Decorative Stone

Decorative Stone: The Complete Sourcebook is a comprehensive identification guide that fills the gap between scholarly works on ancient marbles and the catalogues of the modern stone trade. Indispensable to reliable identification are high-quality images of stones coupled with meticulously researched, authoritative text. This book draws on the extensive and reliably documented collections of the Oxford University Museum of Natural History, which include the historic Corsi Collection of 1,000 different blocks of polished decorative stone, used by the ancient Romans or quarried in Italy in the early nineteenth century, and other collections of historical and modern decorative stones from sites worldwide. The stones are arranged into geological type, such as alabasters, serpentinites, porphyries and granites, and the large group of marbles and limestones is further subdivided according to dominant colours and markings.