In chapter 1, after a brief discussion of “Greek art, the idea of freedom, and the creation of modern high culture,” which treads mostly familiar ground, Tanner takes on some twentieth-century accounts of ancient art and (unsurprisingly) finds them wanting—too literary, too anachronistic, and so on. His own (quasi-Parsonian and somewhat jargon-filled) solution is to characterize art as a form of expressive cultural symbolism, constructing “affective experience on the basis of cultural-level codifications of sensuous form generated in some degree of abstraction from immediate social relationships” (21). He then mobilizes Karl Weber’s concept of rationalization to account for art’s different trajectories at different times and places, concluding (again unsurprisingly, though now with less jargon and a welcome attention to the ancient sources) that the Greek invention of the polis and the mindset that it nurtured—rationalist, logocentric, and holistic—shaped the course of ancient Greek art. All this sets the stage for chapter 2, grandly entitled “Rethinking the Greek Revolution: Art and Aura in an Age of Enchantment.” Tanner focuses on the shift around 480 BCE from archaism to naturalism in the “cult” statues of the Olympians, a term that he uses indiscriminately for temple statues and votives. Mobilizing an array of...