Art History Today

Coming Soon….Art of the Silk Roads

Course Description.

“These tremors were carried along a network that fans out in every direction, routes along which pilgrims and warriors, nomads and merchants have travelled, goods and produce have been bought and sold, and ideas exchanged, adapted and refined…In the late nineteenth-century, this sprawling web of connections was given a name by an eminent German geologist, Ferdinand von Richthofen that has stuck ever since: “Seidenstrafen”- the Silk Roads. (Peter Frankopan, The Silk Roads).

This image of 12^th century Chinese art showing women making silk embodies the aim of this course, namely to use the Silk Roads as a way of exploring the relationship between Europe, the Near East and Asia in the context of art history. We embark on a journey starting with the “predecessors” of the Silk Roads- Egypt, Mesopotamia and Persia before looking at the artistic relations between Greece, Rome and China. After this we look at art and architecture of the Byzantine Empire before taking the road to Oxiana (the title of a famous travel book by art historian Robert Byron) in search of Islamic art and architecture. Then we take two weeks to trace the evolution of art in China looking at landscape, images of court, sculpture, and even the art directly concerned with the phenomenon of the Silk Roads like the above image from the Song Dynasty. One of the most famous Western explorers to travel to Asia was Marco Polo; we follow in his footsteps (and others) to places like Samarkand (below), the court of Kublai Khan, as well as discovering Mongol art and its influence on Chinese art. The next section is devoted to Japanese art, which though superficially similar to China expresses a very different civilisation. No survey of art along the Silk Roads would be complete without India which contains such treasures as the “Cave of the Thousand Buddhas” and the renowned wall painting of the Ajanta Caves seen and compared by Kenneth Clark to the murals of renaissance Siena. And it is Siena, along with Florence and Venice where this course finds its journey’s end. To cap the course we examine the relationship between the art of these three renaissance “sucessors”and the later manifestations of the Silk Roads in the renaissance era bringing out the Arabic and Chinese influences on inventions like perspective and even the art of painting itself.

Syllabus.

1) Predecessors: Royal Roads to Ancient Art: Egypt, Mesopotamia & Persia.

2) From Greece to Rome: Art, the Silk Roads & the Hellenistic Era.

3) From Rome to Constantinople: The Art of Faith & Byzantium.

4) The Road to Oxiana: In Search of Islamic Art & Architecture.

5) The Evolution of Chinese Art: Painting, Drawing & Graphic art.

6) The Evolution of Chinese Art: Sculpture, Minor Arts & Architecture.

7) In the Footsteps of Marco Polo, Kublai Khan & the Art of the Mongols & Central Asian Nomadic Tribes.

8) Japanese Art & the Silk Roads.

9) Indian Art & the Silk Roads.

10) Successors: The Renaissance on the Silk Roads: Florence, Siena & Venice.

Some Suggested Reading.

Peter Frankopan, The Silk Roads: A New History of the World (Bloomsbury, 2015).

Frances Wood, The Silk Roads: Two Thousand Years in the Heart of Asia (British Library, 2004).

Liu Xinru, The Silk Roads : a brief history with documents (Palgrave Macmillan, 2012).

Bjorn Landstrom, The Quest for India: A History of Discovery and Exploration from the Expedition of the Land of Punt in 1493 B.C. to the Discovery of the Cape of Good Hope in 1488 A.D in Words and Pictures, (Allen and Unwin, 1964).

John Boardman, Persia and the West: An Archaeological Investigation of of the Genesis of Achaemenid Persian Art (Thames and Hudson, 2000).

G. M. Meredith-Owens, Persian Illustrated Manuscripts (British Museum, 1965).

David Talbot Rice, Byzantine Art (Penguin, 1935).

Judith Herrin, Byzantium: The Surprising Life of a Medieval Empire (Penguin, 2008).

Robert Byron, The Byzantine Achievement: An Historical Perspective (Routledge and Keegan Paul, 1987, orig 1929).

Sheila Blair, The Art and Architecture of Islam : 1250-1800, Pelican History of Art (Yale University Press, 1994).

Robert Byron, The Road to Oxiana (Penguin, 2007, orig 1933).

Robert Hillenbrand, Islamic Art and Architecture (Thames and Hudson, 1999).

Lubor Hajek, Chinese Art (Spring Books, London, 1966).

Mary Tregear, Chinese Art (Thames and Hudson, 1980, rev 1997).

Various, Nomads as Agents of Cultural Change : the Mongols and their Eurasian Predecessors / edited by Reuven Amitai and Michal Biran, (University of Hawaii Press, 2015).

Marco Polo, The Travels of Marco Polo, ed. Milton Rugoff ( Signet Classics, 1961).

Rudolph Wittkower, “Marco Polo and the Pictorial Tradition of the Marvels of the East” in Allegory and the Migration of Symbols (Thames and Hudson, 1977).

Various, Along the Asian Silk Routes: Central Asian Art from West Berlin State Museums, (Metropolitan Museum, New York, 1982)

Joan Stanley Baker, Japanese Art, (Thames and Hudson, 1984).

Partha Mitter, Indian Art (Oxford University Press, 2001).

Madanjeet Singh, Ajanta: Painting of the Sacred and Secular (Macmillan, New York, 1965).

Hans Belting, Florence and Baghdad: Renaissance Art and Arab Science (Harvard, 2011).

Rediscovery of S Italy in Nineteenth Century & Modern Age. Slides

1) Jean Auguste Dominique Ingres, Antiochus and Stratonice, c. 1838, oil on fabric, 48.1 63.9 cms, Cleveland Museum of Art.

2) Theseus and the Minotaur, previously Herculaneum, now Archaeological Museum, Naples.

3) Jean Auguste Dominique Ingres, Antiochus and Stratonice, 1840, oil on canvas, 98 x 57 cms, Musée Conde, Chantilly.

4) Ulysses and Penelope, from a mural in the Macellum of Pompeii.

5) Edouard Alexandre Sain, Excavations at Pompeii, 1865, oil on canvas, 120 x 172cms, Musée d’Orsay, Paris.

6) Joseph Franque, Scene during the Eruption of Vesuvius, 1827, oil on canvas, 2.96 x 2.28 m, Philadelphia Museum of Art.

7) Frédéric Schopin, The Last Days of Pompeii, c. 1850, oil on canvas, 59 x 91cms, Petit Palais, Musée des Beaux-Arts, Paris.

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

9) Théodore Chasseriéau Self-Portrait, 1835, oil on canvas, 99 x 82 cms, Musée du Louvre, Paris.

10) Théodore Chasseriéau, Tepidarium: The Room Where the Women of Pompeii Came To Rest And Dry Themselves After Bathing, 1853, oil on canvas, 1.71 x 2.58 m, Musée du Louvre, Paris.

11) Benjamin Winkles (after William Gell), The Tepidarium, Plate XXIX, vol 1 of Gell and Gandy, Pompeiana, London, 1832.

12) Hector Leroux, Herculaneum 23^rd August, A.D. 79, 1881, oil on canvas, 190 x 303 cms, Musée d’Orsay, Paris.

13) John Martin, The Destruction of Pompeii and Herculaneum, 1822-1826, oil on canvas, 83.8 x 121.9 cms, University of Manchester.

14) Sebastian Pether, Eruption of Vesuvius with Destruction of a Roman City, 1824, oil on canvas, 71.4 x 92 cms, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston.

15) James Hamilton, The Last Days of Pompeii, 1864, oil on linen, 152.2 x 122 cms, Brooklyn Museum, New York.

16) Edward John Poynter, Faithful Unto Death, 1865, oil on canvas, 115 x 75.5 cms, Walker Art Gallery, Liverpool.

17) Thomas Couture, The Romans of the Decadence, 1847, oil on canvas, 472 x 772 cms, Musée d’Orsay, Paris.

18) Luigi Bazzani, A Visit to Pompeii, 1880s, oil on canvas, 47.8 x 66 cms, Private Collection.

19) Francesco Netti, Gladiator Fight during a Meal at Pompeii, 1880, oil on canvas, 115 x 208 cms, Capodimonte, Naples.

20) Alfred Elmore, Pompeii, A.D. 79, 1878, oil on canvas, 91.4 x 71.1 cms, Yale Centre for British Art.

21) Lawrence Alma Tadema, 1869, An Exedra, 1869, oil on wood, 38 x 60.3 cms, Frances Lehman Loeb Art Centre, Vassar College.

22) Lawrence Alma-Tadema, Glaucus and Nydia, 1867, reworked 1870, oil on wood, 39 x 64.3 cms, Cleveland Museum of Art.

23) Randolph Rogers, Nydia, the Blind Flower Girl of Pompeii, c. 1854, marble, 91.9 x 43.9 x 64.1 cms, Smithsonian Art Museum, Washington.

24) Hiram Powers, The Greek Slave, 1851, marble, 165.7 x 53.3 x 46.4 cm, Yale University Art Gallery.

25) Robert S. Ducanon, Pompeii, 1855, oil on canvas, 53.3 x 43.2 cms, Smithsonian Art Museum, Washington.

26) Wilhelm Marstrand, Portrait of Edward Lear, 1840, location not known.

27) Edward Lear, Illustration to The Owl and the Pussycat, 1871.

28) Edward Lear, The Capitol, 1838, graphite and watercolour on paper, Tate, London.

29) Cover of Edward Lear in Southern Italy.

30) Map of S Italy with Calabria.

31) Lithograph of Palizzo from Lear’s Journals of a Landscape Painter in Southern Calabria, 1852.

32) Photograph of modern Palizzo.

33) Edward Lear, View of Reggio and the Straits of Messina, 1852, oil on canvas, Tate, London.

34) John Singer Sargent, Head of a Capri Girl, 1878, oil on canvas, 22.9 x 25.4 cms, Private Collection.

35) John Singer Sargent, A Capriote, 1878, oil on canvas, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston.

36) John Singer Sargent, View of Capri, 1878, oil on canvas, 50.8 x 63.5 cms, The Warner Collection of Gulf States Paper Corporation, Tuscaloosa, Alabama.

37) John Singer Sargent, Rosina-Capri, 1878, oil on canvas, 19.7 x 25.5 inches, Private Collection.

38) John Singer Sargent, Staircase in Capri, 1878, oil on canvas, 81.9 x 46.3 cms, Private Collection, London.

39) John Singer Sargent, Head of Ana-Capri Girl, 1878, oil on canvas, measurements and location unknown.

40) Charles Sprague Pearce, Moments of Thoughtfulness, 1882, oil on canvas, 73.7 x 54 inches, Private Collection.

41) Sigmund Freud’s Cast of Gradiva, c. 1910, plaster cast, 79.5 x 44.8 x 7.8 cms, Freud Museum, London.

42) “Gradiva” relief, Roman copy of Greek original, marble, 72.5 x 84 cms, Museo Chiaramonti, Vatican City.

43) Galerie Gradiva, left bank, Paris, design, Marcel Duchamp.

44) Salvador Dali, Gradiva Discovering the Anthropomorphic Ruins, 1931-32, oil on canvas, 65 x 54 cms, Thyssen- Bornemisza, Madrid.

45) André Masson, Gradiva, 1939, oil on canvas, 97 x 103 cms, Centre Pompidou, Paris.

46) Sleeping Ariadne, marble, Vatican.

47) Rothko Room, Tate Modern, London.

48) Mark Rothko, Untitled Seagram Mural, (Sketch), 1959, oil and acrylic on canvas, 183.5 152.7 cms, National Gallery of Art, Washington.

49) Robert Rauschenberg, Small Rebus, 1956, combine: oil, graphite, paint swatches, newspaper, magazine clippings, black and white photographs, U.S. map fragment, fabric and 3 cent stamps on canvas, 88.9 x 116.8 cms, Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles.

50) Giorgio Sommer, Cast of a Dog Killed by the Eruption of Mount Vesuvius, Pompeii] - Catalogue nr. 1287., 1863, albumen silver, Getty Centre, Los Angeles.

51) Anon photographer, live dog at Pompeii.

52) William Baziotes, Pompeii, 1955, oil on canvas, 152.4 x 121.9 cms, MOMA, New York.

53) Andy Warhol, Mount Vesuvius, 1985, screen print on linen, hand-coloured with acrylic, 72.4 x 81.3 cms, Andy Warhol Museum, Pittsburgh.

54) Andy Warhol, Vesuvius (Artist’s Proof 48/50), 1985, screenprint, 79.9 x 99.7 cms, Andy Warhol Museum, Pittsburg.

55) Giorgio Sommer, Eruption of Vesuvius, 26^th April, 1872.

Rediscovery of S Italy in Nineteenth Century & Modern Age. (9)

Modern Art Discovers Pompeii (3): Andy Warhol’s Prints of Vesuvius.

A contemporary art dealer from Naples, Lucio Amelio, commissioned Warhol to create a series of images of Vesuvius in 1985. Warhol had already contributed works on the 1980 Irpinia earthquake which ravaged Southern Italy. At this exhibition Amelio- who virtually singlehandedly brought modern art to Naples- showed work by artists like Joseph Beuys, Anselm Kiefer, Robert Rauschenberg who referred to Giorgio Sommer’s photo of the dog at Pompeii in an earlier work- Cy Twombly, and Mario Merz all of whom created art to highlight the plight of the disaster and raise money for its survivors. Though Warhol is well-known for his images of urban, modern disasters like his car crash, accidents, not much is known about his Vesuvius series (above) since they have attracted little critical attention. Some scholars believe that Warhol used paintings by Joseph Wright, Pierre Volaire, and the more obscure Camillo di Vito as sources, but the model seems to have been a postcard by an unknown artist. This postcard is lost but known through a b/w photograph. And in fact Warhol used Giorgio Sommer’s 1872 photograph of the eruption, now in the Warhol archives. The links between Pompeii and modern art still await deeper commitment and excavation.

Rediscovery of S Italy in Nineteenth Century & Modern Age. (8)

Modern Art Discovers Pompeii (2): Mark Rothko’s Seagram Murals.

When thinking of Naples, the names of modern artists, particularly leading ones like Mark Rothko and Andy Warhol tend not to come to mind; but both were fascinated by the story of Pompeii, and in the case of Warhol the eruption of Vesuvius. Mark Rothko (1903-1970) was born in Russia but moved to America where he pioneered what is sometimes called “all-over painting” in which the canvas is drenched in one or two leading colours. Rothko visited Naples has he had always held classical artists, and just as importantly the myths that their pictures communicated, in high esteem. The Seagram Murals, a series of wall paintings commissioned for the Four Seasons restaurant housed in the Seagram Building in New York were felt by the artist to have a deep affinity with the red of the frescoes in the Villa of Mysteries at Pompeii. Other abstract artists in Rothko’s vicinity took inspiration from Pompeii, like William Baziotes (1912-1963) who said to the Director of MOMA, Alfred H. Barr that he had drawn inspiration from Rome’s “decadence, satiety, subtlety and languor.”[1] According to art historian Vincent Bruno who has studied the links between Rothko’s art and the Second Style of Pompeii: “In the Roman murals as in Rothko’s art, the color-field becomes the border that that separates the physical world we occupy from an imaginary world beyond the picture plane, while the colonnades in front appear to project , thus involving the viewer in a spatial continuum that leads from an everyday world within the confines of a room to a realm beyond the ordinary, a realm of fantasy.”[2] Rothko kept a number of canvases when he withdrew from the project in 1960, eventually agreeing to give a group of nine to the Tate; tragically, the Seagram murals (above) arrived at the museum on the same day that Rothko committed suicide in 1970.

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[1] Last Days of Pompeii, no. 38.

[2] Quoted in Last Days of Pompeii, 168.

Rediscovery of S Italy in Nineteenth Century & Modern Age. (7)

Modern Art Discovers Pompeii (1): Surrealist Views of Pompeii and Gradiva.

If there is one solid link between Pompeii and surrealist art, then it is Wilhelm Jensen’s 1903 novella Gradiva: A Pompeii Fancy; or, one could argue, Sigmund Freud’s commentary on Gradiva which became more influential than the novella itself.[1] Gradiva gave Freud plenty of material to work on as it is the story of a neurotic archaeologist Harold Norbert who becomes obsessive about the young woman of the title who he believes lived in ancient Pompeii. Norbert associates the girl with an ancient relief, buys it, and pursues Gradiva to Pompeii itself. For Freud, the archaeology within this story became a model for the process of psychoanalysis: the analyst dredging things from the patient’s subconscious was analogous to the archaeologist uncovering different strata. Freud owned a cast of the original “Gradiva” which is now in the Vatican; it would have been this image that would have confronted patients lying down on his couch in his consulting rooms in Vienna or London. Many surrealist artists like Andre Breton, Salvador Dali, and Andre Masson were heavily influenced by Freud’s ideas so it is unsurprising to find Gradiva appearing as a theme in their work. Breton, a doctor, was the leader of the surrealists, and his Surrealist Manifesto is heavily dependent on Freud’s writings. In 1937 Breton opened a gallery on the Rive Gauche which he christened Gradiva. Marcel Duchamp was responsible for its design; he gave its door the form of a double cast shadow. The Spanish surrealist Salvador gave his wife Gala the nickname of “Gradiva.” In Dali’s eponymous Gradiva, the ancient Pompeiian is a symbol of his wife whom he married in 1934; Gradiva thus became “Gala/Gradiva.” The ruins in the background do not specifically reference Pompeii, but Dali certainly knew about its excavation. According to Picasso, “Dali had become obsessed with the human body cats from Pompeii and proposed casting entire sections of Paris to create a similar record of a simulated modern mass destruction.”[2] The most jarring interpretation of the Gradiva story was left to Masson who depicted the scene of Gradiva’s death during the eruption of Vesuvius (above).[3] The actual figure is based on the Vatican Sleeping Ariadne; but the bright colours seem to evoke the vivid wall painting of Pompeii, while the whole yokes the ancient and the contemporary together in some surrealist dream fantasy in which Gradiva is cast as a symbol of the female ideal, another obsession of the surrealists.

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[1] Victoria C. Gardner Coates, “Pompeii on the Couch: The Modern Fantasy of Gradiva” in Last Days of Pompeii, 70-77, and no 14.

[2] Last Days of Pompeii, no. 15.

[3] Last Days of Pompeii, no. 16.

Rediscovery of S Italy in Nineteenth Century & Modern Age. (6)

On a Trip to Capri with John Singer-Sergeant.

Writing from Capri on August 10^th 1878 to his friend in Paris Ben Castillo, John Singer Sargent (1856-1925) describes his current experience of living in the Marina Hotel- “like a tomb”- and how he and his German artist companion plan to visit Sorrento. Before coming to Capri, Sargent had spent a week in Naples which he describes as “superb.” Eventually, an American – Frank Hyde- arrived on the island and invited Sargent to live at the derelict monastery of Santa Teresa; it is here that he meets the beautiful, sixteen year old Sicilian girl Rosina Ferrara (1862-1938) (above). The beautiful young women of Capri had been a romantic idea in the “French imagination” because of Alphonse de Lamartine’s Graziella which involves a French sophisticate falling in love with a Neapolitan fisher girl who he abandoned in due course.[1] Rosina had already attracted the attention of other visitors like the art historian Adrian Stokes who said “"It used to be easy for artist to find models, but now the grown-up girls are rather shy of strangers, and the priest think it is dangerous for them to pose. For all of that, there are some regular models to be had. Rosina is considered the first on the island, and certainly is a remarkably handsome young woman. She sits perfectly as a model of London or Paris.” In addition to Sargent, other American artists painted Rosina such as Hyde, the Bostonian Charles Sprague Pearce (1851-1914) who trained with Leon Bonnat in Paris. Eventually another American artist George Randolph Barse (1861-1938) fell in love with Rosina and they were married in Rome in 1891. A year later Barse took Rosina back to Westchester, New York. Rosina lived until the age of 76 and died of pneumonia in Flushing, Queens, New York. As for Sargent, he painted Rosina many times including her performing the dance known as the Tarantella on a rooftop in Capri.

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[1] See the helpful essay on the Sargent Capri, on the web site: Capri_Trip.htm

 

Rediscovery of S Italy in Nineteenth Century & Modern Age. (5)

On a Painting Tour with Edward Lear in Calabria.

In addition to the academic reconstruction of Southern Italian cities like Pompeii and Herculaneum there were other genres emerging though these were more in tune with the growing interest in open-air painting. Though Naples was still visited by late 19^th century artists like Mikhail Nestorov from Russia, who kept a painter’s journal of his experience, there were artists who ventured even further south to regions like Calabria and Capri. As we shall see, John Singer Sargent took a trip to the latter in 1878; but in 1842 the poet and landscape artist Edward Lear (1812-1888) made a trip to Calabria, the great landmass on the opposite side of the Messina straits. More known for his nonsense prose and poetry such as “The Owl and the Pussycat” (1871) Lear was an accomplished artist, though that side of his career has escaped the attention of the general public. A well-travelled man, Lear visited Greece and Egypt (1848-49), India and Ceylon (1873-75). His illustrated Italian journeys began a journey in 1842 into the Italian peninsula. Travelling through the Lazio, Rome, Abruzzo, Molise, Apulia, Calabria and Sicily, Lear sketched and commented on local people and customs. His Journals of a Landscape Painter in Southern Calabria were illustrated with eighteen lithographs of buildings and landscape of the Italian peninsula (above).[1] After a long decline in his health, Lear died at his villa in San Remo in 1888 of heart disease, from which he had suffered since at least 1870. Lear's funeral was said to be a sad, lonely affair by the wife of Dr. Hassall, Lear's physician, none of Lear's many lifelong friends being able to attend. Lear is buried in the Cemetery Foce in San Remo. On his headstone are inscribed these lines about Mount Tomohrit (in Albania) from Tennyson's poem To E.L. [Edward Lear], On His Travels in Greece: “all things fair. With such a pencil, such a pen. You shadow forth to distant men, I read and felt that I was there.”

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[1] Lithography (from Ancient Greek λίθος, lithos, meaning 'stone', and γράφειν, graphein, meaning 'to write') is a method of printing originally based on the immiscibility of oil and water.The printing is from a stone (lithographic limestone) or a metal plate with a smooth surface. It was invented in 1796 by German author and actor Alois Senefelder as a cheap method of publishing theatrical works. Lithography can be used to print text or artwork onto paper or other suitable material.

Rediscovery of S Italy in Nineteenth Century & Modern Age. (4)

The Romans of the Decadence.

The title refers to a painting by Manet’s teacher Thomas Couture (1815-1879); this is a very large canvas in Paris showing ancient Romans in a state of prodigality, though it is also a critique of the France of his time. Couture painted his chef d’oeuvre in 1847 several decades before the decadent movement in art and literature fully blossomed; but there was a tendency throughout the century to link the fate of Pompeii with decadence, with the eruption of Vesuvius seen as a symbol of punishment for this corruption and moral dissipation of the decadent Romans. Franque’s painting shown earlier has been construed as part of a tradition in which Pompeii is eroticised which, arguably began with the fresco of the Cupid Seller , though as Seydl points out, this is hardly an erotic image;[1] it was interpreters like Vien who made it a little more risqué, though to a modern eye not concerned with these matters Vien’s cupid dangling in mid-air looks faintly ridiculous. The so-called eroticisation of Pompeii is thought to have begun in the 1820s and continued into the age of the decadent movement. This involved what Sedyl calls the eroticisation of the “experience of the site” itself captured in a painting by the Italian Luigi Bazzani who shows two unaccompanied young women venturing tentatively into the House of the Ancient Hunt at Pompeii where they observe a fresco with a naked man. Though Pompeii certainly produced erotic art, its so-called “eroticisation” in nineteenth-century art sounds more like a narrative dreamed up by academics with a populist bent. However, it is certainly right to link decadence with social and political commentary of the day:[2] Works like Bulwer-Lytton’s Last Days of Pompeii has to be seen as a critique of “slavery, aristocratic luxury, and compromised masculinity, which readers understood in light of contemporary Christian moralizing and classical liberalism.”[3] The plight of slaves is movingly caught in Alma-Tadema’s An Exedra (1869) which shows affluent, decadent Romans gazing out over the Bay of Naples while a pitifully dejected slave waits to be summoned. Alma-Tadema also did paintings based on Bulwer-Lytton’s novel, e.g. Glaucus and Nydia. There is also the sculpture of Nydia by the American sculptor Randolph Rogers (1825-1892) which shows the blind flower girl and her cane which she used to tap on the pavement of Pompeii (above). She led Glaucus and his other love Ione to safety before committing suicide. The sculpture is highly complex and shows Roger’s invention with the detail of Nydia cupping her hand to her ear and the broken capital at the slave’s feet which symbolises the city’s destruction.[4] Also to be admired is the fluttering drapery which suggest Nydia’s movement as she rushes, literally blindly, through the streets of Pompeii. Scholars seem disinclined to see Roger’s Nydia as part of the critique of slavery and in more in the spirit of Hiram Power’s famous Greek Slave which eroticised slavery and therefore aroused controversy in America. Nonetheless, some American artists like the landscape painter Robert S. Duncanon (1821-1872) were certainly aware of the abolitionist movement as his patron, Nicholas Longsworth was active in it.[5] Duncanon travelled to Europe in April 1853 where he was stunned by Turner’s paintings. His sedate view of Pompeii with a slumbering Vesuvius in the background owes much to eighteenth century landscapists like Jan Frans van Bloemen, Andrea Locatelli, and G.P. Pannini whose art he would have seen in Italy.

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[1] Ibid.

[2] On Pompeii and the erotic, Mary Beard, “Dirty Little Secrets: Changing Displays of Pompeian “Erotica” in ibid, 40-69.

[3] Ibid. And William St Clair and Annika Bautz, “The Making of the Myths: Edward Bulwer-Lytton’s The Last days of Pompeii” in ibid, 52-59.

[4] Ibid, no. 69.

[5] Ibid, no. 72.

Rediscovery of S Italy in Nineteenth Century & Modern Age. (3)

19^th Century Painters of Other Nationalities & the Last Days of Pompeii.

Though it was mainly French artists in the 19^th century who responded to the scene of Pompeii’s demise , there were artists from other countries who tackled the subject. The English landscape painter Sebastian Pether (1790-1844) painted the destruction of a city which is thought to be Herculaneum; the volcano depicted is definitely Vesuvius. The Irish-born artist James Hamilton (1819-1878) trained in Philadelphia and never visited Italy. His Last Days of Pompeii (1864) is the product of reading about the tragedy and using his imagination. Other painters include the American Albert Bierstadt (1830-1902) who was more famous for his scenes of the Rockies, but he also painted the terrifying volcano. And perhaps the most apocalyptic painter England ever produced, John Martin (1789-1854) went one better than other disaster artists by representing the destruction of both Pompeii and Herculaneum. In a different key, Edward John Poynter (1836-1919) showed a painting at the R.A. in 1865 that took as its theme self-sacrifice in the face of impending disaster rather than Vesuvius and reactions to the explosion. Faithful unto Death depicts a Roman soldier standing guard while Vesuvius destroys Pompeii, though we are spared the conflagration. This painting ushered in the so-called “Victorian classical movement” which included in addition to Poynter Lawrence Alma Tadema who is closer to Chasserieau’s Tepidarium with his interest in the archaeological furnishings . Poynter was a member of the English upper-class who had spent time in Rome, trained in Paris and returned to London in 1859, though he never visited Naples. The subject of Poynter’s painting came from Edward Bulwer-Lytton’s novel The Last Days of Pompeii (1834) (above) in which the Roman soldier makes an appearance near the end of the book. In the words of Bulwer-Lytton: “the lightning flashed over his livid face and polished helmet, but his stern features were composed even in their awe. He remained erect and motionless at his post.” This sort of picture would have been known as an exemplum virtutis: a moral subject demonstrating bravery, self-sacrifice, or a noble course of action. Moral virtue notwithstanding, the picture has also been seen as “a critique of the state” and “a commentary on the futility of self-sacrifice.”

Rediscovery of S Italy in Nineteenth Century & Modern Age. (2)

19^th Century French Painters & the Last Days of Pompeii.

Some cities never die; Pompeii is no exception. As we saw last week the final days of this noble city attracted painters in the previous century, and this fascination with Pompeii never subsided. Bryullov’s tour de force of 1833 opened the floodgates to artists of all nationalities. Leading the French charge were artists like Joseph Franque (1774-1833), Frederic Schopin (1804-1880) and Hector Leroux (1829-1900). Hailing from a small village in the south of France, Franque and his brother trained in Grenoble, with Joseph eventually going on to Paris and becoming a pupil of Jacques Louis David. After exhibiting a classical subject, Hercules Rescuing Alcestis from the Underworld (1806), Franque went to Italy in 1814 near the end of Napoleon’s reign. Franque settled in Naples where he became a respected professor. Franque’s highly academic and overcharged Scene during the Eruption of Vesuvius (1827) (above) was the last work the artist sent to the Paris salon.[1] Schopin was born to a French family in northern Germany and he trained in the Paris studio of Antoine-Jean Gros, one of David’s star pupils. Schopin’s apocalyptic and chaotic vision of Pompeii pulls out all the stops including a fiery sky and a raging flood. Wether Schopin travelled to Pompeii is unknown, but in 1848 the Academy of St Petersburg named him a member. In Russia Schopin undoubtedly saw Bryullov’s painting of Pompeii’s demise ; other influences include Gericault’s Raft of the Medusa (1819) and Chasserieau’s Tepidarium (1853). Leroux was a member of the Ecole des Beaux-Arts and a confirmed classicist. His Herculaneum 23^rd August AD 79 (1881) shows a group of three exhausted Vestal Virgins watching the volcanic eruption; the group may be based upon a design of a mirror from Pompeii known through engravings by Tommaso Piroli.

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[1] According to Jon L. Seydi in the Last Days of Pompeii (21) the depiction of Franque’s woman and two daughters was “based on an 1812 excavation where jewellery was discovered among human remains. This evidence allowed the painter to spin a narrative suggesting the materialistic selfishness of the victims; the pursuit of valuables slowed their escape and contributed to their deaths.”