Pompeii and Herculaneum

POMPEII AND HERCULANEUM

POMPEII AND HERCULANEUM. Prosperous Roman towns in the Bay of Naples, Pompeii and Herculaneum were destroyed by the eruption of Mt. Vesuvius in 79 c.e. and rediscovered under ash and hardened lava in the eighteenth century. The initial motivation for excavation was a search for sculpture and architectural marble. The excavations yielded well-preserved public and domestic buildings complete with painted decoration and furnishings; while works of art were eagerly gathered, the full range of artifacts of daily life, from graffiti to carbonized food, provided unparalleled evidence for the reconstruction of Roman daily life. The astonishing finds, the direct link with ancient authors (the eruption of Vesuvius was witnessed by Pliny the Younger, as described in his Letters ), the drama of catastrophically lost ancient cities, and the possibility of walking along well-preserved Roman streets and entering Roman houses caused a sensation in eighteenth-century Europe. Visitors on the grand tour, however, were displeased to witness careless and destructive procedures on the sites; they encountered extraordinary security and were forbidden to take notes or draw objects. Comte de Caylus, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Horace Walpole, and Johann Joachim Winckelmann published complaints. A new awareness of the potential of excavation for historical understanding led some to suggest that all finds be left in place as a complete museum.

Chance finds at Herculaneum were made by Domenico Fontana in 1594 while supervising an engineering project, but the site was not exploited until 1709. More determined tunneling started in 1738, when the Spanish engineer Rocque de Alcubierre was assigned by the Bourbon King Charles III of Spain (ruled Naples as Charles VIII, 1734–1759) to search for cut marble and statuary for the king's new summer palace, under construction nearby at Portici. Using deep tunnels and existing wells, artifacts and wall paintings were removed for Charles's palace. In response to complaints about the jealous secrecy surrounding the digging, in 1755 Charles founded the Accademia Ercolanese, whose members were charged with publishing findings from all the royal excavations in Campania. In 1750 the Swiss engineer Karl Weber (1712–1764) was hired to direct the excavations, and he soon discovered the Villa of the Papyri, which included a library of nearly two thousand carbonized papyrus scrolls, most of them works on Epicurean philosophy, and a large collection of bronze statuary. Weber's work was as systematic as his employer's impatience allowed, and it anticipated modern archaeological methods. Excavations at Herculaneum, rendered difficult because of noxious gases, seeping water, and cementlike pyroclastic lava fill, continued for several decades; later, excavations at Pompeii were favored, and work at Herculaneum continued intermittently for over two centuries thereafter.

Digging at Pompeii began in 1748, and the city's identity was established in 1763. Under the supervision of Weber, the excavation proceeded more systematically and with greater ease. Sir William Hamilton, the British envoy to Naples from 1764 and a notable collector and antiquarian, often conducted European visitors through the excavations and took an avid interest in the geology of Vesuvius, whose eruptions he documented. The finds from Pompeii and Herculaneum inspired neoclassical artists (including Antonio Canova, Jacques-Louis David, Anton Raphael Mengs, Angelica Kauffmann, Bertel Thorvaldsen, and Joseph-Marie Vien), architects (Giovanni Battista Piranesi, Robert Adam, John Soane), and ceramicists, and they directed fashionable taste for many decades. Pompeii and the eruptions of Vesuvius stimulated new objectives for the disciplines of archaeology and geology and a new concern for the conservation of antiquities.

See also Archaeology ; Architecture ; Classicism ; Grand Tour ; Neoclassicism .

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Beard, Mary, and John Henderson. Classical Art: From Greece to Rome. Oxford, 2001.

Bologna, Ferdinando. "The Rediscovery of Herculaneum and Pompeii in the Artistic Culture of Europe in the Eighteenth Century." In Rediscovering Pompeii, edited by Baldassare Conticello. Rome, 1990.

Jenkins, Ian, and Kim Sloan. Vases and Volcanoes: Sir William Hamilton and His Collection. London, 1996.

Parslow, Christopher Charles. Rediscovering Antiquity: Karl Weber and the Excavation of Herculaneum, Pompeii, and Stabiae. Cambridge, U.K., and New York, 1995.

Reale Accademia Ercolanese di Archeologia. Le antichità di Ercolano esposte. 8 vols. Naples, 1757–1792.

Schnapp, Alain. The Discovery of the Past: The Origins of Archaeology. London, 1996.

Winckelmann, Johann Joachim. Sendschreiben von den herculanischen Entdeckungen: Nachrichten von den neuesten herculanischen Entdeckungen. Baden-Baden, 1964.

Margaret M. Miles