Over the last 30 years architectural illustration has changed profoundly. Digital technologies, computer-aided design (CAD) and drawing have in large part taken over from hand techniques. There is reason to bemoan a concomitant decline in phenomenological sensibilities (R. Sennett, The Craftsman [2008]; J. Pallasmaa, Understanding Architecture [2012]), while CAD visualisations often have had a ‘clunky’ look. Yet of late digital techniques successfully simulate atmospheric effects, patination, weathering and usage, yielding images that, in short, appear more human.

This book takes full advantage of such developments to present a genuine advance in our understanding of a singularly significant ancient space. The volume is the result of a collaboration between P., a leading authority on Roman architecture, and G., architect and architectural illustrator extraordinaire. They set out the premises for the project in the preface, explaining how previous works on the Forum rarely reconstruct the appearance of buildings or consider the relationships between them, rightly concluding that there is no modern publication in English treating the Forum ‘as an architectural entity’ (p. xiii). This volume aims to redress these shortcomings, while charting its historical development (Parts 1 and 3), and providing an architectural guidebook to the site with a series of chapters on its component monuments (Part 2). Homage is paid to the restitutions made by the great nineteenth-century French prize-winning architect-archaeologists, and in effect G.'s computer renderings are twenty-first century equivalents of the pensionnaires’ watercolours. Despite G. and P.'s wish to show a Forum in all its likely polychromatic glory (p. xvii), so as to minimise make-believe most buildings are rendered uncoloured save for incontestable coloured features (chiefly granite column shafts and bronze statues). The primary drawings represent the Forum in its maturity and at a single moment in time, around a.d. 360.

Part 1 comprises two introductory chapters. After a brief summary of the Republican legacy, Chapter 1 focuses on Augustus’ interventions. Here we encounter the first series of comprehensive reconstructions in the form of sectional elevations cut through the whole site, while the text reviews the principal building types (temples, basilicas, shops). Chapter 2 presents chronological developments from Tiberius to Phocas (a.d. 14–608). Part 2, comprising Chapters 3 to 20, takes individual monuments by turn anti-clockwise, beginning with the Temple of Antoninus and Faustina and ending with the Temple of Vesta. Each chapter typically opens with a full-page perspective on the left while text on the right begins with relevant history, moving on to a description of the building, its construction, materials and major features. Inscriptions, coins, photographs and graphic records are recruited as necessary, and the account is completed with restored plans and elevations. (The least felicitous visual aspect is the framing of the latter with black tone, impeding legibility of the lines.) A longer concluding chapter (21) constitutes Part 3, treating general observations emerging from the study as a whole and issues such as siting, views and the routes through the space to and from the various points of access. The chronological instead of topographical delivery of this part is most welcome, appropriately facilitating a sense of synthesis and history, helping the reader comprehend and contextualise the often baffling array of remnants that survive at the site today.

The volume's chief pleasures are the set-piece perspectives, sensitive evocations of monuments and spaces saturated with history and artistry. Numbering 47, these include such delights as an oblique view of the Temple of Antoninus and Faustina against a glowering sky (fig. 3.1), and a high level panorama over an Arch of Septimius Severus bristling with bronze horses, riders and central chariot (fig. 8.1). Passers-by, umbrella pines, birds, clouds, raking sun-angles, shadows and transient effects such as a recent rainfall or even snow are used with discretion to animate the scenes. While these images will surely seduce a wide lay audience, students and researchers will benefit from P.'s scholarly underpinning, delivered with the support of notes and up-to-date references, a glossary and bibliography. In tune with the mission statement in the preface, the emphasis on ‘group value’ invites appreciation of the relationships between buildings and the visitor's experience of the Forum as an architectural ensemble. For example, gatefold 4 (after fig. 21.11) shows us the north-western end of the Forum over which loom the Capitoline with the Temple of Jupiter Optimus Maximus and the ‘Tabularium’. To some extent the impact of the magnificent perspectival plates is diluted by the quantity of intervening pages, including as these do some interesting but non-essential passages of text (e.g. pp. 261, 264), overly large plans (e.g. fig. 15.2) and ample framing and margins. Such things increase cost and weight, contrary to the notion of a guidebook one might take to the site.

All the buildings are restored to their original state (while a watercolour view evokes a sixth-century state of decay, fig. 21.26). Varying degrees of interpretation necessarily went into the reconstructions of the monuments, which may be divided into four categories. First are those that survive substantially complete, such as the Arch of Septimius Severus; restoring these is primarily a matter of hypothesising lost sculpture (the specifics of which may attract specialist criticism, but it is the general effect that counts). Second are ruined structures of sufficiently standard typologies to be fairly sure of the original design, the Temple of Castor being a case in point. Third are singular ruins, the reconstruction of which leaves greater scope for opinion and judgement, for example the Basilica Aemilia and the Tabularium. Fourth are vanished monuments (save for foundations). Where possible these have been envisioned on the basis of comparison, as has the Arch of Tiberius with reference to nearly coeval well-preserved arches, those of Augustus at Rimini and Susa (p. 266). It would have been welcome to see sketches illustrating competing options (with proportionately larger and smaller attached columns?), however for understandable practical reasons G. and P. settled on a single solution for each monument.

The most challenging of these categories is the third, and here some controversy is inevitable – which is no bad thing. Recent proposals see the ‘Tabularium’ as the substructure for a crowning temple, a sister for Jupiter's. The idea was launched by P.L. Tucci in 2005 to be followed by F. Coarelli, who added two smaller flanking temples (P.L. Tucci, JRA 18 [2005], 6–33; F. Coarelli, PBSR 78 [2010], 107–32). G. and P. object that ‘if the Tabularium were simply a platform, for greater strength, it should have been solid like the platform of the temple of Jupiter Anxur’ (p. 402 n. 41; see also JRA 26 [2013], 553–61, a review by P. of A. Carandini's Atlante di Roma antica of 2012). Tucci has replied that the Temple of Venus Venetrix sat over the Theatre of Pompey on vaulted substructures (RendPontAcc 86 [2013–2014], 43–123). Like disagreement over the existence / location / reconstruction of the Temple of Trajan, this one is set to continue. In fact an important function of this volume is to stimulate debate and provoke other alternative visions. Realistic images are not just eye candy; there is no hiding from the implications of the reconstructions. Their immediacy and comprehensibility make us instinctively agree or disagree, and in so doing they invite us to reflect, appraise and re-evaluate our own preconceptions.

G. and P.'s exemplary tour de force sets down a new standard for the digital age. Anyone seeking to counter their vision will feel bound to present their own proposals in a graphically compelling form, thus furthering both scholarship and its reception. The visualisation of the architecture of the Forum – and so too that of the city of Rome and indeed the whole Roman empire – has been given a fillip by this brave book. Here is an object of desire for libraries as for anyone with a fascination for the built legacy of Rome.