Few statues are more familiar to students of Greek art than the korai from the Athenian Acropolis. From this important study of the korai and other Acropolis votive statues of the sixth and fifth centuries B.C., we learn that we do not know them as well as we thought. Catherine M. Keesling takes a rigorously contextual approach to the Acropolis dedications, considering not only the statues themselves but also their inscribed bases and evidence for bronze dedications on the Acropolis, now lost, in an attempt to “rebuild on paper what the Persian invaders destroyed” (xiv). In the process she reaches some surprising conclusions, among them that the korai represent not generic female votaries, as has so often been assumed, but rather the goddess Athena herself, and that the fifth-century portrait statues dedicated on the Acropolis were probably not for the most part generals and other famous subjects, but rather victors in Panhellenic athletic contests and family members of the dedicators. Some of these conclusions may prove controversial, but no one should find fault with her exhaustive scrutiny of the archaeological, epigraphical, and prosopographical material, or her general conclusion: that the statues dedicated on the Acropolis have to be understood primarily as evidence for the practice of Greek votive religion rather than as reflections of the political and social conditions of ancient Athens. This has serious implications for the study of Greek sculpture, for it calls into question the importance of the stylistic approaches normally used to classify and interpret Archaic and Classical sculpture dedicated in sanctuaries.

In part 1, Keesling examines the context of the votive statues, first by exploring their function as anathemata—gifts for the gods—and the occasions that prompted their dedication. From her study of inscribed statue bases from the Acropolis, she concludes that most of the statues were dedicated in fulfillment of vows, occasions that were not necessarily connected to or reflective of an elevated social or economic status of the dedicator. In fact, dedicators sometimes fulfilled vows made not by themselves but by relatives from whom they had apparently inherited the obligation. The statues therefore might represent years of a family’s accumulated financial obligation, supporting the author’s view that the statues were not merely “spontaneous expressions of wealth and status” (200). But whom do the votive statues represent? The inscribed bases do not help us, since they name only the dedicator and not the statue, a phenomenon that Keesling calls “disjunctive representation.” Disjunctive representation perplexes modern viewers, who want labels identifying their statues. But for the dedicator the inscribed base served a different function, making the dedication a mnema or a memorial of the giver, addressed to the visitors to the sanctuary. Even the layout of the inscriptions, with a strong tendency to place the name of the dedicator first, points to the primacy of this function for the bases.

The usual presence of the dedicator’s name and the absence of an identifying label for the statue have led modern scholars to privilege the function of the statues as mnemata over their function as anathemata, with the result that most recent scholarship has concentrated on the identities of the dedicators and their motives for the public display of their names. This emphasis upon the dedicators has in turn prompted some scholars to try to correlate patterns of dedication on the Acropolis to major historical events, in particular the rule of the Peisistratid family in the third quarter of the sixth century and the democratic reforms of Kleisthenes in 508/07. The perceived “gap” in Acropolis dedications in the period of the Peisistratid tyranny has often been interpreted as the result of restrictions placed on access to the Acropolis, either because the Peisistratid family resided there or because they discouraged public display in the form of dedications by their aristocratic competitors. At the same time, a “bulge” in Acropolis dedications between ca. 510 and ca. 480, including a large number of dedications supposedly by craftsmen and other nonaristocrats, has been correlated with the Kleisthenic reforms. But Keesling concludes that there is no archaeological evidence for a Peisistratid residence on the Acropolis or for their restriction of dedications there. And only a handful of post-Kleisthenic dedications can be attributed with certainty to craftsmen or other nonaristocrats. Thus “neither the archaeology of tyranny nor the archaeology of democracy adequately explains the statue dedications on the Athenian Acropolis” (37).

In part 2, Keesling returns to the problem of identifying votive statues, in particular the korai, by asking what their inscriptions, votive context, and iconography tell us. It has long been acknowledged that the Akropolis korai cannot represent their dedicators, since all the Akropolis bases that certainly or probably held korai were dedicated by men. Neither, Keesling argues, do they represent priestesses or other sacerdotal personnel, since such honorific statues appear only in the fourth century, when they were explicitly identified by inscribed label. The widely held view that they represent generic votaries stems from their lack of identifying features and their coexistence with easily identifiable bronzes of the so-called Athena Promachos type. But Keesling calls this interpretation of the korai “largely a modern construct lacking positive support from historical and epigraphical sources” (98–99). On the contrary, she argues, it is not the iconography of the statues that gives them meaning, but rather the context in which they were viewed. The multivalent kore type could be used in funerary contexts to represent the deceased, but in the context of the Acropolis the kore was only one of many sculptural types used to represent Athena. At the same time, she argues that there is nothing in the iconography of the korai, either in their dress or in the generic repertoire of objects they originally held, that is incompatible with their interpretation as Athena. The gesture of the extended forearm, usually interpreted as the gesture of a votary signifying devotion or female subservience, was just as characteristic of cult statues representing gods.

In part 3 Keesling investigates the nature of fifth-century portraits on the Acropolis, a difficult proposition since no examples survive. But using the evidence of the inscribed statue bases, she identifies two categories of portrait statues dedicated there. The first consists of votive statues representing victors in athletic contests set up by the victors themselves. They indicate that self-representation in this period is to be seen in religious rather than in political terms. The second category consists of statues of fathers dedicated by their sons, which can be identified as portraits because they were reused and reinscribed in the Roman period as honorific portraits of Romans. These works should be understood as heretofore unrecognized precursors of the familial commemorative statues well-documented on the Acropolis in the fourth century. These fifth-century statues are important evidence for the origins of Greek portraiture, since they indicate that the idea of commensurability between statue and subject existed considerably earlier than the invention of physiognomic portraiture, that is, portraiture in which likeness to the subject was paramount. As these are the only two categories of portraiture on the Acropolis attested by surviving statue bases, they call into question the usefulness of Kopienforschung, in which lost Greek originals are sought among surviving Roman copies, as a method of reconstructing the lost portraits of the Acropolis.

In addition to the main arguments presented here, Keesling’s study is densely packed with pertinent observations on such subjects as the implications of the inscribed statue bases for literacy, the design of the statue bases and the original disposition of the votives on the Acropolis, the prosopography of the Acropolis dedicators, the usefulness of Pausanias as a source for the dedications on the Acropolis, and the relevance of dedications in other major sanctuaries such as Samian Heraion, the sanctuary of Apollo at Didyma, and the Ptoön in Boiotia. The book also includes useful appendices listing the votives on the Acropolis mentioned by Pausanias, sculptors’ signatures on dedications from the Acropolis, and the statues from the Acropolis that can be matched with inscribed bases.

Finally, an underlying theme of Keesling’s work is her critique of the methods used in all areas of research pertinent to Athenian art. She reminds us of the problems that stem from accepting imprecise stylistic chronologies as absolute and correlating them with historical events, of the pitfalls of prosopographical research in a society given to name duplication, and, above all, of reliance upon formal analysis at the expense of contextualization. These observations, as much as her valuable contributions to our knowledge of the Archaic and Classical Acropolis, make this book a lasting contribution to the study of Greek art.