Survey: Representations of Pompeii and Herculaneum over time

Question 1

Jakob Philipp Hackert

Answer 1

Offical painter for the court at Naples in 1899

• Painted View of Pompeii, which combined an image of the ruins and a pastoral idyll (fertile landscape)

Question 2

Francois Mazois

Answer 2

Architect/Artist

• Made 454 drawings published in The Ruins of Pompeii to “bring out the poetry of the ruins”.
• He wrote this in a letter: “I was in Pompeii perched on a narrow ruined wall, when suddenly it shifted and then collapsed, throwing me straight down, head first onto the antique marble floor beneath. I must confess, I can think of no better way to die, nor of any better place to be buried.”

Question 3

Romantic Writers and Painters

Answer 3

Representation were imbued with fantasy elements.

• Paul Alfred de Curzon’s painting “Dream Amid the Ruins of Pompeii in 1866 (I googled it and it actually looks pretty normal but whatever)
• Writers such as Henri Stendhal (Rome, Naples and Florence, 1817) and Percy Shelley (Ode to Naples, 1818)

Some chose to represent the horror of the last days of Pompeii.

• P.H. Valenciennes’ The Death of Pliny
• Bruelow Karl Pawlowitsh’s “Doomsday in Pompeii → God taking revenge on the pagan people
• Giovanni Puccini’s opera “The Last Day of Pompeii

Some wanted to “evoke languid sensuality popular at the time in Europe”.

• Theodore Chasseriau’s “Women in the Tepidarium”