Vatican museums Rome. Great museums of the world

Within the pages of this bookin 124 superb new color photographs the inexhaustible riches of the great complex of Pontifical monuments, museums and galleries that comprises the vatican museums.
Here are the choicest of the Papal treasures that
for centuries have drawn the art lover to rome.
Here, wonderfully reproduced in color and with historical commentary, the reader will find the whole range of the collections from the glorious marble statues and frescoes of classical antiquity through the illuminated leaves of medieval manuscripts to the full splendors of High renaissance and baroque painting.
From the etruscan archaic period (5th century B.c.), a painted terra cotta Pegasus that adorned a temple pediment, and the celebrated vatican amphora finest of Attic black figure vases showing Ajax and Achilles playing at dice. From the sculpture collections, antique marbles includ ing the Torso and Apollo Belvedere (ideals of masculine beauty that were to inspire the Renaissance) and the exquisite Roman copy of the Venus of Cnidus (her head appears on back of this jacket).
Here, too, the polychromed marble figure of the emperor Augustus and, prize of the collections, that most dramatic of hellenistic sculptures, the legendary laocoön.