention, reimagination) in their titles. Kristensen and Stirling and their team (assembled twice for seminars in history and classical studies at Aarhus University, in 2008 and 2011) do not advocate a return to the dreary paradigm of decline, fall, and darkness; rather, their volume demonstrates (implicitly) how poorly we are served by the decline vs. transformation binary by exploring (explicitly) how much more complex the evidence is. This can be apprehended quickly from figure 3 of the introduction, where an illuminating set of diagrams shows the relative frequency with which classical statuary was reused (as statuary or as building material), 200 PHOENIX recarved, mutilated, destroyed, ritually deposited, or burned for lime, in each century between the third and the sixth. The first section, “Practices of Deposition and Reuse,” offers methodological critiques of several points of conventional wisdom. Ben Croxford (Chapter One: “Metal Sculpture from Roman Britain: Scraps but Not Always Scrap”) cites the disproportionate survival of bronze heads and fingers in Roman Britain as evidence that apparently not everyone saw defunct statuary as mere scrap. Suggesting that “the same statue and the same action could have been treated and viewed differently even within the group carrying out the fragmentation” (45), this chapter underscores individual agency in place of religious or political ideology, a theme that comes up repeatedly throughout the volume. In Chapter Two (“Sculptural Deposition and Lime Kilns at Roman...

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