Herculaneum and Pompeii: Visions of a Discovery

Fascinating exhibition at the Archaeological Museum in Naples looking at how the news and information about the discoveries at Herculaneum and Pompeii were recorded and circulated from their discovery to the invention of photography.

Having been to Pompeii two days before we did this exhibition in filled in the gaps between the then of what we saw and the now of us experiencing it. I’d also done a course last year on classicism and this illuminated a lot of the points made on it about the re-emergence of classical style in art and architecture when these cities were discovered.

I loved seeing the notebooks of the engineers who discovered Herculaneum when preparing a site to build a royal villa. They included Jakob Weber’s survey of the Villa of the Papyri. Some of his notes are the only record we have of sites as in digging them they were destroyed. They also had an early notebook showing the finds shown alongside the finds themselves and Francois de Paule’s first overall plan of the works at Pompeii.

It also looked at how the cities were added to the Grand Tour and had guide books which would have been used by the travellers as well as their note books and sketches. The excavation works at Pompeii were still going on at this period and there were delightful watercolours of the archaeologists at work. The 18th century book Antiquities of Herculaneum was shown with the drawings for the book, the copper plate and the real reliefs they depict.

It ended by looking at photography which was used on the sites from quite soon after its discovery. It was used to record the sites and for the tourist trade. There was a lovely selection of work by Giorgio Sommer from the 1860s.

Closed on 20 September 2018