Forty years ago, when I graduated from college, I applied for a year’s traveling fellowship to take me around the Mediterranean to study the reuse of ancient materials in medieval buildings. The committee rejected my application, telling me (off the record) that it was a “stupid” topic. Little did I know that a few years earlier, the German scholar Arnold Esch had begun a lifetime’s career publishing on that very subject (beginning with “Spolien. Zur Wiederverwendung antiker Baustücke und Skulpturen im mittelalterlichen Italien,” Archiv für Kulturgeschichte, 51 (1969): 1–64), and forty years later “spoliology” has developed into a burgeoning subdiscipline. Developed from a colloquium held in December 2006 at the Sterling and Francine Clark Art Institute in Williamstown, MA, this stimulating volume on the topic of reuse and appropriation in Western and Indian art from antiquity to postmodernism presents the work of a dozen scholars, six of whom spoke at the colloquium augmented by another six who did not. One of the organizers, Richard Brilliant, had addressed different types of spolia in his seminal 1982 article, “I piedistalli del giardino di Boboli: spolia in se, spolia in re” (Prospettiva 31 (1982): 2–17); the other, Dale Kinney, had written extensively on spolia in medieval art.

Kinney’s introduction contrasts actual spoliation (the forcible transfer of ownership, as in the “spoils” of war) with simple reuse (which she considers transformative but ultimately diminishing) and appropriation (which she deems an essentially neutral act). Her discussion and the following essays raise (but often do not answer) many subtle questions about different kinds of reuse in the visual arts as well as in other human activities, ranging from the differences between museum collecting and tourist souvenirs to quotation and plagiarism, to name a few of the topics mentioned. The essays are generally arranged chronologically, beginning with the ancient world and continuing through medieval reuse to modern and postmodern art and architecture, with two excurses to India.

Many of the essays point out in different ways that the reuse of materials may have numerous meanings. Esch notes in the first essay that the study of reuse is a subject that by definition lies between disciplines. For the archaeologist, for example, a spolium is a piece removed from antiquity, while, for the art historian, the same piece was received from antiquity. The archaeologist wants to bring the spolium back to its original home, while the art historian wants to investigate how the piece was received (14). Like several of the essays, it shows how nuanced the idea of reuse can be, depending on whom is looking at it for what purpose. The second essay, by Paolo Liverani, on reading the meaning of spolia in antiquity and in contemporary perception, reevaluates H. P. L’Orange’s 1939 interpretation of the reuse of older materials on the Arch of Constantine (Die spätantike Bildschmuck des Konstantinsbogens, Berlin: W. de Gruyter, 1939). While twentieth- (or twenty-first-) century viewers might consider the Arch an example of the conscious appropriation of the past, Liverani shows that Constantine’s contemporaries may not have seen it in that light. He expands Brilliant’s binary division of spolia in se (material; indexical) and spolia in re (virtual; metaphoric) to a tripartite division with the addition of spolia in me (conventional; symbolic).

Hugo Brandenburg continues the discussion on the use of older elements in the architecture of fourth- and fifth-century Rome. He argues that recent research shows that many reused elements are not technically spolia (that is, materials purposely removed from earlier buildings) but the result of accidental accumulations of materials in the stoneyards of Rome. Therefore the mixing of old and new materials does not necessarily have the kind of ideological significance so dear to art historians. This view is expanded by Michael Greenhalgh, who has recently published a fascinating book (Marble Past: Monumental Present: Building with Antiquities in the Mediaeval Mediterranean, Leiden: Brill, 2008) on the use of marble in medieval architecture, particularly in the Mediterranean lands. His chapter, “Spolia: A Definition in Ruins,” takes a very practical approach to the reuse of materials, particularly marbles, in medieval architecture. He sees much less meaning and much more economics at work in the reuse of colored stones. According to him, there is little evidence for hidden meanings in the reemployment of attractive materials. In contrast to modern times in which materials are cheap and labor is expensive, in earlier times materials were expensive and the labor to refashion them was cheap.

Kinney’s “Ancient Gems in the Middle Ages: Riches and Ready-mades” is the only essay in the book to deal specifically with the portable arts rather than architecture. Starting with a discussion of Herimann’s Cross, an eleventh-century bronze crucifix that reuses an antique lapis lazuli female head for Christ’s head, Kinney shows how earlier scholars made various assumptions about the head and its provenance to support one reading of the object or another. For example, some have hypothesized that the antique gem was a family heirloom, part of the trousseau of the Byzantine princess Theophanu, whose grandson was Herimann, the patron of the cross. But Kinney notes that there is no evidence to support such an interpretation, as attractive as it might be. The gem could have been lost in antiquity and found in a barnyard. Kinney expands her discussion of spolia to include gifts, and she follows Anthony Cutler’s distinction between use and reuse, whereby use indicates a continuation of the same function, albeit in another context, and reuse indicates a new context or function.

The Roman Empire, source of much of the spolia discussed in this volume, encircled the Mediterranean, at least half of which came under the control of Islam in the Middle Ages. Apart from Greenhalgh’s essay, which mentions Islam in passing, only Finbarr Barry Flood’s essay deals specifically with Muslim monuments. His introduction briefly mentions recycling of Christian or Byzantine monuments in Islamic architecture—one need think only of the capitals and columns of early mosques in Jerusalem, Damascus, Cordoba, Kairouan, or Cairo, let alone the monumental columns supporting the great sixteenth-century Ottoman mosques of Istanbul—but focuses on the congregational mosque (“Qutb Mosque”) of Delhi in India, which is regularly cited as the prime example of the appropriation of Hindu temple spoils by Muslim builders. Through a mostly careful and nuanced reading of the mosque’s “foundation” inscription, Flood deftly demonstrates that the situation is more complex. Not only did the Muslim founder of the mosque appropriate materials from earlier buildings like the founders of many early mosques, but later Muslim rulers themselves appropriated the mosque for their own purposes and meanings, in effect making the Qutb Mosque itself another spolium. Flood sensitively carries his analysis through to modern times, as European colonial rulers continued the process of appropriation to make the building represent other concepts. Considering the enormity of the subject of spolia in Islam and in India, it is somewhat disappointing that Mrinalini Rajagopalan also focuses on this same building in her chapter on the enduring contestations over the Qutb complex in modern India. Like the Dome of the Rock or the Taj Mahal, equally iconic “Islamic” buildings that modern political developments have put in radically new contexts, the Qutb Mosque and its meanings are constantly being reinvented.

Michael Koortbojian’s chapter focuses on the use of spolia and imitation spolia in three buildings in Renaissance Rome and demonstrates how each case of reuse is subtly different. Brilliant’s wide-ranging chapter returns to the Arch of Constantine in a discussion of authenticity and alienation. From him we learn not only that Colbert, minister to Louis XIV, planned (but was not able) to move the Maison Carrée at Nîmes to the park at Versailles, but similar trophies adorn the Cloisters and the Temple of Dendur in New York, as well as the National Museum of Catalan Art in Barcelona.

Annabel Wharton’s discussion of Chicago’s Tribune Tower hardly seems a case of spolia: the building is decorated with little bits of important buildings and significant places from around the United States and the world, ranging from a stone from the ancient city of Petra in Jordan to a fragment from the World Trade Center. These insignificant mementos seem more like a curious game (collect one from every state) or form of souvenir than “spolia as despoliation,” as implied by her subtitle. Hans-Rudolf Meier’s more practical essay deals with spolia in contemporary (European) architecture and the different ways in which architects have integrated older elements into new buildings, or older buildings into new spaces.

Finally, Donald Kuspit’s essay, “Some Thoughts About the Significance of Postmodern Appropriation Art,” is a dense and unillustrated meditation on appropriation in the work of a half-dozen artists ranging from Andy Warhol to Cindy Sherman. The volume concludes with a brief and somewhat disappointing epilogue by Brilliant that fails to synthetize many of the ideas raised in the volume. Indeed, a little research reveals which authors actually participated in the colloquium; only a few of the additional essays enhance the volume, which, despite the editors’ best efforts, remains uneven.

The essays assume not only familiarity with earlier arguments (e.g., L’Orange’s interpretation of the Arch of Constantine) but also with many of the objects and buildings discussed but not illustrated. A novice reader will find parts of the book tough going, particularly chapters 2, 3, 4, and 12, all of which are unillustrated. Chapters 2 and 4 do point the reader to the two illustrations in chapter 8 of the Arch of Constantine’s reliefs, which, although useful, are not enough for someone who does not keep all the reliefs in her or his head. The frontispiece, Robert Rauschenberg’s Erased de Kooning Drawing of 1953, would have been more effective if it had been reproduced in a way that it could be seen. Even though one of the authors discussed this drawing, the index is bizarre and contains no references to “de Kooning” or “Rauschenberg,” yet includes references to “Census of Antique Works of Art and Architecture Known in the Renaissance” and “phatic function.” One wonders to whom the index (and book) is addressed. Many years ago the eminent historian of Islamic architecture K. A. C. Creswell wrote, “I hold that the space at the top of every page should be employed not, as is so frequently the case, to tell the reader the name of the book he is reading, which he presumably knows, but to tell him what the page in question is about” (K. A. C. Creswell, Early Muslim Architecture, Vol. 1, 2nd ed., Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1969, xxxv). While the headlines on the right-hand pages of this book give the titles of the chapter, it would have been more useful if the headlines on the left-hand pages gave the name of the chapter’s author rather than the name of the book. In the end, this book inspired me to think again about reuse, and regret that I had not gotten that traveling scholarship.