Art History Today

Exhuming Pompeii & Herculaneum in the Eighteenth-Century. Slides

1) Claude-Joseph Vernet, View of Naples, 1748, Oil on canvas, 100 x 198 cm, Musée du Louvre, Paris.

2) Roman, 1^st century B.C. The Cupid Seller, from the Villa Di Arianna, Stabiae, fresco, 29 x 35 cm, Museo Archeologico, Naples.

3) Carlo Nolli, after a design by Giovanni Ella Morgan, Cupid Seller, Naples, 1762, etching and engraving, Plate 7  from Delle antichità di Ercolani, Getty Research Institute, Los Angeles.

4) Joseph Marie Vien the Elder, Cupid Seller, 1763, oil on canvas, 117 x 140 cms, Musée du Louvre, Paris.

5) Alexander Roslin, Count de Caylus, oil on canvas, measurements unknown, National Museum, Warsaw.

6) Henry Fuseli, Cupid Seller, 1775-76, black and red chalk on paper, 30 x 48.5 cm, Yale Centre for British Art.

7) Anton Raphael Mengs, Ferdinand IV, King of Naples, 1760, Oil on canvas, 179 x 130 cm, Museo del Prado, Madrid.

8) Nicola Matraini, Portrait of Bernardo Tanucci, 1738, oil on canvas, University of Pisa.

9) Dioscurides of Samos after a Greek original with itinerant musicians, mosaic, find spot, “Villa of Cicero”, Pompeii, now in Museo Archeologico, Naples.

10) Caylus, Recueil, reproduction of frescoes found at Herculaneum, vol vi., Paris, 1764.

11) Photograph of Pompeii today.

12) Sir Joshua Reynolds, Members of the Society of Dilettanti, 1777-78, oil on canvas, Private Collection.

13) Pompeo Batoni, Sir Watkins Williams-Wynn, 4^th Baronet Thomas Apperley, and Captain Edward Hamilton, 1768-1772, oil on canvas, National Museum of Wales, Cardiff.

14) Photograph of modern excavations at Herculaneum.

15) Angelica Kaufmann, Portrait of John Byng with Le antichità di Ercolano esposte,vol 2, Muse of Urania, 1765, oil on canvas, measurements not known, Private Collection.

16) Pietro Fabris, Kenneth Mackenzie (1744–1781), 1st Earl of Seaforth, at Home in Naples: Fencing Scene, 1770, Edinburgh, National Gallery of Scotland, Oil on canvas, 35.5 x 47.6 cm.

17) Pietro Fabris, Naples, a View of Mergellina, 1777, Oil on canvas, 104 x 157 cm, Private collection.

18) Pietro Fabris, The Festival of the Madonna dell'Arco, 1777, Compton Verney, 102.6 x 153.7 cm, oil on canvas.

19) Joseph Rebell, The Mole at Portici, 1818, Oil on canvas, 38 x 55 cm, Neue Pinakothek, Munich.

20) Pietro Fabris,Concert Party in Sir William Hamilton’s Palazzo Sessa, 1744-1781, (left to right, Fabris, W.A. Mozart, Leopold Mozart,Hamilton, Seaforth, and Gaetano Pugnani, 1770, oil on canvas, Scottish National Portrait Gallery, Edinburgh.  

21) Gavin Hamilton, The Oath of Brutus, 1763-64, Oil on canvas, 213 x 264 cm, Yale Center for British Art, New Haven.

22) Antonio Joli, Arrival of Charles III in Naples, Oil on canvas, 128 x 205 cm, Museo del Prado, Madrid.

23) Louis de Silvestre, Portrait of Maria-Amalia of Saxony, wife of Charles III, in Polish Attire, 1738, oil on canvas, Museo del Prado.

24) Anton Raphael Mengs, Self-Portrait, c. 1775, Oil on panel, 102 x 77 cm, The Hermitage, St. Petersburg.

25) Anton Raphael Mengs, Portrait of Johann Joachim Wincklemann, 1761-62, Oil on canvas, 64 x 49 cm, Metropolitan Museum of Art.

26) Johann Heinrich Tischbien, Maria Teresa and Mari Luisa Amalia of Bourbon with a bust of their mother Maria Carolina, 1790, oil on canvas, measurements unknown, Private Collection.

27) Philip Hackert, The Ruins of Pompeii, 1799, National Trust, Attingham Park, oil on canvas, 118 x 164 cms.

28) Pietro Fabris, The Temple of Hera at Paestum, Italy, Compton Verney, Oil on canvas, 56.6 x 90.5 cm.

29) John Robert Cozens, The Two Great Temples at Paestum, 1782, Victoria and Albert Museum, London.

30) Francesco Piranesi, Site Plan of Pompeii, c. 1792, etching and engraving.

31) Giovanni Battista Piranesi, The Villa of Diomedes at Pompeii, undated, brush and pen in black ink over black chalk on white paper, Ashmoleon Museum, Oxford.

32) Giovanni Battista Piranesi, View through the Herculaneum Gate, Pompeii, undated, pen and brown ink over black chalk, Metropolitan Museum of Art, (Lehmann Coll, 1975).

33) Photograph of Herculaneum Gate, date unknown.

34) Giovanni Battista Piranesi, The Via Consalare, Pompeii, undated, pen and brown ink and wash, British Museum, London.

35) Louis Jean Deprez, The Herculaneum Gate at Pompeii, undated, black ink, grey wash and watercolour, National Museum, Stockholm.

36) Louis Jean Deprez, Temple of Isis with Protective Covering at Pompeii, undated, black ink, grey wash and watercolour, National Museum, Stockholm.

37) Pierre-Henri de Valenciennes, The Ancient City of Agrigento, 1787, Oil on canvas, 110 x 164 cm, Musée du Louvre, Paris.

38) Pierre Henri de Valenciennes, The Eruption of Vesuvius, August 24^th, 79 A.D., 1813, oil on canvas, 147.5 x 195.5 cm, Musée des Augustins, Toulouse.[1]

39) Karl Bryullov, The Last Days of Pompeii, 1833, oil on canvas, 4.56 x 6.5 m, State Russian Museum, St Petersburg.

40) Angelica Kauffmann, Pliny the Younger and his Mother at Misenum, 79 A.D., 1782, oil on canvas, 103 x 127.5 cm, Princeton University Art Museum.

41) Jacob More, View of the Bay of Naples, Oil on canvas, 61 x 101 cm, Private collection.

42) Jacob More, Self-Portrait, 1783, Oil on canvas, 198 x 148 cm, Galleria degli Uffizi, Florence.

43) Jacob More, Mount Vesuvius in Eruption, 1780, oil on canvas, 151.1 x 200 cms, National Gallery of Scotland, Edinburgh.

44) David Allan, Sir William Hamilton, 1775, oil on canvas, 226 x 180.3 cm, National Portrait Gallery, London.

45) David Allan, Sir William Hamilton and his first Wife, Catherine Hamilton in the villa at Posillipo with a View of Vesuvius in the Background, 1770, Compton Verney, oil on canvas, 45.7 x 61 cms.

46) George Romney, Portrait of Emma Hamilton as a Circe, 1785, Tate Britain, London, Oil on canvas, 53.3 x 49.5 cm.

47) Joseph Wright, Self-Portrait Aged 59 in a Grey-Brown Coat, 1793, Oil on canvas, 58 x 43 cm, Private collection.

48) Joseph Wright, Vesuvius in Eruption, with a View over the Islands in the Bay of Naples, 1776-80, Derby Art Gallery, 122 x 176.4 cms.

49) Pierre-Jacques Volaire, Eruption of Vesuvius by Moonlight, 1771, Compton Verney, Oil on canvas, 105 x 205 cm.

50) Pierre-Jacques Volaire View of the Eruption of Mount Vesuvius, 1770s, Oil on canvas, 56 x 76 cm, Private collection.

51) Michael Wutky, The Summit of Vesuvius Erupting, Oil on canvas, 95 x 146 cm, Akademie der bildenden Künste, Vienna.

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[1] Ibid, no. 21.

Exhuming Pompeii & Herculaneum in the Eighteenth-Century. (9)

Volcanoes, Artists & Antiquarians.

Between 1765 and 1794, Mount Vesuvius was subject to a series of spectacular explosions which in addition to scaring the locals, provided a once-in-a lifetime opportunity for painters.   If visitors left Rome with the sight of St Peter’s in their mind’s eye, then Vesuvius was the equivalent in the Neapolitan peninsular. Many of these volcano painters moved in the orbit of Sir William Hamilton who published in 1776 the first part of his book on geology, Campi Phlegraei which contained hand coloured copper engravings after the pictures of Fabris mentioned previously. The plates range from views of Vesuvius to illustrations of lava samples collected by Hamilton himself on the slopes of the volcano. Of course the eruptions of Vesuvius were linked with the fate of Pompeii, but rather than the volcano destroying the town it ensured its immortality.  Hamilton, dubbed the “Professor of Earthquakes” by Horace Walpole, probably revived volcanology and was instrumental in attracting many visitors to Naples who would undertake the perilous hike up the fire mountain.  One of the most admired, Goethe, tried the ascent up the volcano only to be overcome with belching smoke and hot ash. Among the painters, one of Vesuvius’s most famous visitors was Joseph Wright of Derby who visited Naples between October and November 1774. Of the volcanic explosions, Wright declared “Tis the most wonderful sight in Nature” though he worried that his renditions of Vesuvius were slight and, literally, superficial. Instead of probing deep within the volcano Wright concentrated on the surface, the “epidermis” of the land, an approach that was consistent with the theorists of the picturesque like the cleric William Gilpin who never used the word “picturesque” to describe the inner quality of the earth.  Wright was, however, aware of the new “connoisseurship of the earth” propounded by John Whitehurst who made illustrations of the structure of volcanic landscape and knew of the reactions deep down. There were many painters of the eruptions of Vesuvius, but after Wright the most prolific is probably the Frenchman Pierre Volaire from Toulon who specialised in night scenes and took advantage of the eruptions during his sojourn in Naples in 1769 (above). Compton Verney has some fine examples of Volaire’s sulphuric canvases; these were included in an exhibition on the theme of volcanoes in 2010.[1]

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[1] Volcano: Turner to Warhol, Compton Verney, 2010.

Exhuming Pompeii & Herculaneum in the Eighteenth-Century. (8)

The Last Days of Pompeii in 18^th & early 19^th 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]

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[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

Exhuming Pompeii & Herculaneum in the Eighteenth-Century. (7)

Reconstructing Pompeii: Piranesi and the Tradition of Drawing

As Giovanni Battista Piranesi (1720-1778) wrote in 1743: “Speaking ruins have filled my spirit with images that accurate drawings could never have succeeded in conveying.”[1] Piranesi’s comment hints at the role of imagination as an aid to artistic creation in the 18^th century, whilst his views on composition and art are expressions of fantasy in an age renowned more for objective reporting, evidential analysis and hard facts. Many artists, archaeologists and scholars both competed and collaborated on the reconstruction of Pompeii through their drawings, models and scholarship. As Pinto demonstrates, Francesco Piranesi drew upon a rich fund of drawings of done by his father, G.B. Piranesi and the French artist Louis-Jean Desprez, a legacy Francesco did not acknowledge when drawing up a plan of Pompeii in 1792 for his patron, King Gustav III of Sweden. Piranesi Senior made a number of spontaneous sketches of Pompeiian features like the Herculaneum gate (above) and an intriguing drawing of prisoners in the stocks in the so-called “Gladiators’ Barracks” which recalls his famous Carceri series. Desprez, a member of the French Academy in Rome, was part of Vivant-Denon’s expedition to Sicily illustrated by the abbe Saint-Non in his Voyage pittoresque (five vols, 1781-86). He spent the last 20 years of his life working in Sweden. Piranesi Junior would incorporate Roman soldiers into his views of 18^th century Pompeii, which would appear in his Antiquités de la Grande Grèce (Paris 1804) perhaps as a way of flattering Napoleon’s ambitions.

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[1] John Pinto, “Speaking Ruins: Piranesi and Desprez at Pompeii” in Rediscovering the Ancient World on the Bay of Naples, 231-244.

Exhuming Pompeii & Herculaneum in the Eighteenth-Century. (6)

A Brief Note on Herculaneum and Pompeii in The 18^th Century.

During the 18th century Naples increased in importance thanks to the excavations carried out at Herculaneum and Pompeii. Grand Tourists in Rome, especially if they had a taste for the ancient world, would make the journey south to see these sites and sights. The finds from Herculaneum would be exhibited in a museum near the site, which tourists would visit after the city of Naples itself.[1] The domestic was emphasised since a Roman kitchen had been re-created complete with ancient utensils. Interestingly, drawings of Herculaneum and Pompeii were strictly forbidden unless a patron could use their clout as in the case of Hackert who produced rare paintings of Pompeii (above) , only because he was Official Painter to the King of Naples.[2] A third site was Paestum in the Gulf of Salerno, formerly a colony of ancient Greece which boasted three surviving temples which enjoyed the attention of artists like Piranesi, John Robert Cozens and Elizabeth Vigée LeBrun. One of the most impressive renditions of Paestum is Piranesi’s etching which captures the gloomy grandeur of the ruins, also of great interest to architects. All of this week’s topics might seem isolated, but they are all tightly bound together. Sir William Hamilton developed his career during the Bourbon dynasty, carried out his researches against a backdrop of Neapolitan culture including the city and its people. As for his interest in antiquity, he employed the same research principles to collecting antique vases as he did in pioneering volcanology in the Neapolitan peninsular. He made the mountain portable and placed it in a lavishly decorated setting as he did with his vases, some of which like the Portland Vase were given by him to the British Museum. So Hamilton’s collection consisted of the volcano, the antique vases, and to it he was to add the beautiful young woman Emma Hamilton, née Hart, the third component of Hamilton’s collection- the “ideal of the female body in motion.”[3] From the discovery of Herculaneum in 1709 to the end of the Bourbon dynasty in 1860, the two cities had a problematical relationship. Using metaphor, modern commentators have suggested that Pompeii was the light city to Herculaneum’s dark.[4] Pompeii was a ruined city open to the sun on the surface whilst Herculaneum mainly lay buried in darkness underground. Metaphors aside, over the centuries Pompeii has eclipsed its companion, almost becoming shorthand for both. From the point of view of the Grand Tour, as Dwyer points out, the physical situations of the two cities has determined the different ways that artists and visitors in general have approached them. The subterranean Herculaneum posed difficulties for the iconographer; the open Pompeii on the other hand was easier to map since it lent itself to aerial perspective.[5] Then there was the slow pace of the excavations which drew the criticism of visitors on the Grand Tour as mentioned above.

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[1] David Irwin, Neoclassicism, (Phaidon, 1997), 37f.

[2] Ibid, 41.

[3] David D. Nolta, “The Body of the Collector and the Collected body in William Hamilton’s Naples”, Eighteenth-Century Studies, Vol. 31, No. 1, 1997, 108-114, 110.

[4] For an interesting use of this metaphor deriving from Susan Sontag’s comparison of Pompeii/Herculaneum to Hiroshima and Nagasaki in her novel on William Hamilton, see Eugene J. Dwyer, “Pompeii verses Herculaneum” In Rediscovering the Ancient World, 247-266.

[5] Dwyer notes that despite’s the sun-lit Pompeii, it yielded up more dead bodies.

Exhuming Pompeii & Herculaneum in the Eighteenth-Century. (5)

The German Artistic Community in Naples.

In 1737 Charles of Bourbon (later Charles III of Spain) was engaged to Maria Amalia of Saxony-Wettin. She was the Queen consort of Naples and Sicily from 1738 till 1759 and then Queen consort of Spain from 1759 until her death in 1760. The mother of thirteen children, and a popular person, she oversaw the construction of the Caserta Palace outside Naples as well as various other projects in her husband's domain. Due to this marriage, cultural traffic increased between Naples and Saxony. One of the most important artists from Saxony was Anton Raphael Mengs (1728-1779) who hoped to visit Naples; but while these plans were forming, Mengs became firm friends with the leading antiquarian of the age, a son of a cobbler from Prussia, J.J. Winckelmann. Mengs organized a number of visits so that the archaeologist could examine the finds at Herculaneum for himself. Winckelmann first visited Naples in 1758 which resulted in a letter to Mengs in Rome giving descriptions of what was then called the Basilica at Herculaneum. Another significance artist was Angelica Kauffmann, Swiss, but close to the German artistic community. She was in Naples between July 1763 and April 1764 with the aim of finding other wealthy and influential patrons, a strategy that paid off handsomely. The openings she made in Naples led to further opportunities in Britain since her sitters in Naples were primarily British, such as John Byng who is portrayed with Vesuvius in the background (above) and with a copy of the second volume of Le antichità di Ercolano esposte, which might be viewed as a symbol of the general interest in Neapolitan antiquity. Byng who never returned to Britain also commissioned a number of Roman subjects from Kauffmann, which according to Roettgen, betray the painter’s knowledge of the classical tradition followed by Batoni, Mengs, Dance and Gavin Hamilton who were all under the influence of Poussin who was the first artist to seriously attempt to give his work the air of ancient paintings long before the Pompeii/Herculaneum phenomenon.[1] Kauffman also met Johann Reiffenstein who introduced her to encaustic or hot wax painting which reflects the evolving debate on how ancient pictures were painted. Kauffmann was also put in contact with Winckelmann, who also sat for her. Finally, Kauffmann was very friendly with Goethe who visited Naples in 1787 with the painter Tischbein, and who visited Pompeii on 11th March 1788 where he notes the “richly painted frescoes” are in a state of deterioration, probably due to the disastrous policy of the Bourbons mentioned above.[2]

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[1] Paolo D’Alconzo, “Naples and the Birth of a Tradition of Conservation”, 205.

[2] Roettgen, “German Painters in Naples”, in Rediscovering the Ancient World, 130.

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.

Exhuming Pompeii & Herculaneum in the Eighteenth-Century. (3)

English Dilettanti & Naples.

Today, the word “dilettante” is mainly pejorative suggesting a wasteful idler who dabbles in a field of expertise rather than being an authority on it. Back in the eighteenth-century the word had a more positive cast since it was linked with notions of virtue and taste. The origins of dilettante are found in 1734 when the word first entered the English language with the formation of the societies called after it.[1] Something of the character of these antiquarian societies can be gleaned from 18^th century group portraits by leading Grand Tour artists such as Sir Joshua Reynolds (1723-93) and Pompeo Batoni (1708-1787). One (above) includes the Welsh collector Sir Watkin Williams Wynn who clothed in a toga stands to the left and indicates a Greek vase on the table from the collection of Sir William Hamilton, who in turn gestures to his catalogue of that collection. Reynolds had taken his cue from an earlier group portrait of dilettanti by Batoni featuring Sir Watkin with his companions Baronet Thomas Appleby and Captain Edward Hamilton. In Batoni’s grander portrait, Sir Watkin, resplendent in a fur coat, holds up a drawing of Raphael’s Justice in the Vatican. To the right the standing Captain Hamilton holds a flute and gestures towards the seated Appleby who has a book open in front of him, the volume labelled “Dante.” Thus, the trio suggest “their devotion to the sister arts of painting, poetry and music.”[2] Whereas the Batoni group portrait “is defined by its Romanitas,” Sir Watkin also visited Naples where he became solid friends with Sir William Hamilton and acquired the first two volumes of Pierre Francois Hughes d’ Harcanville’s Recueil d’antiquités étrusques, grecques et romaine.

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[1] Bruce Redford “Grecian Taste and Neapolitan Spirit: Grand Tour Portraits of the Society of Dilettanti” in Rediscovering the Ancient World, 179-188, 179.

[2] Ibid, 181.

Exhuming Pompeii & Herculaneum in the Eighteenth-Century. (2)

Antiquity and Affairs of State in Naples

The rediscovery of antiquity, sculptures, ancient wall paintings, objects of curiosity in Naples, happened against a backdrop of statecraft and diplomacy. Under Ferdinand IV, and with the help of his pragmatic and capable Prime Minister, the humbly born Bernardo Tanucci, the excavations of Herculaneum and Pompeii were overseen with a view to imposing a royal monopoly on the finds. Charles III, king of Spain, was kept informed of the situation in Naples through diplomatic correspondence with Tanucci and his rival, the Prince of San Nicandro, Ferdinand’s tutor. This correspondence is revealing because it offers insights on art and its reception in 18th century Naples. For example, we know that the young Ferdinand was taken to see a mosaic from Pompeii of Itinerant musicians in 1765, two years after his tutor had vetted it for the king’s visit.[1] Charles III and Tanucci were engaged in the process of imposing copyright controls on the art discovered at Pompeii and Herculaneum, and one way of doing this was to publish books of engravings of the ancient art under the imprint of the king. The ancient paintings were illustrated in a number of publications, but the most significant was Le antichità di Ercolano esposte hereafter “The Herculaneum Volumes” (8 volumes, 1757-61) which contained engravings of these ancient works facilitated by the varnishing of paintings.[2] Due to the restrictions placed on visitors to the sites and museums of Naples, drawing and copying were forbidden, note taking was banned, and removal of objects not permitted- therefore artists and scholars turned to the Herculaneum volumes. Not everybody obeyed the rules. Caylus ( above) had visited Naples in 1757 and stolen some terracotta vases, and secretly had drawings made in preparation for plates for his own book on the ancients, Recueil d’ Antiquitiés which had started to appear in 1752.[3] Yet Tanucci could admire the initiative and learnedness of Caylus who cast aspersions on the validity of the archaeological work at Herculaneum and mischievously but perceptively declared that “…at Naples, antiquity is an affair of state.”[4] Apart from art theft and the difficulty of recording the antiquities on site and in the museums, Tanucci and his court were very sensitive about criticism of the Herculaneum project. To criticise the digs at Pompeii and Herculaneum was frowned upon by the Neapolitan court, but despite this there were many complaints about the pace of the dig. The traveller Hestor Piozzi complained that the Neapolitans were too slow at excavating Pompeii. And the more informed Goethe inspecting the site at Herculaneum put in a plea for legendary German efficiency by regretting that German workmen were not available to speed up the proceedings! There was also the question of fakes of frescoes at Herculaneum circulating on the international art market which may have led to the Bourbon court giving orders in 1757 to deface some of the Vesuvian frescoes to keep them from being copied by antiquarians and artists.[5]

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[1] See Carlo Knight, “Politics and Royal Patronage in the Neapolitan Regency: The Correspondence of Charles III and the Prince of San Nicandro, 1759-1767 in Rediscovering the Ancient World on the Bay of Naples, 1710-1890, (National Gallery Washington, 2013), 75-88, 80.

[2] Steffi Roettgen, “German Painters in Naples and Their Contribution to the Revival of Antiquity 1760-1799 in Rediscovering the Ancient World, 125-140.

[3] Francis Haskell gives a useful account of Caylus and his attitude towards the past in History and its Images : Art and the Interpretation of the Past (Yale University Press, 1993), 180f.

[4] John E. Moore, “To the Catholic King” and Others: Bernardo Tanucci’s Correspondence and the Herculaneum Project” in Rediscovering the Ancient World, 91-122, 105.

[5] Paolo D’Alconzo, trans Mark Weir, “Naples and the Birth of a Tradition of Conservation: the restoration of wall paintings from Vesuvian sites in the 18th Century,” Journal of the History of Collections, 2007, vol. 19, no. 11, 203-214, 205.

Exhuming Pompeii & Herculaneum in the Eighteenth-Century. (1)

The Discovery of Antiquity: The “Cupid Seller.”

The style label known as “neo-classicism” continues to evade precise definition. At its simplest it refers to the re-imagining of antiquity in the eighteenth century- the age of reason- inspired by the archaeological endeavours of scholars, antiquarians and dilettanti.[1] As way of focusing on neo-classism, it is helpful to consider a work of art that embodies the spirit of antiquity and which was much copied and interpreted by artists of this era. This work is the fresco known as the “Cupid Seller”, found in the Villa di Arianna at Stabia, and now in the Archaeological Museum, Naples.[2] This scene showing a vendor of cupids offering her goods to a refined Roman woman and her servant was engraved by Carlo Nolli and published in volume three of Delle antichità di Ercolani (1726) which would become the main source for the transmission of the image. The most famous interpretation of the Cupid Seller was the painting by Joseph-Marie Vien (1716-1809) (above) who became a pioneer of neo-classicism. Trained under Natoire, Vien won awards in Rome and became the teacher of Jacques Louis David. After his return to Paris, Vien met France’s most famous antiquarian Anne-Claude- Phillipe de Caylus (1692-1765) who encouraged Vien’s antiquarian leanings. As Vien would not have seen the original fresco his Cupid Seller was probably based on a print in Caylus’s copy of the Antichità; Vien replaced the bright colours of the original fresco with soft, pastel- like colours set against an architecturally austere background which evokes Poussin just as much ancient Roman wall painting.

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[1] On the problems of the term “Neo-classicism”, Matthew Craske, Art in Europe 1700-1830, (OUP, 1997), 7f.

[2] Various, The Last Days of Pompeii, (Getty, Los Angeles,2012), nos 1-4.