Customer Reviews

Pompeii and the Roman Villa: Art and Culture Around the Bay of Naples

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This is a beautiful exhibition catalog that attempts to show us what life was like in the Roman house in Pompeii in AD 79. The items on display in the exhibition show the best of Roman art and range from large scale wall paintings to statues and gold work and glass and most remarkably an Indian ivory statue imported as an exotic luxury in Roman times. The book takes you around the construction techniques of the houses and how they were used. It then takes you inside to see how they were decorated and what the Romans themselves thought of interior design based on quotes from old documents. The book is full of little tidbits of information that you don't seem to run across elsewhere, such as what "real" Romans thought of "luxus" or luxury as we know it today.

This book is outstanding for the display of individual objects from the Pompeii area, but if you want a book to drool over wall paintings (and this book makes it clear that they were the downmarket cousin to panel paintings) then Domus: Wall Painting in the Roman House (Getty Trust Publications: J. Paul Getty Museum) is probably the recommended volume to get.

This is a companion to the exhibition in Washington and Los Angeles in 2009. Any exhibition of Roamn art in this condition is good but this was outstanding. The catalogue and the exhibition were very selective, only the very best made it. The reproductions in the book take us into the exhibition. If you did not get to see this, this catalogue is the next best thing. The essays are informative and entertaining.

Very nice and good book for reading and if you like "nice beautiful books" for holding them while you read, eh this book fulfills its purpose...
That is when reading is pleasure and it concerns the book bought from Amazon.

This book details a collection of museum quality artwork recovered from the area around the Bay of Naples rougly in the period 200 BC to 100 AD. It is intelligently organized into various topics, such as wall paintings, glass, jewelry, furniture, and so forth. The text that accompanies each photograph describes the artwork but also includes very interesting ideas about how people might have used the piece, and is interjected with lively snippets about human interactions that remind us how little has changed over 2,000 years, such as a 2,000 year old quote from a man lamenting to having to purchase a collection of expensive jewelry to keep his wife happy, or a woman thanking her husband for making these purchases. It includes a map of Pompeii and floor plans of many Pompeii houses. It is very intelligently researched and thoroughly cross-referenced but written in prose that the layperson can understand and actually enjoy.