Amanda Claridge

The Paper Museum ('Museo Cartaceo') is a collection of some 10,000 drawings and prints assembled during the seventeenth century by the Roman patron and collector, Cassiano dal Pozzo, and his younger brother, Carlo Antonio. It represents one of the most significant attempts before the age of photography to embrace human knowledge in visual form, documenting ancient art and culture, architecture and topography, natural history and social customs. The 160 drawings catalogued in this volume are derived from five ancient manuscripts: the famous Vatican Vergil, the so-called 'Roman' Vergil, the Vatican Terence, and the less well-known Palatine Agrimensores, all in the Vatican Library, and from a fifth codex, now lost, known as the Chronography or Calendar of the year 354. The bulk of the drawings were copied for Cassiano between 1632 and 1634 for the purpose of studying both the characters depicted and the allied evidence of ancient costume and artefacts. By the later seventeenth century, when Pietro Santi Bartoli executed the last group of drawings in the present volume for Carlo Antonio, manuscript illustrations had come to be cherished as much for their rarity as examples of ancient painting as for their documentary value. Introductory essays provide an overview of the dal Pozzo commissions, the manuscripts and their history down to Cassiano's day, as well as their study in the wider context of classical scholarship through to the eighteenth century. All the drawings are reproduced in colour at full page, with accompanying descriptions of the subjects or relevant ancient verses in modern translation and brief commentaries.

This volume comprises 207 drawings, about half of which are in the Royal Library at Windsor Castle and the rest in the Department of Greece and Rome in the British Museum and numerous public or private collections in the UK and abroad. They depict a wide variety of ancient statues of gods and humans, standing, seated or supine, large and small, whole and fragmentary, mainly of marble but also of bronze, as well as statuettes in marble and alabaster, figurines in bronze and terracotta, both Roman and Etruscan, military trophy groups and phallic sculptures. Also represented are herms, a sizeable series of portrait busts and heads, miniature busts in semi-precious stones and figurative appliques. Some are wellknown pieces, from the Barberini, Giustiniani, Medici and Pamphilj collections in Rome, but many are unusual and otherwise unrecorded. The drawings were largely commissioned in the 1630s and 1640s from artists such as Pietro Testa and Vincenzo Leonardi, with smaller groups thereafter, the last in the mid-1680s. The assemblage was probably initially intended by Cassiano for publication as a series of prints for the benefit of antiquarian scholars and artists, complementing the larger quantity of drawings of bas-reliefs which Cassiano had begun to assemble from the early 1620s onwards (published in Part A. III) and constituting the core of the Paper Museum in Cassiano's narrower definition of it in 1654 as 'everything good in marbles and bronze which can provide some information about antiquity'.

The city of Rome is the largest archaeological site in the world, capital and showcase of the Roman Empire and the centre of Christian Europe. This guide provides: · Coverage of all the important sites in the city from 800 BC to AD 600 and the start of the early middle ages, drawing on the latest discoveries and the best of recent scholarship · Over 220 high-quality maps, site plans, diagrams and photographs · Sites divided into fourteen main areas, with star ratings to help you plan and prioritize your visit: Roman Forum; Upper Via Sacra; Palatine; Imperial Forums; Campus Martius; Capitoline Hill; Circus Flaminius to Circus Maximus; Colosseum and Esquiline hill; Caelian hill and the inner via Appia; Lateran to Porta Maggiore; Viminal hill; Pyramid to Testaccio; the outer via Appia; other outlying sites; Museums and Catacombs. · Introduction offering essential background to the history and culture of ancient Rome, placing the city in the context of the development of the empire, highlighting the nature of Roman achievement, and explaining how Rome came to be the largest city in the ancient world. · Comprehensive glossaries of Rome's building materials, techniques and building types, a chronological table of kings, emperors, and the early popes, information about opening times, references and suggestions for further reading and a detailed user-friendly index. For this new edition the original text has been extensively revised, adding over 20 more sites and illustrations, the itineraries have been re-organized and expanded to suit the many changes that have taken place in the past decade, and the practical information and references have been fully updated.