Customer Reviews

Roman Portraits

5 star:		(2)
4 star:		(1)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

Powerful portraits done in marble from Roman times.Very little literature but the photos are excellent and haunting.A nice book for any collection.The faces are so life-like.

The cover, showing a few profiles overlapping one another, really gives this book's idea: you can study human character by comparing one portrait to another.
Granted, human nature is truly revealed in choices and actions, which a bust portrait cannot depict. Yet - there is a lot to be said for the fact that certain life choices and habits carve this person's face... The emotions that are behind their choices make certain facial expressions, which over time create distinctive muscle-tendon-bone structures...
So, the face can be said to show not just certain inborn characteristic, but also the sum of this person's life choices, as traced by the emotional marks on their faces.
This book is truly remarkable not just for artistic study (and as someone else said, the photography is superb!) but also for the study of human character.
So happy to have this - truly valuable!

This is a highly browsable, enjoyable collection of photos of faces from Roman sculpture. It is not a museum catalogue and provides little textual description. The 120 plate photos themselves are artistically done (as opposed to being intended simply to document the sculpture). In Roman times, sculptures served a purpose similar to photographs today. Relatively few of the portraits are of identifiable people, but Cicero and Augustus, among others, are included.