Alice Donohue’s new book examines descriptions of ancient Greek sculpture written in the eighteenth to twentieth centuries and the light they shed on the intellectual history of classical archaeology. She argues that the practice common in archaeological publication of isolating description from interpretation was instrumental in perpetuating a false empiricism, characterized by the denial of the subjective nature of vision. Her inquiry focuses on the historiography of early Greek sculpture, a category that she maintains was evaluated through misguided comparisons with Classical and Hellenistic works, and conceptualized in accordance with theories of stylistic development which inappropriately applied evolutionary models to human culture. Although I am strongly sympathetic to Donohue’s reservations about reductive or evolutionist formalism in art history, her critique of past scholarship simplifies it unnecessarily, to the detriment of her own argument.

A substantial part of the book (chapter 2) discusses treatments of Nikandre’s dedication from Delos and the Victory of Samothrace, two statues that are often seen to embody the polar extremes of the formal range of Greek sculpture and which students in the United States are apparently “regularly” asked to compare in slide examinations (20). The pieces were the first representatives of their respective types and styles known from excavations in Greece: Nikandre’s dedication was discovered in 1878, roughly half a decade before the first archaic maiden statues (conventionally known as korai) came to light on the Athenian Akropolis; the Victory, on the other hand, was excavated in 1863, almost two decades before the Gigantomachy frieze from the Pergamon Altar was put on display in Berlin. Donohue shows how, in the absence of chronologically indicative archaeological contexts, the two finds were assigned places in developmental schemes derived from texts, including the antiquarian writings by Pliny the Elder, Pausanias, and Clement of Alexandria. The Victory was judged either better or worse than expected from a work of the period after Alexander the Great (a time of decline according to Johann Joachim Winckelmann and his ancient sources). Nikandre’s dedication was identified as one of the earliest Greek marble statues of large format, since it lacked the representational innovations that ancient authors attributed to the mythical artificer Daedalus and because it supposedly resembled a xoanon, one of the primeval wooden idols which haunted both ancient and modern theories about the origins of Greek statuary (a mirage dispelled in Donohue’s previous monograph, “Xoana” and the Origins of Greek Sculpture, Atlanta: Scholar Press, 1988). By the 1880s each piece was being approached through a standard set of questions, which are all too familiar from more recent handbooks. The Victory was considered stylistically either more or less “advanced” than the Gigantomachy frieze, but certainly closely related to it. Nikandre’s dedication was seen as an initial link in a typological sequence of draped female statues that could sustain conflicting accounts of, on the one hand, the autochthonous “creative genius” of Greek sculpture or, on the other, its debt to Egyptian and Near Eastern influences. Since the evidence available at the time offered no definite solution to these emerging debates, the authority of individual judgment rested heavily on the semblance of scholarly objectivity. Donohue questions this professed objectivity by demonstrating how descriptions of Nikandre’s dedication often prefigured its interpretation, stressing either representational elements that apparently attested to the statue’s “pre-Daedalian” date or formal characteristics which were thought to prove or disprove its dependence on non-Greek models.

The most persistent feature, however, is the negative perspective from which both past and present scholarship views Nikandre’s dedication. Since its discovery, the reception of the statue has almost always been tainted by previous acquaintance with naturalistic sculpture of the Greco-Roman tradition, in comparison to which it is implicitly or explicitly assessed. In the engaging second half of chapter 2, Donohue explores the deep-seated cultural preconceptions that condition even the seemingly unprejudiced student to “discover” a relationship of progression from Nikandre’s dedication to the Victory of Samothrace, and thus to misconstrue non-naturalistic Greek art in general as a failed attempt at realism. Her starting point is the theoretical attempts, widespread in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, to rationalize this apparent failure. The most widely accepted approaches combined descriptions of the monuments with technical, anthropological, or psychological explanations of artistic form in ways compatible with preconceived notions of the development of human civilization. For instance, the archaeologist Heinrich Brunn explained the “plank-like” appearance of Nikandre’s dedication by hypothesizing an early phase of Greek sculpture in which wood and stones of increasing hardness were successively exploited. To perception theorists such as Emanuel Löwy, the statue’s frontality indicated a “primitive” artist, incapable of translating observed images directly into three-dimensional form. Donohue convincingly demonstrates the circularity of these explanations, since the evolutionary schemata on which they drew, although borrowed from disciplines ostensibly unrelated to classical studies, were analogous to or directly dependent upon those found in the ancient sources. Winckelmann’s account of the origins of Greek art, written without access to pre-Classical Greek antiquities, coincided with that by Brunn on the key theme of artistic proficiency in increasingly demanding media because it reiterated the ancient theory set out by Pliny (NH 35. 151–153). The relationship Löwy conceived between sculptural dexterity and psychological development derived ultimately from the idea that all arts depend on drawing or two-dimensional retinal projection. This concept was familiar from ancient aetiology, articulated in sources such as Pliny (NH 35. 15, 151), and perpetuated in academic art education and nineteenth-century theories of vision.

The remainder of the book looks at the biases inherent in statue descriptions based upon this circular heuristic system. The most radical strategy appears to have been erasure, as shown by the short afterlife of a fragmentary limestone figure from Levidhi, Arcadia. Neither “flat” nor “plank-like” enough to qualify as a xoanon translated into stone, this colossal bust literally dropped out of sight within four decades of its discovery in the 1920s, not least because it lacked an obvious place in the by-then historiographically standard model of Greek sculpture’s stylistic evolution. To throw the weaknesses that formalism embedded in the discipline into sharper relief, Donohue concentrates on the historiography of drapery, an aspect of figural representation commonly misinterpreted as subsidiary to the nude. Chapter 3 argues that the widespread desire to reconcile archaeological evidence with the developmental scheme digested from the sources prompted scholars to judge Greek representations of dress in terms of a preconceived goal—the virtuoso use of clinging or “wet” drapery to reveal the bodily forms beneath, as exemplified in the Victory. Although extant monuments from the second half of the fifth century BC suggest that Greek sculptors were not disinclined to dwell on the sensuous effects of light fabrics, the notion of an essentially body-revealing artistic parergon as a defining feature of Greek naturalism had entered modern historiography long before any Classical works were known, through Winckelmann’s reading of Roman-era (especially Pliny’s) literary responses to Greek masterpieces and post-antique treatises on art. The anachronistic application of this notion of “drapery” to Greek sculpture caused scholars to misinterpret iconographically meaningful renderings of dress as stylistic features.

Donohue demonstrates this in chapter 4 by reconsidering the mimetic fidelity of the skirt shown in Nikandre’s dedication to what she believes were actual apron-like garments worn in ancient Greece over a pleated underskirt. She reconstructs this ancient costume from a range of representations in other media, notably the Lady of Auxerre and carved ivory plaques from the Spartan Artemis Orthia sanctuary, where the underskirt is indicated by incisions and polychromy at the edge of the apron. Ironically, this detail was noted in the first publication of the Lady of Auxerre, but has subsequently been dismissed as the product of artistic ineptitude by scholars blinded (Donohue argues) by their text-based ideas about “Doric” dress and artistic character.

As self-contained parts, each of these chapters is incisive and compelling, and amply illustrates the merits of historiographical study. Donohue forcefully reminds us that pre-Classical female statues were not imperfect articulations of an essential characteristic of Greek art (“naturalism”), but rather expressions of ideas radically different from those familiar from Greco-Roman literature and nineteenth-century classicism. To define these ideas is not the purpose of the book, although in her discussion of Nikandre’s dress Donohue introduces the concept of a “situational beauty” (220) realized through conformity to historically specific gender and status roles, such as those reflected in the statue’s epigram.

Donohue’s overall argument, however, while largely persuasive, is somewhat overdetermined. Her historiographical study concentrates on scholars’ initial reaction to objects of a previously unknown type or style. In their attempt to infer history from material form, they assumed that the single artefact could reveal its genealogy. Thus, works of pottery, sculpture, and architecture whose forms recalled the softer materials used in basketry and carpentry were thought to indicate a transitional period in the evolution of the object class as a whole. Insofar as it presupposes a fixed developmental course, this approach is akin to the (now largely obsolete) theory of biogenetic recapitulation by Ernst Haeckel (1866), as Donohue emphasizes. Yet she fails to explain clearly that the current handbooks on Greek sculpture, which she sifted for formalist descriptions, are based not on diachronic extrapolation from single artefacts but on seriation and synchronic classification of a mass of excavated and unexcavated pieces into period styles, with cross-references to objects in other media. For some object groups, including most pre-Classical Greek sculpture, this comparative method yields results that are empirically valid and historically meaningful. The dating of Nikandre’s dedication is not the result of circular stylistic analysis (as implied on p. 27), but rests on comparison to objects dated by their archaeological context or painted decoration (for instance Protocorinthian vases with Daedalic-style moulded heads whose chronology is determined by the historical foundation dates of Greek settlements in Southern Italy and Sicily; see D.A. Amyx, Corinthian Vase-Painting of the Archaic Period, Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988, 397–434). The fact that the development of Daedalic art is consistent enough to allow relative dating within a reasonable margin of error tells us something about the self-consciousness of its makers and users: how it evolved in a broader context of Mediterranean connectivity and long-distance social interaction. For other object groups, including the majority of Hellenistic and Roman sculpture, evolutionary sequencing produces taxonomies that can be highly misleading in terms of chronology and provenance, because post-Classical sculptors drew on an expanding register of concurrent styles to express an attitude to the subject. The comparison between the Samothracian Victory and the Pergamene Gigantomachy reveals more about excavators’ and curators’ need for order and prestigious names than it does about dates of manufacture or the origins of workshops (despite Donohue’s claims on pp. 37, 150; for a non-linear conception of stylistic development in Hellenistic sculpture and arguments for dissociating the two monuments, see R.R.R. Smith, Hellenistic Sculpture: A Handbook, London: Thames and Hudson, 1990, 17–18, 77–79).

It is in many ways unhelpful to assign the eponymous problem of description to the empirical cul-de-sacs of past scholarship when the language of classical archaeology is anchored in current practice, tarnished by misplaced confidence in stylistic classification. In doing so, Donohue paints a picture of the discipline with which few practitioners will feel compelled to identify. Her book may therefore fail to produce the desired effect: that is, methodological reorientation of a kind that promotes better understanding of how formal categories can be made to speak historically.