The marble faun frequently reads like a guide-book. Its characters and narrator describe many landscapes and ruins, comment interpretively on many works of art, and take every opportunity to make general pronouncements on aesthetics. Often at such points Hawthorne's Romance seems interrupted by bits of leftover essays, whose tenuous dramatic plausibility derives from the characters, three of whom are “artists, or connected with art,” and from the Italian setting, which is insistently presented as the home of the “antique, pictorial, and statuesque.”