Since classical antiquity, Greek sculpture has occupied a premier position in the history of art. Pliny the Elder relied on earlier writers such as Xenokrates, Antigonos, and Pasiteles for his accounts of ancient Greek statues in marble and bronze, which appear in chapters of his Natural History devoted to stone and metals. Materials and techniques were of primary interest to Pliny, but his treatment—and those of many modern art historians until quite recently—nonetheless focused largely on stylistic development and the seemingly inevitable “progress” toward more naturalistic rendering of the human form, which is Greek sculpture’s principal subject. The past several decades, however, have ushered in new approaches. Scholars have paid increasing attention to such topics as context (socio-political and religious as well as archaeological), reception, gender, etc. Materials and techniques, too, have received more detailed examination, both in specialized monographs and comprehensive surveys: Andrew Stewart’s Greek Sculpture: An Exploration (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1990) and Claude Rolley’s La Sculpture Grecque 1 (Paris: Picard, 1994), for example, address such matters usefully in introductory chapters. In Greek Sculpture: Function, Materials, and Techniques in the Archaic and Classical Periods, Olga Palagia and her American and British collaborators take things considerably further, zooming...