As the second volume arising from the Pompeii and the Roman Villa exhibition at the National Gallery of Art, Washington, this collection of symposium papers is an elegant, high status publication. It is meticulously produced and typeset with many beautiful colour illustrations and the contributors and editor are all suitably starry. Several of the contributors have already produced monographs on various aspects of the reception of Pompeii: Jens Daehner reprises some of his work on the Herculaneum women, Christopher Parslow discusses the eighteenth-century excavations and Eugene Dwyer closes the volume. Eric Moormann draws on his formidable knowledge of European literature and Mary Beard offers a paper on nineteenth-century tourist experiences.

The enormous impact and fame of the Vesuvian sites, not to mention the archaeological challenges and involvement in some extraordinary moments in European and World history, make for a seemingly endless repertoire of material perfectly suited, given the variety of disciplines potentially involved, to the edited collection. There have been several such collections over the last decade and, given the vast amounts of material, the potential for many more. However, collections, as William Hamilton (an inevitable inhabitant of many of the papers here) would know, are more than the sum of their parts; variety might add to their richness but it is the unifying character or idea that drives their coalescence and gives them potency and identity.

It is a lack of obvious concept that rather prevents these papers from gathering any coherence as a group. The introduction offers no obvious rationale for the collection beyond the fact that the papers were all originally delivered at the symposium that accompanied the Villa exhibition. Instead, it offers a potted history of the Vesuvian sites post-excavation, labouring over the eighteenth century before speeding up to cover the nineteenth in a quick leap of Lytton, Rogers and Gautier, and ending with a thought from Amedeo Maiuri. No explanation is offered about the chronological parameters of the project, particularly the end point of 1890, and there is no obvious order to the chapters. Why put papers on the Piranesis and Joseph of Austria's visit to Herculaneum after Beard's paper which reaches furthest into the nineteenth century? In fact, like the introduction, the vast majority of the material here pertains to the reigns of Charles and Ferdinand (including papers like Knight's which is very interesting on court politics, but makes almost no mention of Pompeii and Herculaneum) and perhaps the volume would have been better pitched explicitly at investigating the Bourbon context of the pre-unification excavations and responses to the sites. That is not at all to denigrate the later material. It is simply that there is so little of it that it does not add counterbalance to the eighteenth-century content.

The papers are of different lengths and the rather discursive arrangement of many of them suggests that they are lightly polished transcripts of the original presentations rather than pieces intended for a unified collection. They all present a high standard of scholarship but nobody really seems to know why they are writing, so the overall effect is of an awful lot of names, dates, objects, sources described and analysed to a somewhat non-sequitous end. There is no evidence of interactions between papers or between contributor and editor, to the extent that John Moore's paper features a tentative aside (not altogether clear whose) about the identification of a wall-painting from Herculaneum, which is certainly firmly identified and regularly reproduced in books about both Pompeian painting and ancient theatre. The illustrations reveal a similar lack of interaction. Pietro Fabris' pair of paintings depicting the Earl of Seaforth at home in Naples are printed twice, once in Alain Schnapp's paper on the intellectual environment of Bourbon Naples and again, almost 160 pages later, in Bruce Redford's paper on portraits of the Dilettanti. Whilst handy for the reader, the duplication seems a little unnecessary (not least because the images are very familiar) and inevitably raises the question of why the two papers were not nearer together in the volume.

The criticism is not intended to cast aspersions on the scholarly qualities of the contributions. They, and the introduction, are well written by highly regarded scholars and beautifully presented. Although a great deal of stuff here will be familiar to readers engaged in the reception of Pompeii and Herculaneum, there is plenty of new data and sources. But the volume as a whole never does anything to identify themes or ideas that might help the reader make sense of this accumulation of material. To a reader particularly interested in nineteenth-century responses to Pompeii, for example, the theme of fakery, emerging in both Moorman's and Beard's papers, was tantalising but had nowhere to go.

In the end, this may be a criticism not of this one volume but of the state of scholarship on the reception of Pompeii more generally. The proliferation of monographs, edited collections and exhibitions on the subject in the last decade has showcased the incredible wealth and variety of sources, a lot of it previously obscure and disparate, and has brought together scholars and approaches from a wide variety of disciplines and countries. But, perhaps, before we are overwhelmed, in somewhat Vesuvian fashion, by the heap of material, now is the time for a more profound, collective reflection on the nature of the city in Western cultural imagination.