The villa: Form and ideology of Country Houses

Abstract

This book is the outcome of Ackerman's A. W. Mellon Lectures in the Fine Arts, given at the National Gallery of Art in Washington, DC in 1985. The author's panoramic view—presented as a string of period casestudies—has all the fluidity and sumptuous illustration of a good lecture series. But despite Ackerman's sweeping introductory statements, his individual chapters reveal a variety of historical perspectives, in which villas are seen as pleasure havens or administrative centres, and as bourgeois or patrician. The Villa is a useful synthesis of research undertaken over the years by Ackerman and others, but it is coated with a patina ofjargon that sometimes results in contradictory statements and methodological ambiguity.