Awards
2006 Charles Rufus Morey Book Award
Carol Mattusch, with Henry Lie, The Villa dei Papiri at Herculaneum: Life and Afterlife of a Sculpture Collection
Carol Mattusch
The Villa dei Papiri at Herculaneum: Life and Afterlife of a Sculpture Collection (Los Angeles: Getty Publications, 2005), by Carol Mattusch, with Henry Lie, is an eminently readable and beautifully produced book that provides a broad historical overview of the collection of marble and bronze sculptures excavated at the Villa dei Papiri at Herculaneum after it was discovered in the eighteenth century. The book was written to coincide with the reopening of the Getty Villa in Malibu, California, which not only was modeled on the Herculaneum mansion as it was known from eighteenth-century plans but also displays modern reproductions of many of the works discovered there. The book reveals a remarkably broad knowledge of a diverse array of subjects, ranging from the architectural and social history of Roman villas and the early modern rediscovery of antiquity to the creation of a mythology for the geologically active landscapes of Naples through artistic and novelistic means. The text flows effortlessly from the first century CE to the present, with engaging and often surprising excurses into such fields as villa design, bronze casting, the European Grand Tour, modern tourism, the display of sculpture, the history of restoration, museum history, and the market for reproductions of antique statuary in plaster and bronze.
The core of the book is a meticulous study of a first-century collection of sculptures and its afterlife. In the catalogue and technical discussion, Mattusch and her collaborator, Henry Lie, comprehensively examine every statue discovered in the villa’s ruins, augmenting their texts with drawings, old engravings, statistical tables, and photographs that reveal the subtlest details of ancient marble-carving and bronze-casting techniques, as well as later restorations and “improvements.” The authors have seamlessly integrated these meticulous technical analyses into their work, thereby placing scientific and conservation issues squarely in the center of the presentation and strongly affirming the value of collaboration in art-historical scholarship.
Carol Mattusch, The Villa dei Papiri at Herculaneum: Life and Afterlife of a Sculpture Collection (2005)
Historians and art historians will find much in this rich examination of the creation, life, and afterlife of an important sculpture collection to prompt further study. In addition to the unusually close and detailed technical analyses of the sculptures themselves, the authors’ broad historical and cultural sweep provides a window onto both first-century tastes and eighteenth- and nineteenth-century understanding of classical art. The book will remain an important resource for scholars in both periods as well as an inspiration for further research into the history of collecting.
Jury: Jonathan M. Bloom, Boston College, chair; Anne Dunlop, Yale University; Nancy G. Heller, University of the Arts; Benjamin C. Withers, University of Kentucky.
