Customer Reviews

3,000 Decorative Patterns of the Ancient World (Dover Pictorial Archive)

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I LOVE Dover books as a resource for art forms and designs for my work. Their 'Pictorial Archive' series consists largely of images that are of art in public domain and I have often searched out my own design resources from books on history, archaeology, etc; finding a design on an antique Oriental carpet here and another on an urn there. This can be fun, like a scavenger hunt, but is a lot of work with many books or sources yielding only one or two inspirations and so I find these Dover 'collections' of designs most valuable. With an eye to cost though, I do like to see inside the book before I buy. If I can find the book at the Library, I will check a copy out before making the decision of whether the book has enough potential inspiration to be worth the price, but many are not available in my community and so the 'Look Inside This Book' feature played a big role in my decision to purchase this book. With 3,000 decorative patterns featured, there is a lot of bang for the buck in this particular book. Some of the newer Dover releases have color renderings that may be attractive to look at but harder to transcribe into a usable diagram as a design source and so I found the black and white line drawings in this book very helpful.

This little volume provides a vast number, and bewildering variety, of authentic decorative designs from Classical Antiquity and earlier from all over the world. Each one is identified, and there is a contents page which helps one home in on the item wanted, along with a page showing the approximate time relation of the various periods represented. One could not have enough projects in a lifetime to drain this resource of its usefulness. I needed it for one purpse only -- to find a design to repoussee' for the shield on the front of a miniature Roman Chariot. I found it imediately just by flipping through this amazing book.