Alice Donohue’s new book examines descriptions of ancient Greek sculpture written in the eighteenth to twentieth centuries and the light they shed on the intellectual history of classical archaeology. She argues that the practice common in archaeological publication of isolating description from interpretation was instrumental in perpetuating a false empiricism, characterized by the denial of the subjective nature of vision. Her inquiry focuses on the historiography of early Greek sculpture, a category that she maintains was evaluated through misguided comparisons with Classical and Hellenistic works, and conceptualized in accordance with theories of stylistic development which inappropriately applied evolutionary models to human culture. Although I am strongly sympathetic to Donohue’s reservations about reductive or evolutionist formalism in art history, her critique of past scholarship simplifies it unnecessarily, to the detriment of her own argument. A substantial part of the book (chapter 2) discusses treatments of Nikandre’s dedication from Delos and the Victory of Samothrace, two statues that are often seen to embody the polar extremes of the formal range of Greek sculpture and which students in the United States are apparently “regularly” asked to compare in slide examinations (20). The pieces were the first representatives of their respective types and styles...