Sinopse
Among the greatest artistic achievements of the Roman Empire are portrait sculptures.
Derived from an ancient tradition of making funerary effigies, these portraits are
astonishing in their realism and expressive power, and their stern humanity speaks to us
across the millennia with undiminished force and directness.
Roman Portraits
is a faithful reprint, in slightly reduced format, of a classic Phaidon plate book, first
published in 1940. Its distinguished author, Ludwig Goldscheider, one of the founders of
Phaidon Press, not only wrote the text, but made the selection of images and designed the
book himself. The remarkable photographs were taken by the writer and photographer Ilse
Schneider-Lengyel, who was commissioned by Phaidon in the 1930s to photograph antique and
Renaissance sculpture in the great museums of Europe. This is a compendium volume to the
same author's bestselling
Rodin
and
Michelangelo
.Portraits are always fascinating, and the powerful, brooding faces in this book have a
compelling and haunting quality that will appeal to all students of sculpture and of human
nature.