Between 1760 and 1800, British aristocrats became preoccupied with the acquisition of ancient Greek and Roman artifacts. From marble busts to intricately painted vases, these antiquities were amassed in vast collections held in country houses and libraries throughout Britain. In Fabricating the Antique, Viccy Coltman examines these objects and their owners, as well as dealers, restorers, designers, and manufacturers. She provides a close look at the classical revival that resulted in this obsession with collecting antiques.

Looking at the theoretical foundations of neoclassicism, Coltman contends this reinvention of ancient material culture was more than a fabrication of style. Based in the strong emphasis on classical education during this time, neoclassicism, Coltman claims, could be more accurately described as a style of thought translated into material possessions. Fabricating the Antique is a new take on both well-known collections of ancient art and newly cataloged artifacts. This book also covers how these objects—once removed from their original context—were received, preserved, and displayed. Art historians, classicists, and archaeologists alike will benefit from this important examination of British eighteenth-century history.

The Renaissance artist Raphael is known for his extraordinary frescoes, his sublime Madonnas, devotional altarpieces, architectural designs, and his inventive designs for prints and tapestries. It was his use of ancient Roman art—the sculptures, the marble reliefs, the wall-paintings, and the stuccoes—and architecture—the temples, the palaces, and the theaters—as well as the churches and mosaics of early-Christian Rome, that formed his much-admired classical style.

In Raphael and the Antique, Claudia La Malfa gives a full account of Raphael’s prodigious career, from central Italy when he was seventeen years old, to Perugia, Siena, and Florence, where he first met with Leonardo and Michelangelo, to Rome where he became one of the most feted artists of the Renaissance. This book brings to light Raphael’s reinvention of classical models, his draftsmanship, and his concept of art—ideas he pursued and was still striving to perfect at the time of his death in 1520 at the young age of thirty-seven.