In a large format and enhanced by a completely unprecedented photographic atlas the most authoritative text to illustrate one of the masterpieces of ancient painting.
Salvatore Settis accompanies the reader on a journey of discovery of the splendid paintings of the garden of the villa which belonged to Livia, the wife of Augustus, at the gates of Rome, detached in the 1950s in order to preserve them and recomposed within the Museo Nazionale Romano in Palazzo Massimo alle Terme. The author explains clearly the architectural and formal reasons for the paintings, the space of enchantment, not interrupted even by the corners of the building, in relation to the position of the observer and with a carefully scaled rendering of detail: the representation of the plants in the foreground is so minute as to permit a precise botanical and ornithological study while it gradually becomes more stumato and indistinct in the vague and hazy background.