Rarely, perhaps once in a generation, does an enterprising scholar step forth with a truly novel research idea and the capacity to see it through. Pierre de la Rufinière du Prey’s The Villas of Pliny from Antiquity to Posterity is just this: an utterly fascinating, deliciously composed, and copiously illustrated treatment of a neglected theme in architectural history. Although it is the author’s object to document the perennial allure for post-medieval architects of Pliny the Younger’s literary picture of villa life in ancient Rome, the book’s overall theme could be equally understood as the enduring architectural potency of one man’s idea of “the good life.” Du Prey succeeds triumphantly both in the close compass of the historian’s exercise and in broader quality-of-life issues.

The book opens with a leisurely literary examination of Pliny’s Como letters and proceeds to articulate the four “cardinal points” of a villa described in the epistles to Gallus and Domitius Apollinaris. Judiciously, du Prey furnishes translations of these missives as appendices; the translation upon which he relies is John Boyle’s unsurpassed mid-eighteenth-century text. After setting forth some of the basic themes that unite various projects across the centuries, the author proceeds through a historical sequence of reconstruction exercises and built designs, each determined by a conscious reflection upon Pliny’s descriptions of his Laurentine and Tuscan villas. From the Medici’s documented interest through various “ruins and restitutions” and “emulations,” du Prey offers the reader an engaging tour through one of the most imaginatively fertile corridors of architectural history.

Although some of this material will be familiar to readers of James S. Ackerman’s recent study The Villa: Form and Ideology of Country Houses, du Prey’s fidelity to the literary exigencies of his topic keeps him from wandering back to familiar stylistic comparisons with survey material. In fact, it is du Prey’s tenacity in seeking out new imagery that keeps one eagerly turning the pages to digest the projects of Francesco Lazzari, William Newton, Stanislas Potocki, Friedrich August Krubsacius, Karl Friedrich Schinkel, Louis-Pierre Haudebourt, Jules-Frédéric Bouchet, and Wilhelm Stier. Not only has du Prey expanded our understanding of historically well-established figures like Palladio and Félibien, he has also tilled the fields of relatively obscure talents to great advantage. The author dedicates the majority of one closing chapter to detailed discussions of several designs for a 1982 exhibition and colloquium in Paris; this amounts to a sustained essay in architectural criticism, and many readers will agree that, compared to his historical labors, the section constitutes the least successful portion of the book. Nevertheless, one hopes this study will generate an increased awareness of the significance of the Pliny theme and that other treatments—such as Constantine Lipsius’s 1889 project in the archive of Dresden’s Academy of Fine Arts—will find their way into a future edition.

The opportunity to survey such a rich thematic vein as Pliny’s legacy invites one to make new connections and associations. One such thought is that The Villas of Pliny should be regarded as a signal contribution to a growing awareness that, in terms of the History of Ideas, the overall continuity of much of nineteenth-century art and architectural theory with what has been called the “Renaissance-Baroque system” is more in evidence than ever before. In other words, while generations of scholars have tended to locate the formal sources of “modernity” in the late eighteenth century, the strands linking nineteenth-century ideas about art and creativity to much earlier periods are increasingly difficult to ignore. Although such a perspective tends to attenuate the rupture of the “High Modernism” of the 1920s, the conceptual musculature of historicism is perhaps better defined.

Regardless of the book’s manifold historiographic value, its significance as a stirring, unforgettable read is impossible to deny.