Vetusta Monumenta

These accompanied text descriptions for the sites, but provided additional information with high levels of detail and multiple or idealised viewpoints to simulate a well-informed tour.

Many of the plates show the setting, inset with exploded views, cross sections and other architectural details, or objects found at the site.

Critics have compared this approach with contemporaneous works that included the subject as an attractively sketched scene, illustrations were not yet recognised as a valuable source of information.

The book used the multiple and separate details to synthesise encyclopaedic surveys that typified the approach of the natural historians and antiquaries, what Barbara Maria Stafford has described as "cross-referencing material bits of distant reality".

[6] The first detailed account of the medieval French Royal Gold Cup in the British Museum was published in one of the last papers, of 1904, by Sir Charles Hercules Read.