DAVID S. NEAL & STEPHEN R. COSH. Roman mosaics of Britain. Volume III: south-east Britain (in 2 parts). xx+288 pages, 531 b&w & colour illustrations. 2009. London: Society of Antiquaries of London; 978-0-85431-289-4 hardback £200.

It is only seven years since the first volume of the corpus appeared, but with the publication of this survey of the south-east the project to publish all known Roman mosaics in Britain is substantially complete. This is an extraordinary effort of scholarship by any standards, all the more remarkable because of the relative neglect of art in many Roman provinces.

With its high production standard, lavish paintings and other illustrations, and its list of distinguished subscribers, this volume is more than a little evocative of the monumental publications of the eighteenth-century antiquaries, who are mentioned at the start. But this is also a highly professional modern work of documentation which far surpasses many catalogues of classical art from the past half-century in its rigour and detail.

The concise introduction begins by summarising the physical and human geography of the counties covered (the Home Counties of southern England plus Bedfordshire and Hampshire). The descriptions of the tribal territories here might be open to question, while an uncompromising reference to 'the official policy of Romanization' (p. 5) is beyond controversial, but such historical problems hardly matter for the documentation that follows. The rest of the introduction describes the typology of the villas and urban houses from which nearly all the mosaics were recovered, and briefly explains their distribution within such buildings. Finally, and most importantly, it surveys the evolving design of mosaics in the region, which appear at Fishbourne and elsewhere within a few decades of the conquest of AD 43 and die out before the end of the fourth century (in fact villa-occupation in the region appears to dwindle surprisingly early, before AD 350). The boom in mosaic production in the south-east begins in the later second century and is loosely linked to the construction and reconstruction of buildings in masonry. The authors generally shy away from attributions of mosaics to 'workshops' although they are happy to distinguish geographical groupings and traditions according to designs and motifs. In most cases they avoid making claims about what those formal groupings might reveal in terms of relationships between craftsmen or patterns of patronage — which is probably wise. The introduction includes a useful list of figurative subjects from the various sites.

The catalogue itself is comprehensive and detailed, and includes even very fragmentary reports of very fragmentary mosaics (and the past recording of mosaics, even in the twentieth century, leaves much to be desired). It is organised alphabetically by county and place name, with short, general introductions to each county and the larger sites. These are helpful in explaining, for example, unpredictable patterns in the apparent distribution of finds. Where possible, the entries record the location and broader context of the mosaics, frequently marking them on a building plan. Tiny groups of tesserae receive line drawings where they can cast some light on larger decorative schemes. Colours and dimensions of tesserae are described (not always materials, though this subject is covered generally in the introduction). There is discussion of dating evidence, of relationships between mosaics and patterns, and of course the iconography. Less evident is consideration of the technical characteristics of the mosaics and their bedding, though this is often simply impossible to study. (This is very much a survey of mosaics as flat art.) There is a very proper tendency to report debates rather than taking sides dogmatically (for instance, on the function of the Silchester 'church', the meaning of the Thruxton Bacchus mosaic's inscription, or the ownership of the villa at Fishbourne). Discussions are up-to-date, taking account of recent publications, and indeed unpublished reports (as in the case of Brading villa).

The catalogue's illustrations are so beautiful and plentiful as to be almost beyond reproach. But perhaps not quite. The illustration of the individual mosaics is not uncontroversial since it relies heavily on meticulous paintings for which the author-illustrators, Neal and Cosh, have become well known. Like architectural elevations, aperspectival paintings of mosaics, produced with the aid of grids, have a certain advantage over the monocular distortions of photography, but they are less suited to explaining the context of the works within rooms or anything like the viewers' experience of them, and while no kind of image objectively records the colours of mosaics, the pigments of the paintings lend them a rather doubtful homogeneity. Nevertheless, in practice these concerns are outweighed by the documentary value of the pictures.

In important respects, this volume offers a different kind of evidence from the previous instalments of the corpus, not only because of the quantity, quality and diversity of the mosaics, but more specifically because of the settlement patterns and architectural character of south-east England. The rapid pacification of the south-east resulted in early traces of Roman-style villa-culture, and we have a wealth of recorded mosaics from major towns, particularly St Albans, Colchester, Silchester, and of course some 130 mosaics from London. This makes for interesting comparison and analysis; for example, an appendix discusses differences in relative mosaic size between the largest towns. It also falls to this volume to document the enormous 'palace' at Fishbourne is Sussex, which once had around 2500m² of finely executed, Flavian or Trajanic mosaics. The buildings and its decorations barely fit any patterns for Britain. The closest parallels are in France and Italy — some of the mosaics would not seem out of place on the Bay of Naples, although they are rather too grand for Stabiae or Oplontis — and in this case there could have been more discussion of the Continental parallels and their significance. Yet this is a corpus, not a book about mosaics, and it offers an excellent foundation for many kinds of future research, across provincial boundaries as well as within Roman Britain.

Book Review