Some of the most perplexing problems in the history of the reception and recovering of antiquity come down to timing and silence. Why, for instance, did the Parthenon not solicit more description from Vitruvius or Pausanias? Why did the temples of Magna Graecia, especially those at Paestum, attract so little attention before the 1760s? Why was it not until the nineteenth century that people could accept the idea of a painted classical temple? Why, moreover, did James “Athenian” Stuart cling to such sun-bleached ideals even after he himself had observed the presence of pigment on ancient structures? In terms of the decorative arts, why did classically inspired vases and candelabrum appear in the fifteenth century while tripods emerged only after Stuart’s mid-eighteenth-century designs? For that matter, how should we account for the fact that The Antiquities of Athens, the first volume of which was published in 1762 by Stuart and his co-author Nicholas Revett, had a greater impact after the Napoleonic Wars than the Seven Years’ War? Why did the Greek Revival hit its stride in the 1820s rather than the 1760s?

Any number of more or less satisfying responses have been offered to such questions, but apart from the content of those answers, how one approaches these problems tends to be bound up with profound methodological and historiographical issues regarding what constitutes art-historical practice in the first place. Notwithstanding the apparent simplicity of such queries, they raise formidable concerns involving continuity and change, the relationship between history and style, the interaction of ideas and appearances, the commerce of images and interests (political or economic), the interface of belief and the material world, and finally the shifting character of perception itself. Examining the reception history of a single site or moment of cultural production from the past underscores this last issue in particular, and it is instructive to consider how the classical tradition has continued to be adapted, from the mid-eighteenth century when excavations began at Herculaneum and Pompeii and Stuart and Revett returned from Attica, up to the present when questions about the relevancy of ancient Greece and Rome still spark debate.

The questions posed at the beginning of this review privilege Stuart’s role in the eighteenth-century “rediscovery” of ancient Greece on the part of Western Europeans, and some would take exception to the list on these grounds alone—the Romanists Robert Adam and Giovanni Battista Piranesi among them. And yet, these questions suggest something of the unsettled position Stuart has long occupied within the history of art and architecture. Because of the complications of timing and silence, scholars have had trouble determining whether Stuart was essential or incidental, a man of accomplishment or just unfulfilled potential. Whatever problems remain, the exhibition James “Athenian” Stuart, 1713–1788: The Rediscovery of Antiquity and its accompanying catalogue should lay to rest the question of whether Stuart mattered. They demonstrate that the life and career of this architect and designer can indeed stand up to sustained scrutiny. If anything, they raise another question of timing and silence: what took so long?

The exhibition, which appeared in New York at the Bard Graduate Center for Studies in the Decorative Arts, Design, and Culture and in London at the Victoria and Albert Museum, was curated by Susan Weber Soros, the founder and director of the Bard Graduate Center. Soros also edited the meticulously learned, 688-page catalogue. To her credit, its intellectual content lives up to the weight and visual appeal of the book as an object.

Its thirteen essays address the role of Stuart and The Antiquities within the context of the Myth of Greece and the Greek Revival, the architect’s life, his antiquarian interests, his social networks, and his work as a designer. The comprehensive scope is especially impressive given previous gaps in scholarship. Dora Wiebenson’s 1969 Sources of Greek Revival Architecture (London: A. Zwemmer) and David Watkin’s slim 1982 monograph Athenian Stuart: Pioneer of the Greek Revival (London: George Allen & Unwin) have stood out as useful exceptions even as they have reinforced the paucity of secondary sources. In the catalogue’s first and final chapters, Watkin draws upon his vast knowledge of buildings and architectural publications to recount the larger history of early modern interest in ancient Greece—from Ciriacus of Ancona to Le Roy and Winckelmann—and to consider the impact of Stuart in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.

Catherine Arbuthnott helpfully establishes many of the basic facts of Stuart’s life while also underscoring the challenges that confront his biographers (whether, for instance, he was born in Scotland or London has yet to be definitively determined). In addressing details of Stuart’s domestic life following his return from Greece, she fleshes out a more human depiction of the man than has previously been published.

Frank Salmon supplies a valuable assessment of Stuart’s antiquarian and archaeological practices, particularly the work he did prior to leaving for Greece in connection with the Obelisk of Pharaoh Psammetichus II, a sixth-century BCE monument transported to Rome by Augustus. Stuart’s studies resulted in the 1750 publication of De Obelisco Caesaris Augusti, though the text has largely been ignored until now.

In one of the strongest chapters, Kerry Bristol adeptly explicates Stuart’s patronage networks—from his early ties to Cardinal Silvio Valenti in Rome to his connections with the Society of Dilettanti, the Royal Society, the Society of Antiquaries, the Royal Society of Arts, and the Admiralty. As detailed in a separate essay by Bristol, this last institution provided one of Stuart’s rare public commissions; the resulting Chapel of the Royal Hospital at Greenwich remains one of the best sites for evaluating Stuart as an architect and designer. Bristol, in fact, deserves considerable credit beyond these two contributions; her dissertation on Stuart, completed at the Courtauld in 1997, as well as a handful of articles, informs much of the catalogue, and the crisp clarity of her writing signals a level of control over the material that stands out even among this distinguished group of scholars (one point that has emerged from Bristol’s research is the importance of Stuart and Revett’s time in Venice prior to their departure for Greece).

The remaining seven chapters by Richard Hewlings, Julius Bryant, Alexander Marr, M. G. Sullivan, Susan Soros, Michael Snodin, and Christopher Eimer consider Stuart’s designs for houses in London, country houses, garden buildings, sculpture, furniture, metalwork, and medals. All are valuable, though in the interest of space constraints I would single out Snodin’s essay on Stuart’s designs for several remarkable tripods and vases produced for Kedleston Hall, Spencer House, and Wentworth Woodhouse. The chapter convincingly explains Stuart’s seminal role in the history of neoclassical metalwork. Despite Adam’s success in the field, for firsts we must look to Stuart. Snodin’s essay brilliantly reveals what accomplished writing on the decorative arts can achieve. Combining scrupulous research, precise descriptions, and lively prose, Snodin compels readers to attend as carefully to the images as the text and allows us to engage Stuart through a small number of manageable, if still exquisite, forms.

The book is attractively designed with five hundred color illustrations and another one hundred black-and-white images. It includes a helpful appendix of the craftsmen associated with Stuart, a chronology, a checklist of the exhibition, a full bibliography, and an index. And yet for all this, the catalogue (even more than the exhibition) suffers from a notable conceptual misstep. It is not clear if this book ultimately is about James Stuart or The Antiquities of Athens. Admittedly, this is tricky terrain, as signaled by the start of the first chapter where Watkin judges that “despite the recent interest in establishing Stuart’s varied artistic oeuvre as a designer of everything from medals to buildings [i.e., the material covered in eight of the other essays], his most enduring achievement was Antiquities of Athens and the contribution to the creation of what we might call ‘the myth of Athens’” (19). While The Antiquities was undoubtedly essential to Stuart’s career, and while he was equally essential to its existence, the four-volume project was also the consequence of collaborative efforts, a point reinforced by the fact that three of the four installments appeared after Stuart’s death in 1788. Since the catalogue will serve as a standard source on The Antiquities, it would have been nice to hear more of Revett and his colleagues—men such Richard Chandler and William Pars, who are mentioned only in passing (Chandler and Pars traveled with Revett to Greece and Turkey in the mid-1760s and were vital for the second volume). To some extent, this issue of scope is difficult to surmount. At the least, however, more acknowledgment of the dilemma would have been appropriate. And this raises another regrettable omission: only the barest attention is paid to the historiographical context of the catalogue. Frank Salmon’s discussion of Jacob Landy’s 1956 Archaeology article is illuminating but all too exceptional (“Stuart and Revett: Pioneer Archaeologists." Archaeology 9 (1956): 252–59). Even a rough sketch through the secondary literature (however uneven it may be) would have been useful.

Still, in the face of what the exhibition and catalogue essays accomplish, these are negligible quips. Anyone whose work touches on Stuart and The Antiquities will find much here to appreciate. The book also propitiously coincides with Princeton Architectural Press’s publication of the complete four volumes of The Antiquities in the fall of 2007 and a growing interest in the Society of Dilettanti. Jason Kelly’s 2004 dissertation on the group, completed at the University of California at Santa Barbara (“Polite Sociability and Levantine Archaeology in the British Enlightenment: The Society of Dilettanti, 1732–1786”), is beginning to result in publications, and the J. Paul Getty exhibition on the Dilettanti planned by Bruce Redford for the summer of 2008 promises to be delightful. As comprehensive as James “Athenian” Stuart may be, it nonetheless plays the part of harbinger, whetting our appetites for what is yet to come.

In 1762, as the first volume of The Antiquities of Athens was going to press, the third volume of the official publication series documenting the artistic treasures of Herculaneum became available—at least to a minority of well-connected cultural elites who could leverage enough influence to secure a copy of the Delle antichità de Ercolano from the Real academia ercolanese. Supported by the Bourbon king Charles VII, the academy functioned as a scholarly extension of the Neapolitan court, which famously restricted access to the excavations around Vesuvius. In an attempt to clothe his reign in the grandeur of these ancient sites, Charles hoarded the findings and asserted exclusive claims over materials he realized would be of intense interest to connoisseurs, antiquaries, and artists across Europe. The strategy clashed with Enlightenment ideals of transparency and international cooperation, and, according to most scholars, it failed miserably. Certainly in terms of publications, Charles was unable to maintain a monopoly. As early as 1740 the Scottish painter Allan Ramsay submitted extracts of two letters describing finds to the Royal Society in London, and in 1754 Charles-Nicolas Cochin and Jérôme-Charles Bellicard published their Observations sur les antiquités de la ville d’Herculanum—two years before even the first volume of the official Antichità appeared.

This contested environment that pitted claims of local patrimony against cosmopolitan expectations of open access played a crucial role in the early reception of Herculaneum and Pompeii and underscored the degree to which knowledge of these buried cities would be mediated by larger cultural and political forces. Key episodes in that reception history, together with analysis of this mediation process, are recounted in Antiquity Recovered: The Legacy of Pompeii and Herculaneum, a fascinating collection of fourteen essays that guides the reader from 1538, when men and women in the Renaissance first had an opportunity to experience for themselves the subterranean forces of the Campi Flegrei, to the mid-twentieth century, when these sites that could so powerfully evoke melancholic loss and misunderstanding served as the setting for Roberto Rossellini’s 1953 Voyage in Italy and Jean-Luc Godard’s 1963 Contempt.

The collection is edited by Victoria Gardner Coates, an art-history lecturer at the University of Pennsylvania, and Jon Seydl, an associate curator of painting at the Getty Museum when the book initially appeared, though he has since been appointed curator at the Cleveland Museum of Art. Drawing from the fields of classics, art history, history, English literature, and comparative literature, the volume addresses broad methodological concerns along with specific works from the excavations, the place of these finds within classical scholarship and also in the popular imagination, and the role of politics in the early modern Bourbon court as well as in nineteenth-century America and Mussolini’s Italy. It leads from Naples to London to Philadelphia to Coney Island to Ann Arbor to Los Angeles and evokes a wide cast of characters along the way.

The volume emerged from a symposium held in conjunction with a 2002 exhibition at the Arthur Ross Gallery of the University of Pennsylvania, also organized by Coates and Seydl. While the show specifically considered the place of Pompeii and Herculaneum within Philadelphia collections, the symposium aimed to flesh out the larger international context. Five speakers were not included in the publication, and five contributing authors did not participate in the original conference; so the book is by no means a simple record of the proceedings. It is instead an impressively coherent group of essays that provides a compelling narrative and rewards reading from cover to cover. For this, the contributors and especially the editors are to be congratulated.

Following an introduction by Coates and Seydl, Sean Cocco offers an account of the geology around Naples and addresses the sixteenth- and seventeenth-century scrutiny of the area as scholars worked to collate ancient textual evidence with firsthand experience facilitated by the eruption of Monte Nuovo in 1538 and Vesuvius in 1631 (the latter had been largely silent since the twelfth century). The volcanic fields around the bay provided a unique opportunity to pursue both the study of storia civile and storia naturale; and as Cocco argues, the contributions of the early modern antiquaries helped establish the terms by which their eighteenth-century successors would approach the finds at Herculaneum and Pompeii.

Alden Gordon explains the political context from which the “Secret of Herculaneum” was born and how it was, in various ways, subverted. He is particularly useful for the critics of Charles VII’s policies as well as the covert activities of men such as Cochin and Bellicard. Engaging some of the same themes, Tina Najbjerg explores how the Antichità enshrined frescoes and artifacts as individual works of art, thereby disregarding—or worse, obliterating—their original contexts in favor of the autonomous, decorative object. Nonetheless, using the evidence of these publications together with images of frescoes copied onto pieces of porcelain (Charles founded a factory at Naples in 1743), Najbjerg attempts to restore some measure of iconographic unity by attending to the relationship between ancient pictures and their original viewers. Specifically, she interprets paintings of Hercules from the Porticus of Herculaneum as “didactic exempla” for the city’s youth. In a similar vein, Hérica Valladares addresses the Four Women from the Villa of Arianna in Stabiae, evaluating the iconographical problems of establishing their identities, issues of their original placement, and the degree to which ancient Romans might have been puzzled by our modern desires for fixed meanings in the first place.

In a stimulating essay, James Porter considers the reception history of the Herculaneum papyri—some two thousand individual rolls of texts that have alternately inspired ecstatic hope and irritable disappointment. Contrary to the longings of many early modern scholars (Winckelmann and William Wordsworth included), the carbonized texts contained not lost works of Sophocles or Euripides but more mundane Epicurean texts. Porter stresses the tensions between materialism (even ancient materialism) and the field of classics as traditionally constructed, reminding the reader that the “ancient” and “classical” labels are less interchangeable than common usage tends to imply. The collection of charred papyri highlights the aesthetic gulf between the harmonic ideas of Plato and the atomistic empiricism of Lucretius, even as the latter can itself be seen to serve certain classicizing agendas. Porter’s discussion of Winckelmann’s own conflicted use of Epicurus is especially intriguing.

Chloe Chard probes the discourse of taste and the curious frequency with which accounts of antiquarian exploration are interlaced with narratives of eating and drinking, while Claire Lyons and Marcia Reed survey the extensive array of visual resources in the Getty’s Research Library. This latter essay nicely complements Gordon’s piece and is fitting given that many of the book’s images, half of which appear in stunning color, come from the Getty’s excellent holdings.

Lee Behlman analyzes the nineteenth-century reception of Pompeii in Britain and the United States through the lens of the storied Sentinel of Pompeii. This stoic soldier who refused to abandon his position was a popular subject for Victorian literary treatments of Vesuvius’s eruption and provided the subject for Edward Poynter’s painting Faithful unto Death and a plaster-and-wax sculpture by Harriet Hosmer. Nick Yablon tackles related themes in his essay on James Pain’s “pyrodrama” of the destruction of Pompeii and the larger context of spectacle epitomized by the entertainments on offer at Coney Island. Reinforcing this spectatorial component, Eugene Dwyer discusses Giuseppe Fiorelli’s casts of ancient victims, which date to the 1860s and now underscore the extent to which the romantic imagination and the erotics of loss intermingled with more positivist notions of archaeological objectivity (Dwyer’s piece should be required reading for anyone who, like me, has ever shown photographs of these plaster forms with little sense of their historical origins).

The next two essays address the reception of the frescoes from the Villa of Mysteries, discovered in 1909. Elaine Gazda investigates the intersection of art, scholarship, and politics through a set of watercolor copies made in the 1920s by Maria Barosso for Francis Kelsey, professor of Latin at the University of Michigan. Bettina Bergmann attends to the ways in which access even to the ancient surfaces have been mediated—physically and psychologically. Balancing both material conditions and less tangible discourses tied to the role of desire and sexuality within knowledge production, Bergmann supplies an enthralling survey of how these now-famous “women of mystery” figured into the work of intellectuals and artists including Sigmund Freud, Jacques Lacan, Aby Warburg, Hélène Cixous, Patricia Olson, and David Cannon Dashiell.

In the final essay, Jennie Hirsh pursues this topic of ambiguous and multivalent eroticism, observing the ways in which this area around the Bay of Naples facilitated Rossellini and Godard’s explorations of emotional distance and the instability of meaning more generally. At its best, modern cinema insists upon how much we don’t know.

That Pompeii continues to resonate in the popular imagination can be seen from the success of the blockbuster exhibition Pompeii: Tales From an Eruption, which recently appeared in Chicago, Birmingham, and Houston. The show combined educational and aesthetic ambitions with appeals to entertainment values, demonstrating that the spectacle of Vesuvius has lost little of its mass-market attraction. Likewise, the impressive sales of Robert Harris’s 2003 novel, Pompeii —described already on the Birmingham Museum of Art’s website as “classic”—indicate that Antiquity Recovered will hardly be the final word on the reception history of these ancient cities. It is, for now, however, an insightful and satisfying summary.