Publisher's Synopsis
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 scholarship as lying most probably in the hills north 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. This book uses the evidence of manuscripts and many evocative drawings and watercolours to present a fascinating example of the influence of classical texts on the philosophy of the Enlightenment, and on the British love of gardens and the cult of the picturesque. Finely illustrated with drawings and watercolours commissioned by Ramsay or produced under the influence of his pioneering explorations of the villa and the landscape of Horace, this study brings together distinguished historians of art, architecture and archaeology to interpret Ramsay?s work and its implications for the visual and literary culture of his times.
