Delight.

THE DISCOVERY OF THE RUINS OF POMPEII HAD AN IMMENSE EFFECT ON WESTERN IMAGINATION IN THE NINETEENTH CENTURY. A FINE NEW BOOK EXPLORES SOME OF THE IMPACT OF THE REVELATIONS.

One of the frescoes of the Macellum in Pompeii, now thought to have been one of the prosperous southern Italian city's principal food markets which, in its day, plainly outshone the glory of the food halls of London's Harrods and Berlin's KDW.

This plate was published in Le case ed i monumenti di Pompei disegnati e descritti by Fausto and Felice Niccolini, a work published in successive volumes, starting in 1854. It aimed to describe the buildings with conjectural restorations like this one by G. Weidenmuller, and to explain the gradually revealed site as it looked in the second half of the nineteenth century (the latter with perspectives showing respectably muffled Victorian tourists visiting the ruins under the hot sun of the Mezzogiorno).

Now some of the best and most revealing plates have been reproduced in Houses and Monuments of Pompeii (English version ed Stefano de Caro, Getty Publications, J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles, 2002, $75). The sumptuous publication not only prints some of the best of the Niccolini brothers' plates, but in thoughtful essays by Roberto Cassanelli, Pier Luigi Ciapparelli and others explains the rich and dramatic impact of the Pompeiian discoveries on eighteenth-and nineteenth-century imaginative and artistic life.