Content area
Full Text
Katherine M.D. Dunbabin. Mosaics of the Greek and Roman World Cambridge University Press, xxi, 358. US $135.00
This is the second general treatment of Greek and Roman mosaics to roll out within a few months. If Roger Ling's Ancient Mosaics (1998) features economy, dependability, and ease of handling, Katherine M.D. Dunbabin's book, at several times the price, is its fully loaded counterpart in the luxury category. Dunbabin outscales Ling in most respects, though not in the ratio of full-colour to black and white reproductions, nor in their visual quality. The appearance now of such works of encyclopedic synthesis, tailored to an educated but not necessarily specialist readership, is a function of the growth and maturation of mosaic studies over the past three or four decades. In that period, the study of mosaic has formed and occupied an ever-larger niche among the subdisciplines of classical archaeology and art history. Dunbabin herself is prominent among the scholars responsible for the burgeoning literature on individual mosaics and sites, on comparative artistic techniques, and on regional corpora of mosaics. The present...