Axel Boethius, J. B. Ward-Perkins
Etruscan and Roman Architecture.
Penguin Books, 1970. The Pelican History of Art. First edition. xxxiii/622 pages.
Large-format volume, in slipcase measuring approximately 7.75" x 11", is bound in red cloth, with gilt-lettered black spine compartment and publisher's emblem stamped in gold on front cover. Book is like new. Top edge of text block is tinted black. Illustrated with color frontispiece plate and plate section at rear of volume, in addition to numerous full-page and in-text illustrations. Dust jacket, with price of $29.50 on front flap, displays mild creasing at edges. Volume is preserved in pictorial slipcase with light shelfwear.
"Axel Boethius's account begins about 1400 B.C. with the primitive villages of the Italic tribes. The scene was transformed by the arrival of the Greeks, and by the Etruscans, who by about 600 had Rome and Central Italy under their cultural spell. The history of Republican Roman architecture is, as Vitruvius emphasizes, largely based on Etruscan models. The wealthy houses of Pompeii and Herculaneum afford a clear picture of the progressive hellenization which ensued.
The history of Roman Imperial architecture, with which John Ward-Perkins deals, is one of the intersection of two dominant themes -- in Rome itself the emergence of a new architecture based on the use of a revolutionary new material, Roman concrete, and in the provinces the development of interrelated but distinctive Romano-provincial schools. The metropolitan school, exemplified in the Pantheon, the Imperial Baths, and the apartment houses of Ostia, constitutes Rome's great original contribution. The role of the provinces ranged from the preservation of a lively hellenistic tradition to the assimilation of ideas from the east and from the military frontiers. After the crisis of the third century these currents tended to converge into a single stream, as demonstrated by the foundation of provincial administrative capitals, culminating in that of Constantinople. It was this Late Roman architecture that transmitted the heritage of Greece and Rome to the medieval world".