Art of late Rome and Byzantium in the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts /

Rarely can the catalog of all or part of a permanent collection serve as both a useful introduction to undergraduates and a scholarly record for specialists. This long-awaited account of the holdings at Richmond meets these needs and, in so doing, will serve as a model for other institutions. This is achieved by "wrapping" entries on the 136 items--mostly jewelry, metalwork, bone and ivory, ceramics and textiles--in unaffected language; many are accompanied by the sort of technical study still too rare in this field. Research in these areas is advancing so fast that the bibliographies ("essentially completed by 1991") are occasionally out-of-date. But this is compensated for by essential revisions to our understanding of objects not only in this museum but also many at Dumbarton Oaks, both collections initially assembled and published by M.C. Ross in the 1950s and '60s. All classes of user will delight in the illustrations, often to scale and from multiple points of view. The color pictures, in which, for example, gold does not assume the nasty red hues sometimes imposed on it by photography, are an especial joy. General; undergraduate; graduate; faculty. A. Cutler; Pennsylvania State University, University Park Campus