The Destruction of Rome

I'm not one to rate a book only one star, especially one that as highly lauded as this book but I gotta say that I absolutely did not enjoy any part of this book. This is particularly surprising due to the fact that I am a history major with an intense interest in architecture and art history, but its true, I absolutely could not get into this book. From the very beginning I should have realized that I was not going to enjoy it due to the author's lack of structural and historical organization. Mr Hughes would jump from speaking about a painter, to the picture, to a second painter, and then would speak about the early life of the first painter. Also, did I mention an extremely insufficient number of pictures within this book? Ok, don't judge but this is an art history and architectural history book and Mr Hughes' descriptions of the buildings and paintings were so inadequate that I was having a hard time picturing buildings, paintings, and sculptures that I had just seen in Rome three years ago. I think a lot would have been added if the publisher had included some photos of the buildings or paintings that the Mr Hughes discussed at length in the chapters in which he was describing it. But perhaps the publisher could not do that because there was absolutely no organization in any of the chapters. The book was exhaustively researched but there was so much information that the point of the book got lost in the author's musing on different artistic theories and methods. This book had great potential but it fell really flat for me. I'm sorry Mr Hughes but this was just not for me.