This beautifully engraved collection of ancient Roman art and sculpture encompasses the heart and soul of the Grand Tour at its height during the final years of the ancien régime. Aristocrats and gentry flocked to Rome throughout the eighteenth century, eager to engage firsthand with the beauty and magnificence of classical antiquity that had occupied the lion’s share of most grammar school and university curricula. Each of the thirty-three engraved plates in this volume is rendered unique, and in many instances hauntingly beautiful, thanks to masterful interventions of hand coloring in warm blue, gray, and sepia tones augmented with white highlights against dark backgrounds. The rediscovery of the preternaturally well-preserved archaeological sites of Pompeii and Herculaneum during the decades immediately preceding this publication captivated European imaginations, presenting the renewed possibility for a seemingly unmediated and exclusive experiencing of the art, architecture, and culture of what hitherto had seemed an impossibly remote Roman antiquity.

Every engraving captures stirring artistic visions from ancient imperial palaces, baths, and mausoleums of the reigns of Titus, Trajan, Hadrian, and Constantine—the last of which,of course, also marked the start of the transition of Rome toward Christianity. However, the subject matter of these seductive classical scenes remains resolutely pagan, depicting gods and goddesses, nymphs and putti, and legendary heroes.

The volume opens with a prefatory text in French, followed by identifications of each plate that function almost as latter-day museum labels—perhaps a gesture to the contemporary advent of the first great national European museum collections. These are written minimally, allowing the suite of engravings to truly shine without the distraction of dense interpolated texts, and thus reproducing as far as possible the experience of stumbling across these ancient masterpieces in situ and embracing them for the wonder they evoke.