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