Jewelry and Amber of Italy. A Collection in the National Museum of Naples

Siviero, Rodolfo. Jewelry and Amber of Italy. A Collection in the National Museum of Naples. New York: McGraw-Hill Book Company, 1959. First edition. Folio. [6] 153pp., 274 plates. Original blue cloth with gilt lettering and double ruling on cover and spine, in original, illustrated dustjacket, black lettering on white spine. Stiff blue endpapers. Profusely illustrated with five hundred and sixty-nine plates depicting jewelry and amber on 274 plates, many of them full page and in color, as well as in-text depiction with descriptions. Contains index of inventory numbers for gold jewelry, a short list of jewelry w/o inventory numbers, amber, indices of places of provenance, index of b/w/ plates, and index of twenty color plates.

“This book brings to glowing life the brilliant creations of many Italian and Greco-Roman artists of antiquity. Their names – like the secrets of their unsurpassed craftsmanship – are lost forever, but their aesthetic sense lives today in these pages which now describe and show 569 of their choicest works. This is the definitive catalogue, fully illustrated and documented, of the collection of gold jewelry and amber in the National Museum of Naples, one of the world’s finest and most complete arrays of this art… The photographs in this book reveal exquisite details of workmanship achieved by mysterious technical subtleties no longer understood.” (Publisher). Dustjacket with some chipping and closed tears, covers with light wear, and block with some sunning along edges, not affecting images. Front endpaper with light crease at bottom foredge. Good – to very good condition. Hardcover. (54494) $95