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...