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ELSNER, J., Art and the Roman Viewer. The Transformation of Art from the Pagan World to Christianity. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge (...), 1995. XXVI,375p. ills.(B&W as well as a few full colour phtographs). Original black cloth with dust wrps. Dus wrps near tail spine slightly wrinkled. 'Like many art historians before him, Elsner sets out in this book to explain the well-known stylistic transformationof art in the Roman Empire from an essentially naturalistic and illusionistic style in the first century to an increasingly abstract and symbolic style in Late Antiquity and the Early Christian period. Because ‘meaning depends as much on what the viewer brings to interpretation as it does on the actual object he or she interprets’, the most useful key to explaining this change, he proposes, is not formal analysis of stylistic changes but rather an understanding of how ancient viewers were predisposed to look at art. About half of the book is therefore devoted to an exploration of ancient texts in order to discover ‘the different conceptual frameworks which interpret what is seen to make it meaningful’’, and the remainder is devoted to illustrating how these modes of viewing can help us to understand both the form and content of a select group of major monuments. In essence E. Discovers two fundamental ways of viewing art. One is a ‘secular’ mode in which the viewer ambivalently colludes with the overt premise of the work of art (…). The other is an ‘initiate’ or ‘exegetic’ mode in which the artist tries to convey, and viewers strive to discern, a higher truth in the work of art (…). E. makes clear, in a quite original analysis of the ‘Imagines’ of Philostratos (ironic and deconstructive) and the ‘Tabula’ of Cebes (exegesis fro pagan true believers), that the relationship between these two ways of seeing is not diachronic. Nor is it a question of a pagan versus a Christian outlook (…). E.’s account of the nature of viewing in various ancient authors is often original and is one of the strong points in the book. His reading of Cebes as a testimony for pagan initiate viewing, for example, gives a new and significant dimension to this neglected text; he enlivens Philostratos’ often tedious rhetorical exercises by discovering passages that expose the complexity involved in viewing illusionistic paintings (…). More problematical, however, are his commentaries on how understanding the conceptual framework with which ancient views approached art helps us to understand what particular works of art we’re really all about. (…) The broad range of scholarship, both archaeological and literary, that E. Brings to bear on this topic is impressive, but his text is often marred, it seems to me, by an unfortunate tendency to attribute simplistic views to other art historians in the roman field. (…) Obviously this is not simply another positives study of the stylistic development of Roman art. It is an often original, frequently stimulating, and altogether quite unusual book.’ (J.J. POLLITTin The Journal of Hellenic Studies, 1997, pp.265-266). € 195.00 (Antiquarian) ISBN: 9780521453547