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August Mau (1840 – 1909) was a prominent German art historian and archaeologist who worked with the Deutsches Archäologisches Institut while studying and classifying the Roman paintings at Pompeii, which was destroyed with the town of Herculaneum by volcanic eruption in 79 AD. The paintings were in remarkably good condition due to the preservation by the volcanic ash that covered the city.
Mau first divided these paintings into the four Pompeian Styles still used as a classification. Mau was born in Kiel, where he read Classical Philology at the University of Kiel, and then at the University of Bonn. He moved to Rome, for reasons of ill-health, in 1872, where he became Secretary to the German Archaeological Institute and catalogued the holdings of its extensive library. His interests lay above all in Pompeii, with inscriptions and Roman wall paintings, where he built upon the earlier work published by Wolfgang Helbig and Giuseppe Fiorelli. Mau died in Rome in 1909.
Pompeii and Art
For twenty-five years Professor Mau has devoted himself to the study of Pompeii, spending his summers among the ruins and his winters in Rome, working up the new material. He holds a unique place among the scholars who have given attention to Pompeian antiquities, and his contributions to the literature of the subject have been numerous in both German and Italian. The present volume, however, is not a translation of one previously issued, but a new work first published in English, the liberality of the publishers having made it possible to secure assistance for the preparation of certain restorations and other drawings which Professor Mau desired to have made as illustrating his interpretation of the ruins.
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