Technical studies focusing on the materials used, the methods and tools employed, and the craftsmen responsible for artistic production have a long history in scholarship on Roman and, to a lesser extent, Greek sculpture. Interest in the practicalities and logistics of sculptural production can be traced from the early works of H. Blümner (Technologie und Terminologie der Gewerbe und Künste bei Griechen und Römern [1912]) and C. Blümel (Griechische Bildhauerarbeit [1927]), through S. Adam's study of Archaic and Classical carving (The Technique of Greek Sculpture in the Archaic and Classical Period [1966]), to more recent analyses by J.-C. Bessac (L'outillage traditionnel du tailleur de pierre, de l'Antiquité à nos jours [1986]), M. Pfanner (‘Über das Herstellen von Porträts’, JDAI 104 [1989], 157–257) and P. Rockwell (The Art of Stoneworking [1993]), among others. This previously niche subject has increasingly positioned itself in the mainstream of ancient art history and major new studies like those by P. Stewart (The Social History of Roman Art [2008]) and J. Trimble (Women and Visual Replication in Roman Imperial Art and Culture [2011]) devote whole chapters to questions of production.

This volume, then, follows a well-trodden path, though the primary objects that are its main focus have never been systematically examined from this perspective. The specified aim of this volume is to explore the relationship between craftsmen and their customers through the lens of the sculptures created and used by these individuals, and in so doing examine the mechanisms which conditioned the production of sculpture more generally in the Roman world. In particular, D. is interested in models and how sculptors worked with their customers to translate these models into three-dimensional marble sculptures. To do this, two main datasets are drawn on: inscriptions mentioning sculptors and their workshops, of which a useful appendix is provided; and a range of finished and part-finished sculptures, principally from second-century a.d. Rome and Tivoli.

The volume is divided into three main sections. The first of these concentrates on the broader question of how the relationship between craftsmen and customers might have functioned, the cost of production and the difficulties associated with identifying the output of specific workshops. Some of this is valuable, especially those sections dealing directly with the material from Rome and Tivoli, which clearly demonstrate how the sculptors responsible for this material adapted particular sculptural types and motifs in response (presumably) to cliental demands. The rest of this section draws together primary evidence for the cost of raw materials, of labour and of finished sculpture, as well as data relating to the specialisation of craftsmen and the organisation of production. Some of this is dealt with too superficially, however, to be really useful to specialists in the field and much recent work on the provenancing of marble, on quarry-based production of stone objects and on the transport of these materials is not referred to. Occasional assertions are crying out for supporting evidence; the statement that funerary monuments were carved by specialist sculptors, for instance.

The issue of workshop output is dealt with in more detail in the second section. A well-constructed discussion of the history of scholarship in this area, especially as it concerns the adaptation of Greek sculptural types and the production of Roman portraits, leads on to a critique of the methodology employed to assign bodies of work to common producers. Particular influence is drawn from C. Gasparri's work on the Lateran Sophocles (‘Il Sofocle lateranense: nuove considerazioni su un'officina di scultori di età medioimperiale’, RPAA 78 [2005–6], 139–81) and C. Evers' study of the portraits of Hadrian (Les portraits d'Hadrien, typologie et ateliers [1994]). Using a comparable methodological framework D. then turns to her main datasets which, despite the volume's broad title, consist of just four defined groups of material: eighteen sculptures from Hadrian's Villa (Groups I-A and I-B); seven from various locations in Rome, including the Horti Lamiani and the Tomb of the Licinii, as well as Ostia (Group II); seven from, or thought to be from, the tomb of Claudia Semne on the Via Appia (Group III); and six from the tomb of the Manilii (Group IV). This selection is explained by the fact that D. is keen to examine a range of material that is broadly contemporary (second century a.d.), that is from known archaeological contexts, but that was also employed for quite different purposes and commissioned by individuals from differing social backgrounds. Based on a close examination of the form of each of these sculptures – especially key details, such as their eyes, hair and surface treatment – D. argues that the material from Hadrian's Villa can be assigned to two groups of carvers who were clearly closely related and perhaps worked together on occasion; the high-end sculpture from Rome and Ostia, meanwhile, is credited to an unrelated third workshop, and the assorted finds from the pair of tombs to two further sets of craftsmen. Analysis of this kind has its critics but the close study of the primary material that forms the core of this volume is generally sensible and well-reasoned, and the identification of the different hands at work is plausible.

In the third and final section, D. turns to the question of how these various sculptures were actually manufactured. This is essentially a discussion of copying, of the production and transmission of models (in clay or plaster) and of how sculptors translated and adapted models during the carving process. Some of this will sit uneasily with those familiar with the lengthy discussions of copying, replication and emulation – most of it more than simply semantic – that has dominated studies of Roman sculpture in English for a little over a decade (see especially the essays in E. Gazda [ed.], The Ancient Art of Emulation. Studies in Artistic Originality and Tradition from the Present to Classical Antiquity [2002] and E. Perry, The Aesthetics of Emulation in the Visual Arts of Ancient Rome [2005]). However, there is as much in this section on experimentation and the creation of new models – which D. sees as being characteristic of second-century sculpture in central Italy – as there is on the repetitive production of the best-known sculptural types. D. also stresses that there existed no system in the Roman period for the exact, or even near-exact, replication of three-dimensional objects, the pointing machine being demonstrably a later invention. This is an important point that is too often glossed over (P. Rockwell, The Art of Stoneworking [1993], pp. 118–20). This being said, the focus on models in this section is somewhat limiting. Few securely identified sculptural models survive from the Roman period and while it is repeatedly assumed that marble carvers would always have employed models (sometimes one-to-one in scale), many sculptors throughout history have worked just from drawings or from memory, especially when trained by rote to carve a limited canon of forms.

While the first and third sections of this volume might disappoint experts in the field of Roman sculptural techniques, at its heart this is a detailed, methodical analysis of four groups of marble sculptures from second-century Rome and Tivoli. It is well illustrated (though some images are inexplicably repeated) and it will interest anyone studying this material or other products of the same period or region.