Sheila Dillon’s Ancient Greek Portrait Sculpture: Contexts, Subjects, and Styles does not attempt to present a comprehensive history of Greek portraiture, but focuses on anonymous portraits that cannot be definitively associated with any historical individuals. Dillon neatly eschews vexing questions of specific identity, and the resulting volume is a compelling exploration of formal, theoretical, and contextual issues fundamental to the very genre of portraiture itself. In effect, Dillon disengages from previous preoccupations with individual identification and effectively rescues these mostly anonymous portraits from the general scholarly obscurity in which they have long languished.

Dillon rigorously applies methodologies derived from Kopienkritik to establish a corpus of 108 surviving portraits, of which 31 exist in multiple replicas, and 77 in single examples. Her first chapter, “Facing Up to Anonymity,” directly addresses the lack of identity and consequent invisibility of her images, many of which fail to appear in any studies of Greek portraiture. Dillon’s conscientious rejection of prevailing formulations of Zeitgeist allows her to reposition these images both chronologically and stylistically. Dillon’s repudiation of period consciousness, however, may be too sweeping; even these sculptures clearly reflect the artistic concerns of their primarily Roman imperial artists and patrons.

For Dillon the fourth-century BCE emerges as the time of greatest artistic innovation in Greek portraiture, a position that is confirmed in Pliny’s account of Lysistratus, the brother of Lysippus, as the originator of realistic representation (HN 35.153). For Pliny, Lysistratus is the first sculptor to inject likeness (similitudo) into portraiture; John Pollini has recently explored the profound implications of Lysistratus’s innovation for the concomitant rise of Roman veristic portraiture and elite self-fashioning (John Pollini, “Ritualizing Death in Republican Rome: Memory, Religion, Class Struggle, and the Wax Ancestral Mask Tradition’s Origin and Influence on Veristic Portraiture,” in Performing Death: Social Analyses of Funerary Ritual in the Ancient Near East and Mediterranean [Oriental Institute Seminars 3], Nicola Laneri, ed., Chicago: University of Chicago, 2007, 237–85). Despite Pliny’s assertions concerning Lysistratus’s accomplishments, Dillon acknowledges that representational accuracy never became a core priority for Greek portrait artists, and, unlike past commentators, she does not see a chronological progression of increasing realism in her material. In this regard, Dillon misses an opportunity to explore the separate trajectories of Greek and Roman portraiture which would have helped her clarify further the defining characteristics of the Greek images.

Dillon’s second chapter, “Making Portraits of the Greeks,” raises issues concerning the mechanics of portrait production. Her discussion of “models” can be somewhat confusing, even for portrait specialists, as there is considerable slippage between concepts of model and prototype. While it may not be possible to strictly apply notions of prototypes and replica series derived from Roman imperial portraiture to a majority of these sculptures, the fact that many are singletons begs the question that they may, in fact, be Roman creations consciously reflecting and reviving earlier stylistic modes.

Chapter 3, “Displaying Portraits of the Greeks,” focuses on the dynamics of display. Here, Dillon highlights the “archival and commemorative” aspects of Greek portraits in Roman domestic environments. She demonstrates how repeated viewings of portrait collections such as that at the Villa of the Papyri helped to shape and frame the meaning of these images that also unfold and develop over time. Dillon suggests that the display of portraits of Hellenistic rulers and Greek intellectuals in garden settings promotes Roman political superiority and that abbreviated portraits on busts and herms “cut down to size” “once great rulers and thinkers of the Greek East.” This formulation, however, is simplistic and clearly fails to take into account the Roman conception of both the bust and herm formats as highly honorific and often used for emperors and other members of the imperial family as well as for funerary commemorations of private citizens. In addition, Roman portraits themselves were also displayed in garden contexts, so this is unlikely to be a pejorative form of display.

Chapter 4, “The Appearance of Greek Portraits,” addresses the physical appearance of Greek portraits. Dillon notes significant points of comparison between the three-dimensional portraits and Greek funerary stelae. Dillon loosely divides the portraits into mature male and elderly male categories, and she carefully analyzes details of physiognomy, coiffeur, and beard for each. She also makes the important observation that, until the Hellenistic period at least, Greek portraits always consisted of head and body together. Dillon does not include here Roman painted portraits of intellectuals primarily found in domestic ensembles, but they tend to consolidate her conclusions.

Dillon’s final chapter, “Greek Portraits in Practice,” suggests that “portraits are more performative than descriptive,” and successfully challenges the rigid delineation of portrait categories and their linear stylistic development. For example, Dillon demonstrates that the identification of an a priori “poet type” is essentially impossible. For Dillon, these intellectualized images are not conformist, nor do they constitute an intellectual alterity. Rather, they are deliberately ambiguous in terms of representing intellectually engaged citizens and civically involved intellectuals. As a result, there are no rigidly circumscribed categorical boundaries between representations of “men of thought” and “men of action.” Throughout, Dillon consistently employs a more flexible approach to these portraits derived from the work of Klaus Fittschen (“Zur Mantelstatue aus dem Heraion von Samos,” in Agalma: meletes gia ten archaia plastike pros timen tou Despine, D. Pandermalis, M. Tiverios, and E. Voutiras, eds., Thessaloniki: Hypergeio Politismou, 2001, 325–32), and she persuasively argues against the more sweeping generalizations set forth by Paul Zanker (The Mask of Socrates: The Image of the Intellectual in Antiquity, Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995).

Ancient Greek Portrait Sculpture: Contexts, Subjects, and Styles features two useful appendices including a museum index, an indispensable component of serious works of this type, as well as a portrait catalogue. The book is meticulously footnoted, although there is some degree of repetition, such as page 49, note 92. Ultimately Dillon’s work considerably expands the range of images that must considered under the rubric of Greek portrait sculpture. She has immeasurably enriched the ongoing dialogue by reassessing the very nature of ancient portraiture.