American Journal of Philology

Since the 1995 publication of his Art and the Roman Viewer (Cambridge), Jaś Elsner has been reminding students of ancient, but especially Roman and Late Antique culture, of the distance between standard academic approaches to the description and valuation of art and the way in which contemporaneous audiences might have perceived and participated in the artistic culture of their times. His period-oriented explorations of vision and the subjectivity of viewing experience also incorporate verbal perspectives drawn from ekphrasis, to whose growing popularity among literary scholars his work has made significant contributions. No small part of Elsner's interdisciplinary orientation is his background as a Cambridge-trained classicist, as witness his philological engagement with the texts of Pausanius and other Second Sophistic writers; but, even so, the range of his interests from Athens to Syria and beyond is unusual in its breadth. Similarly broad is the range of venues for his publication, many of which have appeared in conference collections or anthologies on other than strictly classical themes. For the benefit of classicists to whom these venues may well be unfamiliar, the book under review makes available a number of essays published during the past fifteen years but revised for the occasion to incorporate the concept of gazing as their hypothetical thread of unity.

Although, as Elsner observes in his prologue, before the 1990s little had been said in classical studies about the gaze, already long incorporated into the theoretical discourse of literary and art history in non-classical fields, a great deal has subsequently been said and much of it rather fuzzily undefined. Currently [End Page 284] there seem to be as many versions of gazing afloat as there are gazing interpreters, many of them merely simplistic in invoking "the gaze" as a high-flown manner of reference to a lascivious leer. Simplistic Elsner is not, as the concluding premise of his prologue can witness: "My focus . . . is on the pattern of cultural constructs and social discourses that stand between the retina and the world" (vxii). With an emphasis on cultural constructs, Elsner's previous approach has positioned the ancient receiver as viewer or spectator, emphasizing the contribution of subjectivity that diversifies individual experiences. The difference perhaps between what Elsner calls the personal gaze and spectatorship is expanded dimensions of subjectivity that incorporate concerns of sexuality, identity, and the self-conscious awareness of the viewer being viewed. Or, as Elsner defines it in a manner appropriate to a concept that originated with Lacan (xi):

when we turn to the "gaze" we move from the material and objective into the world of subjectivities. This is a realm of fantasy, impression, and creativity—framed, certainly, by the particular objects on which the gaze may fasten in specific contexts—but nonetheless subject to all kinds of psychological (and indeed psychopathological) investments, both collective and individual, to which our historical, documentary, and visual sources usually fail to give access.

Although the schedule of contents groups the essays under the major headings of "discourses" and "viewings," these categories are in effect permeable since similar considerations pervade all the discussions. However, to break down the conspectus of content further, among the essays' key themes are problems of "naturalism" as a species of illusion and as a provocation of desire (which the more it convinces, all the more it deceives), the function of art in ritual both ancient and late antique, the way in which art objects serve their community, the imposition of Romanitas upon societies of other cultural heritages, the relationship of descriptive or interpretive verbiage to art, and the animation of cultural memory as a means of reentering the past. The principal and recurrent texts are those of Pausanius and Lucian with occasional resort to the additional second sophistic writers Philostratus and Callistratus as well as to Ovid and Vergil where their narratives engage issues of reading and of creation. The corresponding subject range proceeds both geographically and chronologically from...