Roman marble sculptures were often carved with built-in supports of two different kinds. Figural supports include tree stumps, weapons and the like. Anna Anguissola's book focuses on the other kind, non-figural struts. These are bars of various sizes connecting different parts of a sculpture, wedges under the non-weight-bearing foot, or rough lumps left at the back of the neck. Most scholars have dismissed struts as ugly and extraneous, an attitude exemplified by Georg Treu's suggestions in 1897 of ways to eliminate struts from plaster casts and photographs. Even today, struts suffer from a ‘presumption of invisibility’ (16) grounded in Kantian ideas about what is extrinsic or intrinsic to an artwork. The problem is that ancient Roman sculptors, patrons and viewers did not share these ideas. In this book, A. re-evaluates struts by looking closely at the material itself.
Modern explanations have been primarily functional. A. agrees that struts were primarily functional in purpose (205) but she shows that the existing explanations are insufficient: they do not fully account for the evidence and entail faulty assumptions. One long-standing explanation is that struts helped translate a Greek bronze original into a Roman marble copy. However, marble originals were also replicated with added struts, and struts regularly appear on sculptures that are not copies. A second explanation has focused on safety during transport, but A. points out that any movement of a sculpture, even from a workshop to a display location near by, risked damage. Moreover, some struts make no sense from a transport perspective; meanwhile, some sculptures that were demonstrably finished on site have struts. A third explanation has focused on balance and stability. Many marble sculptures required built-in supports, but some struts do not contribute to the work's stability and can even threaten it.
If struts were not purely functional, what were they for? There are no ancient writings about struts, so A. looks closely at individual sculptures. She stresses that there are no general rules; each sculpture has to be evaluated individually. Nonetheless, key ideas emerge. Struts were not meant to be invisible. They exist on otherwise highly finished sculptures; some are polished and even ornamented; struts were occasionally carved in obtrusive positions; numerous sculptures have unnecessary struts. All this points to the creation of deliberate visual effects, and A. explores these in ch. 6, to my mind the most original and interesting section of the book. She shows that struts could complement gestures, highlight movement and direct the viewer's gaze. For A., struts belong to what Peter Stewart has termed the ‘statuesque’, meaning all the ways a work calls attention to itself as a sculpture. Struts play with artifice and artfulness. As abstract complements, struts could frame a figure, highlight textures and contrasts, and call attention to the sculpture as a replica not of a living model but of an image. Struts also show off technical expertise, e.g. through deep and difficult undercutting, and attest to the conspicuous consumption of marble (ch. 7). A. further shows that struts vary enormously among replicas of the same model; she attractively suggests that, in this way, sculptors could simultaneously reproduce a form and creatively individualise it. This leads to an important broader observation: the cognitive process of recognition and comparison was a fundamental part of how originality and replication worked in Roman art (156).
The book's strengths will be evident by now. It is carefully researched and clearly written. The photographs are thoughtfully chosen (though not well reproduced). A.’s own drawings add visual support to her arguments. One measure of her success is the reader's surprise at encountering well-known statues whose struts one had never really seen before; a dramatic example is A.’s analysis of the Apoxyomenos in the Vatican (157–9). Her multi-faceted approach is productive and her individual analyses for the most part convincing. Her attention to changing contexts produces, along the way, a history of struts. Sculptural supports appeared in the sixth century b.c.e. and became important for leaning poses in the fourth century; by the late Hellenistic period, all the main forms of struts were already in use in Greek sculpture. In Roman sculpture, struts became common from the late Republic onward. The second century c.e. saw the peak availability of large blocks of marble as well as the floruit of struts between drapery folds or embellished with spiral grooves, all part of Antonine aesthetics. Struts remained popular into the fifth century, especially on miniatures.
I have only three criticisms. First, more quantitative precision would have been helpful. A.’s analysis is predominantly qualitative, and she does not explain how many sculptures are meant at key points, or what proportions of the total they represent. A small example: A. writes that the Large Herculaneum Woman type had a special association with neck struts (88), but by my count, only six replicas have these out of the more than 200 known. Second, A. does not consider labour flows and specialisation within workshops. However, the skilled sculptors responsible for the detailed carving of (e.g.) hands almost certainly did not do the unskilled drudgery of final polishing; the organisation of labour will also have affected the appearance of struts. Third, A.’s discussions are sometimes under-developed; I often wanted more interpretation and argumentation.
Ultimately, A.’s book changes the way we look at struts and at the sculptures to which they belong, with broader implications for questions of originality, replication and viewing in Roman visual culture.
