Exhuming Pompeii & Herculaneum in the Eighteenth-Century. (4)

A Room in Naples.

In addition to these portraits of dilettanti we also have pictures of life amongst the cognoscenti in Naples thanks to the painter Pietro Fabris who was known for painting both the high and low life in eighteenth-century Naples. One of Fabris’s scenes shows Kenneth Mackenzie and Lord Fortrose engaged in quite different pursuits in a room full of antiquities of different shapes and sizes: Fortrose is fencing; Mackenzie draws with a quill pen at a table. They are occupying Fortrose’s apartment in Naples, itself decorated in the style of Sir William Hamilton’s Palazzo Sessa- also painted by Fabris (above). As Redford explains: Hamilton’s room shows copies of wall paintings from Herculaneum and Pompeii (overdoors); shelves above the harpsichord lined with antiquities such as types associated with the objects, vases, and lamps Hamilton was collecting at the time. Next to the shelves of objects hangs a print after Gavin Hamilton’s Oath of Brutus, a history painting commissioned by a friend of Fortrose- Charles, Lord Hope, and a quintessential example of the neo-classical picture.