For the first half of the twentieth century, Roman art history was dominated by questions of typology, chronology, and iconography as scholars attempted to articulate what was “Roman” about Roman art. The field has since embraced social-historical analyses, and contextual approaches remain a dominate trend. The variety of methodologies and the vast quantity and range of objects included in the category of Roman art have resulted in an extraordinarily diverse body of scholarship, the key themes of which have been summarized in The Art Bulletin state-of-the-field essays by Brunhilde Ridgway on ancient art and Natalie Kampen on Roman art (Brunhilde Sismondo Ridgway, “The State of Research on Ancient Art,” The Art Bulletin 68, no. 1 [March 1986]: 7–23; and Natalie Boymel Kampen, “On Writing Histories of Roman Art,” The Art Bulletin 85, no. 2 [June 2003]: 371–86). In an innovative twist, Peter Stewart embeds a summary of social-historical scholarship into his book on the functions and reception of Roman art. The Social History of Roman Art consists of an introduction, five chapters, and a brief bibliographical essay. Each chapter focuses on a theme that has received much scholarly attention: artists and workshops, domestic and funerary art, portraiture, political and religious art, and art produced in the provinces. Articulating the assumptions underpinning traditional approaches to the material, Stewart uses case studies to illustrate the importance of social context.

Chapter 1, “Who Made Roman Art?” discusses the ethnic and social identities of artists, workshop organization, and the relative input of artists and customers into the final forms of artworks. Few Roman objects are signed by their artists. Scholars, however, have traditionally assumed most artworks in Roman Italy were created by Greek craftsmen, primarily on the basis of two factors: the heavy reliance of Roman art on Greek forms and the preponderance of Greek names for artists in ancient literature and on monuments. This assumption is problematic because, as Stewart points out, craft traditions were passed down in extended families that included freedmen and slaves and were learned through apprenticeships. Furthermore, Greek names may have been given to workshop slaves to emphasize the quality of the work rather than the ethnicity of the individual. Stewart addresses a recurring concern of the book—social status—in his discussion of the organization of artistic workshops. He describes the prominence of freedmen and slaves in workshops and notes that the emphasis on occupations in their funerary monuments stands in stark contrast to the relatively low social status ascribed to craftsmen in historical sources.

Chapter 2, “Identity and Status,” considers personal identity and social status in domestic and funerary art, the latter of which includes funerary reliefs and sarcophagi. Stewart notes that a gulf existed between legally recognized social status and the fluid, lived identity of a person; he suggests this disjuncture drove the use of art to display perceived and desired social statuses. Heavily influenced by Andrew Wallace-Hadrill’s research into how domestic wall paintings were used as markers of social status (Andrew Wallace-Hadrill, Houses and Society in Pompeii and Herculaneum, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1994), Stewart rightly rejects the idea that domestic decor was governed by rigid intellectual programs, but he bypasses an entire body of sophisticated literature on decorative displays, from Bettina Bergmann’s “Art and Nature in the Villa at Oplontis,” which discusses the spatial assimilation of real and painted gardens in the Villa at Oplontis (Bettina Bergmann, “Art and Nature in the Villa at Oplontis,” in Pompeian Brothels, Pompeii’s Ancient History, Mirrors and Mysteries, Art and Nature at Oplontis, and the Herculaneum ‘Basilica,’ Journal of Roman Archaeology, supplement 47, Portsmouth, RI (2002): 87–120), to Elizabeth Bartman’s essay in Roman Art in the Private Sphere, which proposes that sculptural collections like the one at the Villa of the Papyri were driven by a number of factors that went beyond strictly thematic or iconographic ones (Elizabeth Bartman, “Sculptural Collection and Display in the Private Realm,” in Roman Art in the Private Sphere: New Perspectives on the Architecture and Décor of the Domus, Villa, and Insula, Elaine K. Gazda, ed., Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1991, 71–88).

Stewart astutely uses the House of the Vettii to illustrate how assumptions about the identity of owners have turned into “facts” that lend a moral tint to the scholarly literature. In this house, seals with the names of Aulus Vettius Restitutus and Aulus Vettius Conviva were found in the atrium; these seals led to the assumption that the house was jointly owned by freedmen brothers, hypotheses about ownership and familial relationships that cannot be definitely proven. Furthermore, the presumed nouveau-riche tendencies of freedmen are often read into the wall paintings as if the Vettii were historical counterparts of Trimalchio, Petronius’s fictional freedman with money but no taste. Turning to funerary art, Stewart argues that the generic label of “freedman art” for the funerary reliefs that adorned the exterior of tombs in the first centuries BCE and CE negates the mixed legal statuses held by those commemorated in the reliefs. At the same time, assumptions about freedmen art color Stewart’s own discussion of the gladiatorial games and the tribunal scene painted on the Pompeian tomb of Gaius Vestorius Priscus, a freeborn man who died while serving as aedile. Stewart notes that similar imagery was used for tombs of freedmen augustales, civic benefactors appointed to serve as imperial priests, as well as for the fictive tomb of Trimalchio. Stewart explains the shared iconography by suggesting that Vestorius Priscus was a social climber, and so, like freedmen, he appropriated aristocratic imagery to assert a higher status. Might the gladiatorial and tribunal scenes, however, simply be imagery considered appropriate for tombs of civic benefactors, regardless of the deceased’s legal social status or economic background, similar to the shared domestic imagery of Greek mythology?

Chapter 3, “Portraits in Society,” focuses on the function and typology of portraits, and Stewart describes how recent scholarship has challenged the erroneous assumption that honorific portraits were commissioned by the people they represented. Rather, they usually were commissioned in honor of a benefactor by a community, a family, or dependents; the portrait stood as a public pronouncement of this relationship. Two primary concerns of portrait studies have been identification and dating, both of which can be difficult to ascertain. Stewart cautions against a linear reading of typologies, pointing out that older portrait types continued to be used after newer ones appear. He also warns against reading the biases of historical sources into the details of a portrait; Nero, for instance, would not be presented in a negative light by communities relying on his benefactions. Stewart rightly emphasizes the necessity of a multidisciplinary approach to portraiture that considers portrait heads, which are the traditional focus of art-historical studies, in combination with bodies, costumes, gestures, accompanying inscriptions, and original contexts. He also advocates balancing the typological approach with one primarily informed by texts, thus shifting attention to broader patterns of display.

The title of chapter 4, “The Power of Images,” is a nod to Paul Zanker’s seminal work, The Power of Images in the Age of Augustus (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1988). The bulk of this chapter addresses political imagery, focusing on its patronage, social functions, and accessibility to a plurality of viewers. Like the honorific statues discussed in chapter 3, victory and honorific monuments celebrating imperial virtues and deeds were typically dedicated to the emperor by a community; the emperor was usually not the patron. As these monuments were communal gifts celebrating the emperor rather than monuments mandated by a central authority, the application of the twentieth-century term “propaganda” to Roman monuments detrimentally colors our understanding of them. Stewart notes that many such monuments provide “the senate’s commentary on the emperor” (116), a fact that should impact scholarly analyses, as should the issue of their reception in antiquity. Stewart advocates balancing the omniscient scholarly viewpoint with an awareness of how political imagery may have been perceived and encountered by individuals from any number of backgrounds.

After discussing religious art, chapter 4 ends with an illuminating comparison of the form, function, and affecting power of political and religious imagery. Stewart convincingly argues that scholarship has drawn a distinction between political and religious imagery that Romans would not. By encouraging interactions with the ruler or deity and providing tangible ways to do so, political and religious art not only reaffirmed ideas of social and power hierarchies but also influenced the actions and minds of viewers.

Throughout the book, Stewart references the Greek underpinnings of Roman imagery, and chapter 5, “Art of the Empire,” directly addresses the topic as part of a larger discussion of artistic traditions in the provinces. Many artworks produced in Roman workshops were Greek-style statues. Stewart synthesizes the trends in English-language scholarship on these statues, which has moved away from dismissing them as second-rate copies of lost masterpieces, primarily useful for their ability to shed light on formal elements of the presumed Greek originals, to considering the statues in their local and Roman contexts. These Greek-style statues speak to the totality with which Roman art assimilated the Greek tradition (which simultaneously was assimilating the Roman tradition), to the point that the bulk of Roman art stands in conflict with the virtues of originality, progressive development, and creative inventiveness privileged in art-historical studies.

The emphasis in Roman scholarship on originality and the Greco-Roman tradition has also relegated the art of other provinces, like Egypt and Britain, to the shadows. Stewart advocates focusing on the immediate context of art produced in the provinces and points out that imagery does not always travel from the center to the periphery. New styles, whether found in the provinces or introduced during later time periods, indicate different aesthetic tastes, expectations, purposes, and modes of viewing and should be judged on their own terms, not as failures to meet earlier standards or standards in other parts of the empire.

Stewart provides a provocative and engaging discussion of many recent developments in Roman art, astutely using texts and documents to illuminate the social context of objects. Because he is understandably selective with which scholarship he engages, the book is best read as “a critical commentary on and complement to other studies” (4) rather than a definitive statement on any particular theme. Accessible to advanced students and scholars in related fields, The Social History of Roman Art challenges many long-held assumptions and inspires the reader to consider new avenues of inquiry.