Roman Portraits

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 unchanged reprint in slightly reduced format of a classic Phaidon plate book first published in 1940. Its distinguished author, Ludwig Goldscheider, who was 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. 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.