In an innovative twist, Peter Stewart embeds a summary of social-historical scholarship into his book on the functions and reception of Roman art … Each chapter focuses on a theme that has received much scholarly attention: artists and workshops, domestic and funerary art, portraiture, political and religious art, and art produced in the provinces…. Stewart advocates focusing on the immediate context of art produced in the provinces and points out that imagery does not always travel from the center to the periphery. New styles, whether found in the provinces or introduced during later time periods, indicate different aesthetic tastes, expectations, purposes, and modes of viewing and should be judged on their own terms, not as failures to meet earlier standards or standards in other parts of the empire…. Accessible to advanced students and scholars in related fields, The Social History of Roman Art challenges many long-held assumptions and inspires the reader to consider new avenues of inquiry.

Meanwhile Sheila Dillon has reviewed Jane Fejfer’s Roman Portraits in Context, also from 2008:

[P]ortrait statues and busts were arguably one of the most important and prominent forms of Roman public art and played a crucial role in constructing and communicating Roman social and political identity. Fejfer’s aim is to focus on the reconstruction of the socio-historical and physical contexts of portraits, rather than on more traditional scholarly concerns of portrait typology, chronology, and stylistic development, although these topics are dealt with as well … Fejfer has assimilated and summarizes a tremendous amount of secondary literature; while this avalanche of data can sometimes overwhelm the reader, there is a great deal here that is new and interesting. Even those whose research specialization is Roman portraiture will learn a lot from Fejfer’s book…. The material is endlessly fascinating and visually engaging, and the many new and provocative observations and interpretations contained in this study should provide fruitful avenues for research in Roman—and Greek—portraiture for many years to come.

I would like to bring alive the glint of a gold arm-cuff, the flow of a woven red robe splaying across a mudbrick floor, the clang of bronze cups as they are set down on an ebony table decorated with ivory carvings … [Such details] are obsessed over in ancient administrative documents … [One stele] lists scores of rare and exotic foods that Ashunasirpal II served at the opening of his palace, including turtledoves, spring lambs, salted oxen, various shelled nuts, onions, cumin, grapes, and olives … Tiglath-pileser III claims that he installed in his Central Palace at Nimrud “double doors of cedar and pine, which bestow great pleasure on those who enter them and whose fragrance wafts into the heart” … It is important to remember, however, that … every whiff of cedar [also] evokes victory over land to the west.

In one of two historical surveys of the art’s reception, Julian Reade describes “The Early Exploration of Assyria,” the nineteenth-century years when Western excavators exported antiquities en masse out from under the feckless Ottoman Empire for the collections of museums and educational institutions all over. James F. Goode fills in the twentieth-century in “Archaeology and Politics in Iraq: From the British Mandate to Saddam Hussein.” Iraqi leaders have run hot and cold toward the ancient inhabitants of their lands. When Saddam Hussein sought to justify his invasion of Kuwait, he cast his nation as “a civilization which is 6000 years old.”

Westerners have also oscillated in the respect they’ve paid to Assyria. Vigorous collecting and appreciation have alternated with neglect and disdain. Assyrian art and the rulers that commissioned it have often been portrayed as grandiose and vulgar. As Thomason illustrates, the “trope of the decadent Oriental despot” can be found in everything from the Old Testament and Delacroix’s The Death of Sardanapalus to modern journalistic descriptions of Saddam’s former palaces as “tasteless and tacky.” Goode describes the parlous fate of Iraq’s antiquities during the American invasion and occupation of the last several years:

In addition to the sacking of the Iraq Museum, the adjoining offices of the State Board were also looted, leading to the loss of countless expedition records and photographs. Many more depredations took place and continue to take place at site around the country. Some of this illicit digging, it has been charged, has been abetted by foreign experts and institutions, which, although they will not purchase looted items, will show them on loan or “authenticate, read, analyze and write catalogue entries for stolen items.”

In the book’s concluding chapter, Samuel Paley and Donald Sanders describe present-day attempts to piece back together and bring to life dispersed monuments such as the Ashurnasirpal palace, using virtual reality software that supplements existing reliefs with now-lost polychromy, hypothetical lighting conditions, and the people and objects that would have likely inhabited these spaces:

The use of digital reconstructions has certainly been subject to controversy … [Can it] “represent simultaneity, multidimensionality, pattern and nonlinearity with … speed and efficiency” to do what “prose cannot capture”? … The ability to visit the site with chariots and … human figures moving with the king, the brazier [which wafts smoke around the virtual room], and the throne gives life to an archaeological environment. Even though this effort has been pushed almost to theater, the model gives us an impression of used space.

One day perhaps a computer will even be able to waft the fragrance of ancient cedar right into your heart.

• Kaelen Wilson Goldie on Routes d’Arabie at the Louvre (The National)
• On Dynasty and Divinity: Ife Art from Ancient Nigeria, previously in Santander, Madrid and London, now in Houston, and later in Indianapolis, Richmond and New York: Douglas Britt (Houston Chronicle); The Economist; Itziar Reyero (ABC.es); Richard Dorment (The Telegraph); Jonathan Jones and slide show (The Guardian); Mark Hudson (Financial Times); Rachel Campbell-Johnston (The Times); Waldemar Januszczak (Sunday Times); London press roundup
• On Raphael: Cartoons and Tapestries for the Sistine Chapel at the V&A: Souren Melikian (New York Times); Jonathan Jones (Guardian); Martin Gayford (Telegraph)
• PD Smith on Mark Hudson, Titian: The Last Days (The Guardian); Keith Miller (The Times), Serena Davies (The Telegraph)
• James Hall on Salvator Rosa at Dulwich Picture Gallery (The Guardian)
• Jed Perl on Susan Lake, Willem de Kooning: The Artist’s Materials (The New Republic)
• Martin Herbert on Martin Gayford, Man with a Blue Scarf: On Sitting for a Portrait by Lucian Freud (The Telegraph); cf. Gayford on Freud’s Bacon (Bloomberg)
• The Economist on Damien Hirst
• On Umberto Eco on beauty: Arthur Krystal (Harper’s/Powell’s); Mike Phillips (The Guardian); cf. Nicola Copping on Roger Scruton, Geoffrey Jones, and Carol Dyhouse (Financial Times)

I’ve come to believe that artifacts need to stay in their place. And that’s after having gone through museum collections and seeing just the vast amounts of material that we’ve gathered already and going through private collections and just realizing how much we have swept up from the ground. And when I find something that’s on the ground, even if it’s a tiny thing, even if it’s a broken arrowhead, it is so much more powerful there than it is on a shelf or in a display case. And, you know, I’m not saying we need to get rid of all the artifacts we’ve gathered. I’m just looking at it going, we don’t need to take everything. We can leave some stuff out there, and there’s not that much left. I walked thousands and thousands of miles across deserts and mountains, and I know. I’ve seen the holes. I’ve seen where diggers have been. And I know that there is a lot missing, and I know that these last pieces that are remaining are rare, and I don’t want them moving.

Childs’ new book is “Finders Keepers: A Tale of Archaeological Plunder and Obsession.” According to the L.A. Times, “Once, he stole a pot from [a] case to return it to the desert. He did not feel entirely good about that.”

• “Art and its mediums,” a set of links from Bookforum
• Alex Danchev reviews Michael Fried, The Moment of Caravaggio (THE)
• Jeffrey Hamburger and Anthony Grafton, “Save the Warburg Library!” (NYRB)
• Rebecca Solnit and Peter Conrad on Eadweard Muybridge at Tate Britain (The Guardian)
• Tom L. Freudenheim on German Master Drawings at the National Gallery (WSJ)
• Bill Brubaker, “In Haiti, the Art of Resilience” (Smithsonian); also, “Art After the Quake,” a slideshow of works by Haitian artists (New Yorker)
• Hilton Als, Angus Cook and Peter Doig, “Discovering the Art of Boscoe Holder, Trinidadian Master,” (NYRB)
• Edmund White reviews Beat Memories: The Photographs of Allen Ginsberg at the National Gallery (NYRB), and Richard B. Woodward reviews Dennis Hopper: Double Standard at L.A. MoCA (WSJ)
• Daniel Siedell on Denis Dutton, The Art Instinct (Books & Culture)
• George Johnson reviews Craig Childs, Finders Keepers: A Tale of Archaeological Plunder and Obsession (NYT)
• Michael Dirda reviews Edmund de Waal, The Hare With Amber Eyes: A Family’s Century of Art and Loss (WP), on a particularly poignant netsuke collection

• Sarah Williams Goldhagen reviews ?ur?i? and Hadjitryphonos, Architecture as Icon: Perception and Representation of Architecture in Byzantine Art in The New Republic (exhibition and catalog)
• “The Lost World of Old Europe: The Danube Valley 5,000-3,500 B.C.” at the Ashmolean Museum, reviewed by Neal Ascherson (LRB), and noted by Jonathan Jones (Guardian) and Paul Levy (WSJ); previously at NYU and reviewed by John Noble Wilford (NYT)
• Mark Brown, “National Portrait Gallery shines light on forgotten artist Thomas Lawrence,” The Guardian
• Blake Gopnik, “At National Gallery, Edvard Munch’s ‘Prints’ reveal artist’s methodical process,” Washington Post
• Jed Perl, “Individualism: Getting Matisse weirdly wrong, and getting Renoir weirdly right,” The New Republic ($)

The Colosseum, more than any other building from ancient Rome, is routinely the subject of both scholarly and popular texts. While it seems that important studies are published on this structure every year, rarely does any attain the status of definitive text. Katherine Welch’s The Roman Amphitheatre: From Its Origins to the Colosseum is such a book. Welch’s splendid volume is a culmination of her amphitheatre studies and provides a much-needed examination of the building type’s origins in Republican Rome and its development up to and including the Colosseum.

Royal purple found at Qatna, Syria
The Bishops of Whithorn and their diet
Cannibalism in Neolithic Germany
Clubbing and stabbing in Bronze Age Spain
The eventful story of some Chinese trousers

Also in this issue, Bisserka Gaydarska analyzes the Theoretical Archaeology Group and N. James writes on the new Acropolis Museum and Greece’s hopes for recovering the Elgin Marbles from the British Museum:

Much more pressing than the issue of the Elgin Marbles is the scandal of the visitor experience on the Acropolis itself. In more than two decades, there has been no significant improvement [to the bottlenecks and noise created by large crowds] … The [Acropolis] Conservation Committee was right to fret about how much visitors understand the Acropolis. To face that challenge is the most urgent priority. And incidentally, to meet it would further enhance the case for restitution.

• Stuart Ferguson reviews Ravenna in Late Antiquity, by Deborah Mauskopf Deliyannis
• Ingrid D. Rowland, “Radiant, Angry Caravaggio” [$]
• Julian Barnes on a new, 2,520-page edition of Delacroix’s Journal (“un document étonnamment complexe, hybride, chaotique, labyrinthique”)*
• Dalia Judovitz on her book Drawing on Art: Duchamp and Company

* edited by Michèle Hannoosh; see also Hannoosh, “Histoire d’une édition,” review by Beth S. Wright [PDF], and notices by Philippe Lançon, Richard Blin, and Isabelle Martin reprinted at the José Corti website. From Barnes’s review:

 Du Camp tells the story of a banker who, innocent of artistic politics, managed mistakenly to invite both painters to dinner on the same evening. After much glowering, Ingres could no longer restrain himself. Cup of coffee in hand, he accosted his rival by a mantelpiece. “Sir!” he declared, “Drawing means honesty! Drawing means honour!”. Becoming over-choleric in the face of the cool Delacroix, Ingres upset his coffee down his own shirt and waistcoat, then seized his hat and made for the door, where he turned and repeated, “Yes, sir! It is honour! It is honesty!”.

Brown University will host the Theoretical Archaeology Group from Friday, April 30 through Sunday, May 2, 2010. [This conference will address] the question of the place of archaeology – literally and figuratively. We have invited renowned scholars [Homi K. Bhabha, for example] from around the world to join with Brown faculty and students in exploring and debating this question over the course of the weekend – through conversation, presentations, performances, screenings, and exhibits. More than 300 conference participants are expected … with some 150 presentations planned.

The overarching theme of TAG 2010 is ‘The Location of Theory,’ and the conference is particularly noteworthy for its truly global scope. A delegation of Chinese archaeologists will be attending TAG for the first time … Several other sessions bring together scholars from a number of countries—from Iceland to South Africa to Palestine to Turkey—as well as archaeologists working right here in Rhode Island.

In other news, Brown was recently awarded

an $180,000 grant from the Getty Foundation to begin work on an international project titled “The Arts of Rome’s Provinces.” Twenty people with terminal degrees will be chosen to be a part of the project … Because art history is studied differently in each part of the world, the project will aim to “figure out how these different kinds of art histories can benefit each other” … the project [will be] a “movable feast” because the fellows will study Roman art history and archaeology in both Greece and England. The foundation approached [project co-directors] [Natalie] Kampen and [Susan] Alcock several years ago and asked if they would form a project to internationalize art history and apply for the grant.