The authors discuss the role of private collecting in museum development and trace the increasingly scientific approach to the classification and display of objects in the 19th and early 20th centuries, followed by a shift after World War I to minimalist installations that continued to follow chronological narratives but now eschewed plaster casts and historic restorations as lacking authenticity.

Here and in the three subsequent chapters the authors rightly give attention to the importance of such elements as gallery density, wall colors, and lighting both in shaping the overall impression of a gallery and in focusing on individual objects. They also usefully note that the pace of change in museums, as in any large institution, can be slow and that therefore some galleries still reflect older approaches to the collections.

The authors are to be commended for having considered a wide variety of institutions, including both national and site museums in Italy and Greece, large encyclopedic museums in Europe and the United States, and several regional museums in Germany. Their conclusions might have been more nuanced, however, had they given greater consideration to the impact on gallery installations of different forms of museum governance and varying institutional missions.

There is no mention of the British and American university museums with large antiquities collections—an unfortunate omission since several of these particularly the Ashmolean Museum, the University of Pennsylvania Museum and the University of Michigan's Kelsey Museum of Archaeology have new installations that emphasize objects' ancient contexts, the presentation of which is the focus of Chapter 8.


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With few exceptions, the authors seem not to have consulted staff from the museums they visited, a choice that preserves the independence of their observations but gives little insight into the complex process of planning and installing museum galleries. Chapter 6 is devoted to display techniques that emphasize individual sculptures as masterpieces, focusing attention on their aesthetic qualities through, for example, isolated placement in the galleries. The authors link this practice to traditional methods in both art history and classical archaeology and note that both disciplines have recently critiqued this approach.

In Chapter 7 "Art Historical Narratives" and Chapter 8 "Archaeological Displays of Sculpture" the authors assess the impact of distinctly art historical or archaeological themes on museum installations. But the definitions of the two disciplines employed here—"art historical narratives emphasize the inherent artistic qualities of the ancient sculptures" and "the more archaeologically orientated an exhibition is, the more it strives to display the original contexts and functions of the sculptures" —ignore both the role of style-based classification schemes in classical archaeology and the importance of contexts in current Greek and Roman art history and contradict the more nuanced histories of the two fields already presented in Part II.

The authors might have better described certain museum installations as reflecting traditional, connoisseurship-based strands of classical archaeology and art history, and such an observation could have led to a profitable exploration of reasons for the persistence of these approaches in museum displays. Chapter 7 concentrates on several "art historical" narratives that the authors identify in museums: Both here and in Chapter 8 the authors present a comparative critique of the installation of the Parthenon marbles in the new Acropolis Museum and the British Museum.

They also take issue, again in both Chapters 7 and 8, with a number of site museums in Italy and Greece for displaying sculptures prominently without emphasizing their connection to the archaeological site. In Chapter 8 the authors address the presentation of the architectural, socio-historical and economic contexts of the works.

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The authors find more emphasis on social and historical contexts in displays of Roman than of Greek monuments. At the end of the chapter they note efforts in some museums to present sculpture production methods, including polychromy. Although the authors describe themselves as having visited museums "not as trained archaeologists.

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Taking the visitor experience into consideration might have substantially reshaped their discussion of, for example, the usefulness or not of chronological installations, how sculptures' contexts are presented, or the connectedness of site museums to their archaeological sites.

As the same scanning method was used for SNG Ashmolean vol. These are minor complaints within such a vast catalogue, and anyone who has ever done similar work will appreciate that there is indeed little wrong with this latest issue of the Ashmolean sylloge. The two authors are to be congratulated for their excellent work and encouraged to tackle the remainder of the collection of Greek coins of the Heberden Coin Room at the Ashmolean Museum. Displaying the Ideals of Antiquity. The authors argue that certain academic traditions and per- spectives have influenced, for better or for worse, scholarly approaches to ancient sculpture and our understanding of its use in ancient society.

They treat sculpture not only from an The Classical Review Sculptural displays also iterate modern perceptions of ancient art and society.

Displaying the Ideals of Antiquity: The Petrified Gaze, 1st Edition (Hardback) - Routledge

The first two chapters do not deal explicitly with ancient sculpture. Instead, they provide historiographical overviews of classical archaeology and art history, respectively. Obsession with the Parthenon Frieze as a canonical art object has more to do with modern perceptions of it than ancient reality pp. In antiquity, the Parthenon was best known for its chryselephantine cult statue of the Athena Parthenos by Pheidias, while the frieze received comparatively little attention.

The Petrified Gaze, 1st Edition

The last half of the fourth chapter evaluates recent dissertations on sculpture in terms of how the next generation of scholars is grappling with new and traditional approaches. Nowhere do they cite or explore the innovative interpretation of J. Her reading aligns the Parthenon Frieze with other temple reliefs that depict mythological, not historical, scenes. In fact, the per- sistent view that the Parthenon Frieze represents an exception in Greek temple relief sculp- ture and represents an historical Panathenaia, and exemplifies Athenian democratic ideals, is a modernising notion influenced by the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century appropriation of classical architectural forms in Western European and North American Neo-Classicism in order to connote republican and democratic values.


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  • The second half of the book focuses on museum displays of ancient sculptures, divided broadly into two categories. Art historical displays tend to exhibit sculptures in isolation, affirming that the object has an intrinsic meaning. In archaeological displays, the museum treats the sculpture as an artefact; the sculpture is displayed with objects discovered with it or objects that flesh out the larger historical meaning or cultural context.

    The two types of displays are not mutually exclusive and elements of both can be found in various displays. Chapters 7 and 8 explore, respectively, art his- torical and archaeological displays. Art historical displays emphasise artists, styles and aes- thetic qualities.

    Displaying the Ideals of Antiquity

    Different research traditions, archaeology vs art history, and the evolution of method and theory within those fields through the centuries, have caused sculpture to be treated differ- ently by scholars and have influenced displays of ancient sculptures in museums. Although there is min- imal discussion of looting and cultural property issues p.

    Indeed, the placement of an object in a museum removes it from its original context and meaning, and constructs a new meaning around it pp. In this way, the book is a significant contribution to the methodological and theoretical literature on ancient art that underlines the need for contextual approaches and highlights the perils of applying modernising perceptions of art to the study of ancient art. Another important audience will be museum curators, who formulate displays of ancient sculptures, and graduate students in museum studies programmes.

    Archaeological Survey and the City.