Pliny's Statue
The Letters, Self-Portraiture and Classical Art

"John Henderson's Pliny's Statue is a wonderful account of the complex interrelationship between art, text and self-portraiture in the letters of the Younger Pliny. Written with Henderson's characteristic richness of ideas, each page sparkling with original observations, this book denies us any easy pigeon-holing of word and image in Roman imperial culture. Instead we are shown a confidant of emperors obsessed with his own monumentalization - both in his writings and in the art works he handles. . . Whose concerns stand for an elite equally obsessed. For the student of Roman art, this book explicates the purchase, display and inscriptional commentary on statues in Pliny's world with a panache and subtlety that is quite unrivalled."
(Jas Elsner, Corpus Christi College Oxford and author of Art and the Roman Viewer: The Transformation of Art from the Pagan World to Christianity (1997))

‘this is probably a book for teachers and undergraduates, not least to demonstrate that a thoroughly academic book can also be a great read.’
(Pliny’s Statue: The Letters, Self-Portraiture and Classical Art JACT Review 33 2003)

‘This acute and challenging monograph…’
(New England Classical Journal, 11/2006)