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JEREMY TANNER. The Invention of Art History in Ancient Greece: Religion, Society, and Artistic Rationalisation. Cambridge Classical Studies. Cambridge University Press, 2006. xvi + 331 pp. 62 black-and ills. Cloth, $99.
In his introductory chapter, Jeremy Tanner quotes J. J. Winckelmann's eighteenth-century description of the Apollo Belvedere: "Among all the works of antiquity which have escaped destruction, the statue of Apollo is the ideal of art . . . In the presence of this miracle of art, I forget all else, myself take a lofty position for the purpose of looking on it in a worthy manner" (6). Tanner makes it clear that Winckelmann, widely regarded as the founder of modern art history, was not simply recording a personal reaction. Instead, Winckelmann's notion of artworks as autonomous objects of aesthetic experience was deeply rooted in the transformation of the basic institutions of art during the Enlightenment. These included changes in patronage and production, the introduction of the new philosophy of aesthetics. The new conception as a form of individual expression was tied not only to the notion of personal liberty but also to the growing obsession with national identities. Winckelmann's rapturous response to the Apollo Belvedere is understandable only as a part this broader set of social and intellectual currents.
The kinds of art history that Tanner is concerned with in this book quite distinct from Winckelmann's and belonged to profoundly different cultural networks. Tanner lays out three goals for the book: first, to analyze art as of material culture that was both shaped by society and, in turn, helped to society; second, to develop an analytic framework for comparing classical modern art history without conflating the two; third, to move art history explanatory level, exploring not only how classical art developed over the term, but why. Tanner's approach is sociological, drawing especially on the of the once influential American sociologist, Talcott Parsons (1902-1979) and semiotics of Charles Sanders Peirce (1839-1914). As a result, Tanner shifts the traditional focus on artists to the interaction of artists, patrons, and viewers.
In chapter 2 ("Rethinking the Greek Revolution," 31-96) Tanner addresses one of the central problems in art history, the apparently sudden transformation from abstraction to naturalism in Greek art in the beginning of the fifth century...