Allan Ramsay and the Search for Horace's Villa, edited by Bernard D. Frischer and Iain Gordon Brown with contributions by Bernard Frischer, Iain Gordon Brown, Patricia R. Andrew, John Dixon Hunt and Martin Goalen (Ashgate, London, 2001). ISBN 0754600041. Published with the assistance of the Getty Grant Program.
The Sabine Villa of the Roman poet Horace, celebrated in his verse as an arcadia
of rural simplicity and contentment, was a place embedded in the Western consciousness
both as an ideal and as an actual, physical site. The location of the villa
was fixed by seventeenth-century scholraship as lying most probably in the
hills north-east of Tivoli. For the British in particular the Sabine farm had
a special resonance, and by the age of the Grand Tour its general district
came to be visited by enterprising travellers. Foremost among these was the
great Scottish portrait painter Allan Ramsay, who was distinguished also as
a classical scholar, archaeologist and man of letters. Ramsay's account of
the villa in its landscape - both actual and 'literary' - is published here
for the first time. Preceding the text are eight studies by experts on Horace's
Villa, Ramsay, and the other topics addressed by Ramsay's text.
Frischer, B., 2001. "Ramsay's 'Enquiry': Text and Context," in Allan Ramsay and the Search for Horace's Villa, edited by B.D. Frischer and I.G. Brown (Ashgate, Aldershot) 73-107. View Document
For an online review of this book, see: http://bmcr.brynmawr.edu/2002/2002-07-07.html.