Tonio Hölscher’s essay belongs to a particular moment in art-historical scholarship, not to mention Roman art history. The moment, to be more precise, is the mid-1980s, when semiotics was a thriving method of inquiry and two of the most formidable Romanists in the German language, Hölscher and Paul Zanker, both indebted to structural linguistics, separately set out to explain why Roman art looks the way it does. For example, Zanker, in his book The Power of Images in the Age of Augustus (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1988), explores the political language of both subject and style in Augustan art and architecture. His text, translated from German about one year after its original appearance, has become a staple of Roman scholarship. Largely overlooked by an Anglo-American audience, Hölscher’s contemporary text, Römische Bildsprache als semantisches System (Heidelberg: Carl Winter Universitätsverlag, 1987), is at long last translated into English and is now readily accessible. Coming nearly twenty years after its debut, how can Hölscher’s newly published essay speak to us today?

The book’s thesis could be succinctly articulated as follows: Roman image-making embraced Greek forms to express Roman ideals. The basic premise of Hölscher’s argument is that in Roman art formal choices were dictated by social and political content. In the book’s introduction, Hölscher defends his methodological approach by stating, “Recent efforts to explore the political and social meanings of Roman figural art have tended to push issues of form and style into the background” (1). In effect, he perceives a dichotomy among scholars—those who look closely at form and those who are concerned primarily with content as expressions of artists or patrons. What Hölscher aims to show is that form and content are inextricably linked in Roman art, producing a visual language that evolved gradually and organically.

In his second chapter, Hölscher presents Roman image-making as a carefully constructed semantic system, in which styles of the Greek past function as types imbued with specific meanings. The language of Roman art thus rests firmly on Greek foundations. Indeed, for better or for worse, most historians since the eighteenth century have viewed Roman art in rigorous comparison to Greek art (sometimes disparaging it, other times praising it for its emulation of Greek models, and oftentimes trying to justify its uniqueness), a scholarly phenomenon carefully outlined in Otto Brendel’s Prolegomena to the Study of Roman Art (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1979; first published in the Memoirs of the American Academy in Rome, 1953). Hölscher, deeply indebted to Brendel’s work, rightly challenges two previously ingrained and privileged art-historical concepts that seemingly favored Greek art—that of originality and that of the individual. Assumptions about the intrinsic value of these two concepts have historically led scholars to understand Roman art as, at best, merely and passively imitative of Greek art. Hölscher attempts to break from these entrenched concepts by suggesting that “Roman art based its choice of visual paradigms not primarily on considerations of style or taste, but according to content and subject. It settled on different patterns, drawing on different periods of Greek art, for the different classes of subject-matter” (20–21).

More specifically, Hölscher argues that typological forms, derived from works dating to the Late Archaic to Late Hellenistic phases of Greek art (that is, from roughly the sixth to the first century BCE), could be used side-by-side within a given period of Roman image-making and even within a single composition. Hölscher thereby challenges the long-held notion that particular periods of Roman art necessarily exploited only particular styles of Greek art (such as Augustan art and the idealism of fifth-century BCE High Classical art, or the art of the Flavian dynasty [69–98 CE] and the “realism” and baroque-like qualities of fourth-century BCE Hellenistic art). To speak of a period style in Roman art, he argues, one must look to the technical execution of marble-carving, citing the “spare,” “precise,” and “dry” chisel-work of the Augustan period and the “loose” and “sketchy” techniques of the Flavian era. This idea typically receives only passing mention throughout the text, but nonetheless seems important as Hölscher asks new questions about what is meant by “style” in Roman art.

A weakness of this study is the narrow range of illustrations and examples. In a short book with fifty-two illustrations, Hölscher needs to walk us through the images carefully in order to make clear both elements of Greek style in Roman art and aspects of period-specific technical execution, which, unfortunately, he does not do. He assumes that we see exactly what he does and that his audience is fully familiar with the objects he refers to but does not illustrate—an irony (and source of frustration) given that his method depends so heavily on formal analysis.

Chapters 4 through 6 explore Hölscher’s ideas through case studies, showing how, for example, the Hellenistic depiction of pathos (an appeal to emotion) and complex conceptions of space in battle scenes (in both Greek art and literature) found their way into Roman battle scenes as a way to express Roman ideals, namely the glorification of the victor through powerful action (labor), as exemplified with the reliefs on the Column of Trajan. Meanwhile, Classical Greek models served as expressions of Roman order (gravitas and auctoritas) in ceremonial sculptures, most notably those of the Ara Pacis Augustae. Here we see echoes of the now-familiar models provided by Zanker in his book on Augustan art and even earlier by Sheldon Nodelman in his essay on Roman portraiture as a system of signs (“How to Read a Roman Portrait,” Art in America 63.1 (1975), 26–33). Both Zanker and Nodelman present Roman art as a system of formalized language dependent on, but not merely copying, Greek models so as to convey a specific, Roman message. What all three authors have in common, therefore, is the belief that Roman art can be characterized as a precise visual language.

What distinguishes Hölscher’s study is its attempt at breadth; he provides us with a plausible model to apply to all of Roman art. For instance, in the seventh chapter, Hölscher presents fascinating and complex material on the use of heterogeneous models for a particular subject or within a single monument to highlight the flexibility of the Roman semantic system. Furthermore, he argues in chapter 8 that Roman art signified abstract, intellectual ideals and values based on works of specific Greek artists, so that, for example, images of Roman gods, meant to convey majesty and dignity, evoked the forms of the artist Pheidias (from the Classical period), and images of animals, in conveying truthfulness, might follow the forms of Lysippos, who worked in the Late Classical and Hellenistic periods.

At the heart of Hölscher’s analysis is the broadly stated notion that Greek forms were selected “according to their power to convince” (111). This idea, however, seems imprecise, for it does not demand that both image-maker and audience understand the specific language being spoken by images (as Hölscher presents in chapters 7 and 8) but only the general contours of the language (as presented in chapters 5 and 6). Indeed, his ideas are deceptively convincing at first. How, he rightly asks, does this visual language transmit to the empire’s diverse populations? His response is two-fold. First, he addresses the “theoretical views of art” and turns to Roman elite writers, who have articulated the values assigned to particular Greek works and artists. Because we have so little written by ordinary Romans themselves, this method is a mainstay of the field; a tiny, elite segment of Roman society speaks for the whole. Furthermore, Hölscher proposes that both sculptors and ordinary viewers, unlike the elite, responded to art in an “unthinking way” (99) or by “pure intuition” (98), as if the basic meanings of aesthetic forms were universal and self-evident. This is a hard pill for today’s readers to swallow, for it uncritically adopts a top-down approach to reading Roman art, an approach that has recently come under close and well-deserved scrutiny (see, for instance, John R. Clarke, Art in the Lives of Ordinary Romans: Visual Representation and Non-Elite Viewers in Italy, 100 B.C.–A.D. 315 [Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003]), as well as implying a primacy and universality of Greek art.

To this extent, the book falls squarely in the middle of thorny debates—past and present—concerning the “the Roman-ness” of Roman art. Although Hölscher’s structuralist methodology may seem a trifle dated now, his compact essay should be read alongside Elaine Gazda, ed., The Ancient Art of Emulation: Studies in Artistic Originality and Tradition from the Present to Classical Antiquity (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2002), and Ellen Perry, The Aesthetics of Emulation in the Visual Arts of Ancient Rome (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), among others (see, for example, Jaś Elsner’s useful and updated bibliography, 141–47). In Gazda’s edited volume and Perry’s book, we see that scholars continue to tackle broad, art-historical issues, such as the meaning of artistic originality, but with specific focus on the “problem” of Roman copying of Greek art; both books were written, so it would seem, with the intent of explaining what “originality” and emulation meant to the Romans. Hölscher was surely invested in similar issues in 1987, but his interests were different—to show how Greek art formed part of a visual language to express Roman ideas and ideologies. He makes no apologies for Roman art’s embrace of Greek art.

Although Hölscher’s book is intended to provide a paradigm for reading Roman art from the late Republic to the late Empire (from 200 BCE–300 CE), it in fact focuses narrowly upon a few imperial sculptures coming primarily from Rome herself, and deals little with art from the provinces or that commissioned by those outside the emperor’s tightly knit circle, a situation that distinguishes his work from the more inclusive scholarship of the past couple of decades. Herein lies another limitation of his essay. In the final four chapters (9–12), Hölscher steps away from the minutiae of Roman visual semantics to address some of the theoretical implications of his ideas. For example, he briefly readdresses the issue of changing taste in Roman art, which he stresses was “less general, less fundamental and less rapid” than in Greek art (118). Roman art, according to Hölscher, was relatively static and fossilized. But if one were to look at artistic forms beyond elite sculpture, and to visual media from across the empire, his argument would surely begin to lose some ground. One would be hard pressed, I believe, to discuss the first-century whimsical frescoes of Cupids and Pysches from the House of the Vettii (Pompeii) and the heavily drilled, iconic third-century reliefs from the Arch of Septimius Severus in Leptis Magna (Libya), separated by less than two hundred years, as examples of a “fossilized” artistic tradition. In fact, it is his conclusion that reveals the very real problem of engaging structural linguistics in trying to theorize five hundred years of Roman art. To claim that Roman art was “a universally understood system of communication” (125) that became “self-explanatory” (125) through an “unconscious process” (127) risks making Roman art seem totally divorced from social and historical context, as little more than part of the perceived evolution of Greek art. It is indeed no surprise that agents of creation or reception are virtually absent in Hölscher’s structuralist account of Roman art. In stark contrast, more recent inquiries are presently grappling with theories of agency across a range of demographics (for an inspiring example, see Natalie Boymel Kampen, “On Writing Histories of Roman Art,” Art Bulletin 85, no. 2 (2003): 371–86).

In any event, Hölscher thinks big in this tightly conceived essay. Elsner, author of the book’s foreword, makes a compelling case for reading Hölscher’s essay in its historiographical context (and I agree wholeheartedly). Much has happened in the field in the past two decades, however (particularly with regard to theories of gender, sexuality, and reception). This is not to say that Hölscher’s book is obsolete. On the contrary, it provides rich material with which to think. While Hölscher’s structuralist methodology may seem limited today, he still gives us much to ponder, question, and debate, which is no small feat.