Collectors, Scholars, and Forgers in the Ancient World: Object Lessons by Carolyn Higbie

Abstract

Reviewed by: Collectors, Scholars, and Forgers in the Ancient World: Object Lessons by Carolyn Higbie Alexandra Bounia Carolyn Higbie. Collectors, Scholars, and Forgers in the Ancient World: Object Lessons. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017. xx + 276 pp. 31 black-and-white figs., 8 color plates. Cloth, $105. Tales about passionate collectors going to extremes to acquire the objects of their desire, or of knowledgeable connoisseurs who allied themselves with collectors or forgers, or worse, failed to recognize an authentic work of art when they encountered it, as well as of artists who directed their skills to help or deceive collectors and connoisseurs have fascinated academic and literary authors since antiquity. Many intricate and intriguing stories with villains and innocent admirers of beauty, stories of vanity, excitement, and/or deceit have informed the adaptations and tales that authors, script writers and film makers have used with varying degrees of success. Literary forgery has similarly attracted popular and academic attention, especially in the case of the books of the Bible and other religious texts (see, for instance, B. D. Ehrman, Forgery and Counter Forgery: The Use of Literary Deceit in Early Christian Polemics [Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013]). Medieval and biblical studies have focused their attention on literary deceit and evidence from various sources has been used to pursue specific academic queries or fascinating hypotheses. In the study of the classical world, forgery, copying, collecting and scholarship have not been brought together in a systematic manner. This has been partly the result of the surviving range of evidence and partly of the approaches chosen for the study of the material available to researchers. Copying and forgery have been studied mainly in light of Kopienkritik, and within the fields of archaeology and history of art (for a critique of Kopienkritik, see "Introduction" to E. K. Gazda, ed., The Ancient Art of Emulation [Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2002]; cf. P. Stewart, "Roman Copies?," CR 55.1 [2005]: 336–8); scholarship has been usually discussed in terms of ancient philology or even antiquarianism (see, for instance F. Montanari and L. Pagani, eds., From Scholars to Scholia. Chapters in the History of Ancient Greek Scholarship [Berlin: De Gruyter, 2011]); whereas collecting in the ancient world has only recently started to attract scholarly attention (for a comprehensive bibliography and a selected set of articles, see M. W. Gahtan and D. Pegazzano, eds., Museum Archetypes and Collecting in the Ancient World [Leiden: Brill, 2014]). Carolyn Higbie's book contributes to this discussion by bringing together many of these approaches but also combining them with perspectives from anthropology and cultural studies. She aims to shed light on the relationship between people and the material world that surrounded them in antiquity, while at the same time offering a fascinating collection of stories and evidence regarding copyists, collectors and scholars in the ancient world. The main focus of the book is forgery in ancient Greek and Roman traditions; nevertheless, in order to explore this topic, the author starts with collectors and collecting as a major incentive for forgery. She aims to discuss how forgery was perceived in antiquity, how collecting and scholarship encouraged and facilitated [End Page 716] it, and thus moves beyond cultural hierarchies and intellectual understandings that have been prevalent in classical scholarship for decades. In addition, she aims to combine literary and material testimonies and to discuss forgery in a holistic way, as a phenomenon that brings together works of art in all media. Therefore, the book covers a broad range of areas and topics: from Greek and Roman traditions to written and visual resources. Furthermore, she uses analogies with personalities, resources, and circumstances of more recent periods not only to attract readers' attention and curiosity, but also to draw comparisons and identify patterns; thus, the book employs scholarship that has developed in other fields, such as anthropology, and museum and cultural studies. The book consists of four chapters. The first discusses collecting in the ancient world, using as a starting point and an analogy the case of Charles Townley, arguing that he and his contemporaries could offer a "partial model for Greek collectors of the Hellenistic era and for Roman collectors from the...