In chapter 1, after a brief discussion of “Greek art, the idea of freedom, and the creation of modern high culture,” which treads mostly familiar ground, Tanner takes on some twentieth-century accounts of ancient art and (unsurprisingly) finds them wanting—too literary, too anachronistic, and so on. His own (quasi-Parsonian and somewhat jargon-filled) solution is to characterize art as a form of expressive cultural symbolism, constructing "affective experience on the basis of cultural-level codifications of sensuous form generated in some degree of abstraction from immediate social relationships (21). He then mobilizes Karl Weber’s concept of rationalization to account for art’s different trajectories at different times and places, concluding (again unsurprisingly, though now with less jargon and a welcome attention to the ancient sources) that the Greek invention of the polis and the mindset that it nurtured—rationalist, logocentric, and holistic—shaped the course of ancient Greek art.

All this sets the stage for chapter 2, grandly entitled “Rethinking the Greek Revolution: Art and Aura in an Age of Enchantment.” Tanner focuses on the shift around 480 BCE from archaism to naturalism in the “cult” statues of the Olympians, a term that he uses indiscriminately for temple statues and votives. Mobilizing an array of ancient anecdotes, representations, and other evidence about the lives of such images and Greek responses to them, and dissatisfied with both “essentialist” and “conventionalist” theories of naturalism, he opts for a pragmatist, neo-Parsonian, and neo-Peircean account of it. Grounding Greek naturalism in distinctively Greek cultural, somatic, and behavioral codes, in an adroit move he then proceeds to argue that its “distinctive expressive effects” (his main focus of interest) “depend not on culture and biology alone, but on the interpenetration of cultural and behavioural systems, which naturalism facilitates” (83, emphasis in original). So just as the progressive democratization of Greek religion explains the genre’s early fifth-century abandonment of elitist archaism, the powerful sense of actual divine epiphany à la Grècque delivered by this peculiarly Greek sort of naturalism explains its sweeping success among a newly empowered citizenry.

By and large this may well be right, but cannot serve (as Tanner apparently wants it to) as an across-the-board explanation for the “Greek revolution” as a whole. For one thing, this revolution came in not one but two stages: first, a “naturalistic turn” after c. 520–510 BCE (the generation of Euphronios, Euthymides, the Foundry Painter, the Ballplayer base, and the Akropolis Gigantomachy pediment and athlete statuettes) that has nothing to do with “cult” statues but seems particularly intense in secular subjects such as symposia, erotica, and athletics; and second, the advent of the Severe Style by (or in) 477/76 BCE , when Kritios’s and Nesiotes’s new bronzes of the Tyrannicides were unveiled in the Athenian Agora—two lambent poster-boys for the “iron-man” self-image of the jubilant victors over the Persian and Carthaginian invaders in 480/79 BCE. Tanner engages none of this.

Chapter 3 turns to portraits. Mutatis mutandis, the argument follows roughly the trajectory of the previous chapter. Realist and conventionalist accounts of portraiture are examined and discarded, and a more specific, culturally grounded definition is advanced (in this case involving physiognomics but not the important concept of êthos, which is never mentioned). A shift in terminology from the essentially untranslatable agalma to eikôn (“likeness”) is detected and located between the archaic votive inscriptions and Herodotus. Tanner then makes his move.“I shall argue that we should understand civic portraits in democratic Athens as a particular type of expressive symbolism, namely reward symbolism” (109).

After a sideswipe at the present reviewer’s 1979 exposition of the same basic idea apropos fourth- and third-century Attic portraits, Tanner revisits the ancient sources on portrait exchange, then widens his analysis to take into account the semiotics of contrapposto, movement, gesture, and physiognomy in classical portrait statues. Finally, he returns to the early fifth century, the Athenian democratic revolution, and the Tyrannicides to argue that “these institutional ruptures and the creation of a new secular representational space [sc. the agora] must lie behind the creation of portraiture, both as a new category of image, the eikôn, and as a new type of image, the public honorific portrait” (136). He then widens his horizons again to embrace the spread of democracy and egalitarianism in early fifth-century Greece, invoking extra-Athenian democratic revolutions and Ian Morris’s now-classic discussion of the “middling” ideology espoused by even such conservative states as Sparta.

Again, some (perhaps much) of this must be right, but as a general explanation for the advent of portrait “likeness,” the Athenian invention of the public honorific portrait simply will not do. For Tanner has forgotten that between the Tyrannicides of 477/76 BCE (which he admits are highly unindividualized) and Konon’s award of 394/93 BCE the Athenian state erected no honorific portraits at all. Demosthenes is quite explicit on this point, and all the sources that Tanner mobilizes on portrait exchange postdate the Konon. So the Themistokles, Pindar (if Athenian), Perikles, and such other stratêgoi as are assignable to the fifth century were private commissions and not state ones. Apropos Themistokles, his stratospheric reputation and colossal ego after the Persian victory, amply documented by Thucydides, Diodoros, and especially Plutarch, offer an obvious explanation for his quasi-Heraklid appearance (overlooked by Tanner); the others require others.

Chapter 4 addresses the role of the artist. Again skirting the traditional terms of the debate (modernist/primitivist; creative genius/banausos), and en route misrepresenting an argument advanced by the present reviewer, Tanner produces three more up-to-date criteria: status, role, and agency. He cogently proposes that they allow one not only to sidestep the dichotomies listed above, but also to develop a more nuanced, flexible, and chronologically sensitive account of the subject. Although the material is familiar and others have anticipated many of Tanner’s points, this is the most engaging chapter so far. It engages such key issues as commissions and contracts, representations of the artist in myth and ritual, the signature and self-portrait, and the peculiarly Greek practice of recognizing great artists not qua artists but as benefactors (euergetai) to the city.

There follows the central question of the Great Masters: their enhancement of their work via the medical, mathematical, optical, and other scientific knowledge produced by the “Greek Enlightenment,” its purposes, and its effects. Thus, “the practical and the rational elements of Polykleitos’s treatise are two sides of the same coin, by which he sought to reconstruct and rationalise the material form of artistic agency” (168). Yet even so, Polykleitos apparently limited himself to revolutionizing sculptural design alone; and although the explosive expansion of mimetic techniques, outlets, markets, and opportunities that followed (involving such luminaries as Zeuxis, Parrhasios, Apelles, Praxiteles, and Lysippos) augured a new kind of art world, inhibiting factors (institutional, social, and artistic) ensured that it remained stillborn. Greek civic, logocentric paideia proved impregnable after all.

Tanner’s fifth chapter, entitled “Reasonable Ways of Looking at Pictures: High Culture in Hellenistic Greece and the Roman Empire,” is in many ways his best. In it, he engages the culture that gave rise to the first historico-critical art writing and the ways in which it informed late Hellenistic and Roman imperial art production:

On a structural level, art becomes disembedded from its traditional functions only to a very limited, if significant extent . . . [and is] more closely tied to the lifestyle of a relatively restricted social elite than is modern high culture. . . . On a cultural level, the rationalist cosmology that was characteristic of Greek intellectual culture, together with associated cultural practices derived from elite rhetorical and philosophical education, engendered an aesthetic ethos that stylised how viewers related to works of art in a quite distinctive way. (211–12)

After sketching the removal of Greek art to new contexts in Hellenistic palaces and Roman temples, villas, and other locales, and the rise of new cultures of collecting, viewing, and response, Tanner tackles Pliny and his rationalistic and Stoic agendas, and then moves on to the primacy of rhetoric and reason in Roman imperial art writing and its consequence, the devaluation of strongly affective responses to art. Under the Empire, the “art lover” became a figure of fun. Throughout, the analysis is subtle, well informed, and persuasive, though it has one significant lacuna. The newly discovered Poseidippos papyrus with its many early Hellenistic epigrams on gems and statues, fully published in 2001 and intensively studied and debated since, would have anchored the argument more firmly and also nuanced it considerably.

Finally, in chapter 6, “Art after Art History,” Tanner addresses the artworks (copies, sarcophagi, and so on) produced during the late Hellenistic and imperial periods and their quasi-professional creators. An intriguing section discusses the new concept of phantasia and the rationalist stamp that it placed upon artistic imagination, reconciling it to the rational, logocentric paideia now universally accepted and taught throughout the Greco-Roman world. Selected copies and sarcophagi are then analyzed from this perspective, and the “ancient system of the arts” (301) briefly compared with two other classicizing traditions: the French and Chinese. This chapter is too dense and rich to summarize in more than the crudest terms. Students of ancient art had better read it for themselves.