The Last Days of Pompeii in 18th & early 19th Century Art.
Penetrating deep into Sicily the French landscape painter Pierre-Henri de Valenciennes (1750-1819) created a view of the city of Agrigento nestling in a placid Arcadian setting, a vista owing much to his fellow countrymen Claude and Poussin. Yet, as David Irwin reminds us this calm, idyllic vision of nature could be rapidly transformed into a scene of devastation due to natural threats to civilisation such as floods and the eruption of volcanoes, especially Vesuvius from the last days of Pompeii in A.D 79 to sporadic explosions during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.[1] Though artists like Jacob More (active in Rome 1740-93) and Valenciennes himself and the less famous Pierre Volaire painted Vesuvius in the eighteenth-century- see below- It was the volcano’s devastating damage to Pompeii that proved irresistible to artists who through technical skill, rich imagination and archaeological study rendered the legendary cataclysm. Much of these paintings of the “last days of Pompeii” would be created in the next century, both as part of the Romantic Movement and the academic trends of the Victorian age encapsulated respectively by Valenciennes eruption of Vesuvius (1817) and the Russian academic artist Karl Bryullov’s (1799-1852) apocalyptic Last Days of Pompeii (1833). This huge machine catapulted Bryullov to fame and made his career may have been based on Pacini’s opera L’ultimo giorno di Pompeii staged in Naples in November 1825. Bryullov visited Naples in the 1820s where he met Demidov, a Russian industrialist who took up the commission from another patron. Taking earlier dramatic masterpieces like Raphael’s Fire in the Borgo and Poussin’s Plague at Ashdod, the canvas contains a hidden self-portrait- the young man with a box on his head.[2] Something else Bryullov was doing in Naples was reading the letters of Pliny the Younger who wrote down what he observed including the eruption of Vesuvius which claimed the life of his uncle, Pliny the Elder. This was one of three scenes of Roman history which occurred on the Bay of Naples and which Angelica Kauffmann was inspired to paint a few decades earlier when she visited Naples in 1782.[3] Valenciennes painted the death of Pliny the Elder from asphyxiation (above) which is a blend of scientific volcano art and dramatic history painting entirely at odds with his peaceful Claudian idylls.[4]
[1] Irwin, Neoclassicism, 205.
[2] The Last Days of Pompeii, no. 26.
[3] Ibid, no. 20. The three subjects were Pliny the Younger and his Mother, Cornelia, Mother of the Gracchi, and Virgil Composing his epigram. These were all exhibited at the R.A. in 1784.
[4] Ibid, no. 21
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