This is a lavishly illustrated book with 97 figures in the text and at the end a catalogue of 186 items, all with an illustration. Thus, a veritable treasure trove for the comprehension of the representation of age and ageing, with items drawn from museum collections from across the world and from private collections.
The book takes its starting point from the literary sources for old age, that bifurcate into a catastrophic old age and an old age of liberation (ch. 1); this leads into ch. 2 and the discussion of pictorial signs of old age, from which the reader moves to chapters on veneration (ch. 3), wisdom (ch. 4) and the ‘aged sage’ (ch. 5). There is a change of tack in ch. 6, looking at ambiguous images, and this is followed by a chapter on derision of the elderly, before a final chapter on the elderly in myth.
How the elderly are identified is discussed in ch. 2 with M. seeing the elderly identified by white hair — particularly in Greek vases: grey hair; beards, thinning or stippled hair; baldness; beards; wrinkles; sagging flesh and emaciation/prominent tendons/varicose veins; toothlessness; blindness; stooped posture; reduced scale and clothing/attributes — for example, walking sticks.
Methodologically, this seems at first sight okay, but if we look beyond the field of Classical Art, we find a much more sophisticated set of methods being applied to images of people ageing. The study of self-portraits in early modern Europe has utilised recent knowledge derived from the study of the ageing face within plastic and reconstructive surgery (see, for example, Abastado et al., Ageing and Society 25 (2005), 147–58). When applied to works by artists such as Rembrandt, who repeatedly painted his self-portrait and dated his work, there is a means for comprehending how age is represented. Rembrandt died at the age of sixty-three, an age if transposed to the discussion of the elderly in antiquity that is certainly in the category of old age — over sixty years. Moreover, many of the characteristics that M. applies can appear at an earlier age than sixty — the assumed start of old age in most life-course schemas from the ancient world. Interestingly, signs of ageing appear much earlier than sixty years and, in the case of Rembrandt's face, as early as thirty-five years, with the period from forty-five to fifty years associated with major facial ageing. This information may allow us to consider the artistic representation of age to be associated with those over the age of forty-five rather than over the age of sixty. This coincides with the age division in Rome between juniores and seniores (Livy 1.43; Varro ap Censorinus 14). Thus, the images of old age cover not just the senex over the age of sixty, but also the senior over the age of forty-six.
If we are to accept that images that show M.'s characteristics of ageing could be both seniores and senes, we encounter an immediate difficulty in reading across from the visual sources to the texts that refer exclusively to senes over the age of sixty. This is implicit in any case, because the book includes Marcus Aurelius as an example of an emperor in old age, but he died prior to his sixtieth birthday. Yet this is resisted; he is described in the text as prematurely ageing (98–9). As in the example of Rembrandt, there are images of Marcus Aurelius over a period of decades — thus presenting an opportunity for more nuanced analysis of the ageing face in antiquity. It is also notable that some of M.'s categories of ageing overlap with those of disability (e.g. blindness) — in some ways age and ageing are debilitating. Thus, when we select imagery of old age, we are selecting against a perfectly formed body without any attributes of ageing. Yet in the book some images, such as figure 27, a funerary relief of five family members, includes a figure with a prominent naso-genial fold, who is identified as the son and grandson of the other four figures who do appear to be older. These identifications are assumptions — these five figures could equally be adults associated in non-familial ways. On another funerary group, figure 26, the relief for Lucius Vibius, Vecilia Helia and their son Lucius Vibius Felicio Felix, M. comments ‘Both [adults] look older than one would expect of parents of a young boy’, going on to add ‘but the boy may have died years before the relief was created’ (61). Our expectations of how old a person may appear are quite subjective, and harder lives lead to the more rapid appearance of the facial features of ageing. It is clear, even within the examples in this book, that ageing was placed into representations of people by artists in antiquity, well before they were old (senes), and the characteristics in images identified in this book for the elderly and old age could represent persons at a much earlier age. There would appear to be a misfit between this visual evidence of ageing and the representation of old age focused on Cato the Elder, living to the age of eighty-five, or Seneca the Younger, living into his sixties, discussed at the start of the book as a means of scene-setting for the discussion of the many examples of ageing faces and bodies assembled in this book.
Putting these methodological issues to one side, this is a truly beautiful book with a huge variety of images; students now have a starting point to begin the work to understand how ageing was represented — so long as we acknowledge that the visual signals of what we call old age can occur far earlier than the age of sixty.
