Although The Animated Image addresses images and texts which are well worn staples of much recent work in the history of ancient art, Stijn Bussels' book brings a new perspective to these materials through the breadth of its focus. The fundamental thesis of the book is that image animation is a feature not just of Greco-Roman art and literature, but needs to be seen in the context of a wider range of cultural practices — in particular rhetoric, pantomime, theatre and even such para-theatrical institutions as élite funerals and public executions.
An introduction — grounded in an analysis of Lucian's Lover of Lies, with its animated statue of a Corinthian general, heard singing in the bath at night — sketches the key themes of the book, and the theoretical perspectives which inform it, notably Jas Elsner's analysis of Roman visualities, and the anthropologist Alfred Gell's account of art as agency.
The first chapter looks at anecdotes in Pliny's art history with a focus on the issue of image animation. It then explores these in a broader context of concepts and practices of image animation in late Republican and early Imperial Rome, with a particular emphasis on the distinction between popular identifications of image with reality and a repeated insistence on the ‘as if’ of élite writers discussing their own social group's participation in equivalent practices of animation, such as the impersonation of ancestors by their wax-mask-clad descendants in élite funerary commemorations.
Ch. 2 is concerned with animated images in rhetoric, in particular with enargeia and energeia. It traces these concepts back to fourth-century Greek philosophy and rhetorical theory, and shows how the epistemological issues concerning the status of vivid visual representations — as well as the practical issues of how to engender them by means of words alone — is explored in Hellenistic and Roman rhetorical and literary texts from Cicero to Philostratus.
The third chapter starts from Callistratus' (late third/early fourth-century a.d.) ekphrasis of Lysippus' Bacchante. B. explores the concept of image-making implicit in Callistratus' description of Lysippus as both a prophetes, inspired by a divine pneuma, and the master of rational techne. As B. points out, this is a rather unusual account of the rôle of the sculptor, and he traces the two components of this rôle definition back through Horace, Aristotle, Plato, Pindar and so on — though with the emphasis very much on poets, rather than visual artists, with the consequence that the context and significance of Callistratus' quite striking innovations are rather lost.
Ch. 4, in many ways the most original and stimulating, at least from the perspective of an art historian, explores the broader ramifications of ideas concerning truth, imitation and animation in the context of a broader range of performative practices. B. explores the rôle of actors and orators in bringing to life events or characters, exploring the different degrees to which the performer ‘conceal[s] the representational aspect of their own performance’ (112) and masks their own identity in trying to present a living scene in the very different contexts of a murder trial or a tragic drama. Pantomime raises similar issues of literal and ‘as if’ responses on the part of audiences, but also the intriguing concept of a kind of inverse ekphrasis, where the audience might claim even to be able to hear the words of the characters, if the gestural language of the mime artists was sufficiently articulate. The chapter concludes with an interesting discussion of Martial's account of the public executions staged as enactments of famous scenes from mythology (Pasiphae and the Dictaean Bull, Meleager and the Caledonian boar) participating in the same cultural logic as ekphrastic image animation, but taken to the level of hyper-reality.
The last substantive chapter explores the issue of the animation of cult images, discussing examples already largely familiar to most art historians from the discussions of Richard Gordon and Verity Platt, and without very much new to contribute, though it is good to see Lucian's criticism of image worship in On Sacrifices being discussed alongside that of his contemporary, the Christian Clement, in his Protrepticus. An Epilogue, discussing responses to Praxiteles' Aphrodite of Cnidus, resumes some of the key themes of the book.
Inevitably, given the range of the materials covered in the book, and its rather short length, readers may come away with the feeling that the analysis of many of the specific examples is perhaps too superficial. And Gell's analytical framework, much trumpeted on the book jacket and in the introduction, actually plays rather a marginal rôle, if any, in informing by far the majority of the analysis; this is a shame, since a more systematic resort to Gell could have helped to bring out in an analytically much sharper way the continuities and differences between the various modes of image animation which B. discusses, and in particular their sociological underpinnings. That said, B.'s contribution should help to broaden the range of the debate about image animation in the classical world, and should be welcomed for that.
The book is well produced, apart from a rather too generous sprinkling of typos and other errata. There is, however, one perverse choice made by the publishers and editors, which one might wish not to see repeated: namely a bibliography in alphabetical order by surname but with first-names, rather than surnames, placed first (for example Jas Elsner, rather than Elsner, Jas), which is extremely tiresome when one is scanning though the bibliography to find a reference.
