Roman Portraits by Gisela M. A. RichterReview by: David M. RobinsonAmerican Journal of Archaeology, Vol. 54, No. 1 (Jan. - Mar., 1950), pp. 89-90Published by: Archaeological Institute of AmericaStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/500650 .

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BOOK REVIEWS 89

mation should have been made practically impossible to use. The only section conveniently arranged is that on Imported Western Terra Sigillata by Howard Com- fort, in which the pieces are numbered consecutively 1-228, and these numbers are given in the figures of photographs and repeated on the plates. The rest of the work on the pottery could have been presented just as conveniently by using a similar system.

The section on Medieval pottery contains a brief account of "Chinese and Related Pottery." This is followed by a "Technological Report on the Chinese Pottery" by Frederick R. Matson, Jr., the purpose of which is to test the degree of glossiness and the amount of lead used in the glaze of the pottery of Chinese ori- gin. Only a small number of sherds were tested, but the results indicate considerable variation in the com- position of the glaze. A wider application of this kind of test might yield important information on the provenance of imported varieties of glazed ware.

The volume also contains the publication, by George C. Miles, of the Islamic Coins found at Anti- och. These have been separated from the rest of the coins, a catalogue of which is being prepared by Dorothy Boylan Waage, but the final publication has been delayed because of conditions created by the war. The coins are well illustrated on five full pages of figures. The obverse and reverse of almost all the coins illustrated are given together. Much historical data has been made available from the coins, and it seems particularly regrettable that it did not prove feasible to associate the pottery more closely with the coins.

One discovery of exceptional interest has been made by Mr. Miles. The Antioch coin collection contains some 90 examples of "Elephant coins," a puzzling class for which no explanation has hitherto been found. Sixty-nine coins of this kind turned up in the Theater area at Corinth in 1928. They were part of a hoard containing seventy-three Byzantine coins, all of the eleventh century. Apart from these and the coins from Antioch the "Elephant coins" seem to be unknown. The author, who will make a more complete study of this group, ventures the conjecture that they were coined by the Seljfiqs of Syria, probably at Aleppo, between the years 1085 and 1114 A.D. He further sug- gests that their rarity may be due to the fact "that few collectors have taken the trouble to acquire coins so barbaric and enigmatic in appearance." A further search among collections here and in Europe he hopes will bring to light other examples of this interesting series.

UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO OSCAR BRONEER

TESTIMONIANZE E MOMENTI DI SCULTURA ALESSAN- DRINA, by A. Adriani. Pp. 45, pls. xix. Rome, "L'Erma," 1948. This slender fascicle, the second of the Documenti e

Ricerche d'Arte Alessandrina, contains an ambitious reexamination of the monuments that may be ascribed to Alexandrian art and attempts to date its stylistic developments through Roman times. A shorter Ap- pendix, which is a reprint of an article published in 1947 in Le Tre Venezie, seeks to vindicate the right of the Gaul of Ghizeh to be included in the corpus of Alexandrian sculpture.

Adriani makes a marble head of a young woman acquired in 1938 for the Museum of Alexandria in the Paris art trade the keystone of his discussion. The head is remarkable for its two rows of tightly rolled curls which hang down on each side, and for the singu- lar peaked turban-like head covering previously known from a statuette in Ince-Blundell Hall.

The head which may represent a young Dionysiac initiate, according to Adriani, is of unknown proveni- ence. The author's documentation of the Egyptian character of this type of hair dress is convincing, but his attribution of the head to Alexandrian centers of art seems less inevitable. Adriani dates the head be- tween 225 and 175 B.c. and considers the Ince-Blundell Hall statuette a later, and independent development.

With this touchstone Adriani is able to bring into as- sociation with Alexandria a considerable number of female heads and to outline the chronology of stylistic developments within these groups. The author's dili- gence and ingenuity are everywhere manifest and command respect. But, none the less, the question persisted in the reviewer's mind whether a particular style of wearing the hair is a sufficiently sturdy founda- tion on which to erect an Alexandrian school of sculp- ture. Even in imperial portraiture, where nothing more generic than the identity of an individual is in- volved, it can prove a treacherous criterion.

The decision to reprint the article on the Gaul of Ghizeh as an appendix to the longer article seems un- fortunate. The defense of the Gaul as a product of Alexandria is both highly subjective, as it is perhaps inevitable, and, at the same time, produces in the reader a desire to learn how sculptures so dissimilar in every way as the Gaul and the groups discussed earlier can both be derived from the same center of sculptural activity.

HUNTER COLLEGE MERIWETHER STUART

ROMAN PORTRAITS, by Gisela M. A. Richter. The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, 1948. $1.50. This monograph of beautiful plates includes the

whole valuable collection of more than a hundred marble busts, statues and heads both in the round and in relief, also several outstanding portraits in bronze, on gems and on gold coins. The notes give the prove- nance and list the chief publications of the works de- scribed and illustrated. The whole development of

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90 AMERICAN JOURNAL OF ARCHAEOLOGY

Roman portraiture is represented from the American- like realistic rugged Republicans (who invite compari- son with American business men) through the re- strained classicism of the Augustus and Julio-Claudian periods and the reassertion of realism with the practi- cal bourgeois Flavian emperors, to the third-century portrait busts with a hard and troubled expression. The story ends with the colossal head of Constantine, which has lost the life of even the third-century heads; it is carved in a few distinct planes with clear-cut fea- tures, two-dimensional, preparing the way for the monumental figures of Byzantine mosaics. The book has multum in parvo, the best, most scholarly, and most interesting treatment of the subject in five pages of text. The unnumbered fifty-six pages of figures are an important demonstration of visual education, and the learned and original 110 notes have material of in- terest to every student of Roman sculpture and Roman civilization.

UNIVERSITY OF DAVID M. ROBINSON

MIssIssIPPI

ESSAI SUR LA PROVINCE ROMAINE DE BETIQUE, by R. Thouvenot (Bibliotheque des ecoles frangaises d'Athenes et de Rome, fasc. 149). Pp. 748, figs. 179, map 1. E. de Boccard, editeur, Paris, 1940.

Mommsen once remarked that a good study of the Roman empire would be impossible until monographs on its various provinces had seen the light of day. In his preface, M. Thouvenot explains that his ambition has been to supply this need, so far as Baetica is con- cerned.

The ambition, indeed, is a worthy one; historians have needed for southern Spain a study that would perform the service rendered by M. Thouvenot's com- patriots, MM. Desjardins, Jullian, D6chelette, and Grenier, for their own native Gaul. The work is neces- sarily one of synthesis rather than of final interpreta- tion; the reader may draw his own conclusions, but will have at his disposal a wealth of detail that needed assembling, along with indispensable bibliographical material and a helpful Index Locorum. (This reviewer looked for an Index Rerum, but was disappointed; however, the Table of Contents goes into reasonable detail.) Unfortunately, the ancient literary docu- mentation is by no means as plentiful as that relating to Gaul, nor has archaeological investigation gone much beyond the fortuitous and obvious in Spain, but we are still able to form a fairly adequate picture of the terrain, "l'occupation du sol," the civilization in general, and the effects, if not the actual processes of Romanization.

The choice of Baetica (roughly Hispania Ulterior) as the object of a study apart from the rest of Spain is justified by its distinctive unity, geographical, ethnic, economic, and consequently, administrative. Lying

between the sea and the Sierra Morena, it was known for its wealth long before the Roman conquest, and visited by merchant convoys from the eastern Medi- terranean before Carthaginian and Greek competed for a permanent foothold. Although the administra- tive boundaries of the region varied, M. Thouvenot follows Ptolemy in his description of Baetica-a term which was not used officially until Augustus divided Hispania Ulterior into Lusitania and Baetica.

The Essai begins with a physical description of the country, discusses the much-disputed site of Tartessus (choosing a location conforming to Strabo 3.1.9, 2.11), and passes on to Phoenician, Greek, and Carthaginian influences, the Roman conquests, political and admin- istrative life under the republic and the empire, eco- nomic life (with special reference to mines, mining methods, and machinery), religion (pagan and Christian, with a 6-page note on the purported visit of St. Paul to Spain), urban life (including theaters, amphitheaters, baths, and temples), highways, bridges, navigable waterways, private homes, funeral monuments, sculpture, decorative art, and Christian monuments. As in many otherwise attractive French manuels, the illustrations are scarcely first-rate, and the maps patently home-made. One wonders, in- cidentally, whether the treatment of French works in American bibliographies is as erratic in respect to capitalizations as that of English works in French bibliographies. One notes, too, that in M. Thouvenot's bibliography, Tenney Frank is entered under "T."

The final value of a work such as this may be ap- praised according to the objective which the author announces in his preface: its contribution to our under- standing of Roman imperialism. As to the purely political and administrative problem, we are in a posi- tion to reach a fairly clear conclusion: to a territory with a well-developed economic life, Rome brought peace, the basis of prosperity. As in Gaul, the mer- chants and farmers had a tremendous stake in the con- tinuance of the pax Romana, the price of which was trivial in relation to the returns. There was little or no local patriotism upon which political or cultural re- sistance might be based. Roman interests, on the other hand, conflicted in no way with those of the pro- vincials; law and order was the primary Roman objec- tive; colonization apparently caused no serious dis- placements of the native population; and here was initiated the policy applied so successfully later on in Gaul-the liberal enfranchisement of provincials in the Roman political order.

The most remarkable phenomenon here, as also in Gaul, is of course the submergence of the local culture. As we well know, by 100 A.D., Or sooner, Baetica was more Roman than Italy. There are practically no epi- graphical traces of native culture; even native nomina and cognomina are rare. The art is simply common-

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