Product Description: During the last millennium B.C., before the coming of the Romans, the Etruscans built a thriving civilization in the western Mediterranean basin, which was rich in natural resources. From the eighth century B.C., Etruria became a destination on the Italian peninsula for refined works by artisans of the Hellenic regions, the Near East, and central Europe, and for masters from these regions, who emigrated and began to work for the local clientele...read more

Product Description: Beginning in the eighth century B.C., an expanse of central Italy extending from the edges of the Po River plain to the shores of the Tyrrhenian Sea became the setting for the civilization of the Etruscans. Although this people's geographic and linguistic origins remain controversial, the Etruscans were deeply rooted in the region and wove a tightly knit fabric of commercial and artistic trade throughout the Mediterranean...read more

Product Description: In viewing the great works of sacred Western art, many people find difficulty in understanding the stories and identifying the figures portrayed in them. This informative guide decodes these often-mysterious scenes and reveals a vibrant world of images from the Christian tradition for museum visitors, students, and art enthusiasts alike...read more

Product Description: Gods and Heroes in Art aims to help museum patrons and art lovers recognize the legendary characters of classical antiquity in art. The characters are each described in entries summarizing their distinctive stories, their special attributes, and the ways in which artists have depicted them...read more

Product Description: From Agatha to Zeno, Francis of Assisi to Mary Magdalene, Saints in Arti presents the characteristic features of more than one hundred saints often encountered in sacred Western art. Each saint is introduced by a practical list of his or her unique attributes...read more

Product Description: The discovery of and excavations at Pompeii in the second half of the eighteenth century not only provided historians with a trove of information about ancient Roman civilization but also fired artists' imaginations and inaugurated the vogue for the "Pompeian style" that so influenced the West in the nineteenth century...read more

Presents almost two hundred reproductions of the 19th-century architect pennsionnaires of the Academie Francaise de Rome who, as students, won the prestigious Prix de Rome, offering watercolors and drawings of Pompeii's structures as they were excavated at the time.

Product Description: Rome continues to be the monumental expression of a legend. It is the eternal city where all roads of the ancient world converged, and through the millennia has been the model for the very concept of a universal empire. Through art, architecture, and urban planning, the empire expanded with an exceptional synthesis of technology, politics, law, and propaganda, conquering Europe, the Mediterranean, and the Near East...read more (view table of contents, read Amazon.com's description)