From Paris to Pompeii by Blix Göran;

Author:Blix, Göran;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press

Figure 10. Karl Pavlovitch Briullov (1799–1852), The Last Day of Pompeii (1833). Russian State Museum, St. Petersburg, Russia. Scala / Art Resource, NY.

Figure 11. Frédéric Henri Schopin (1804–80), The Last Days of Pompeii. Musée du Petit Palais, Paris, France. Réunion des Musées Nationaux / Art Resource, NY.

If this rampant catastrophism testified to a dark streak of Romanticism, it was kept in check by a contrary current, a redemptive dream fueled by a series of spectacular archaeological finds that captured the public's attention. These set the drama of recovery against the tragedy of disappearance. Chief among them, of course, was Pompeii, where excavations went on throughout the century, and which rapidly became a major tourist destination, a favorite theme for novels, poems, operas, and paintings, and a motif of engravings. But important finds were made also in Egypt, Arabia, Assyria, Turkey, and Crete. Napoleon, as is well known, brought an army of savants and artists with him on his 1797 expedition in Egypt and put them to work inventorying the country's cultural treasures, a mission that yielded the monumental Description de l'Egypte (1809–28). The dead city of Petra was another spectacular find: a Roman trading post in Arabia Petraea, carved into the cliff face and hidden in a maze of stony gorges, it was first visited by a European in 1812, when the Swiss Johann Ludwig Burckhardt (1784–1817) passed through.5 Thereafter, its fame quickly spread: an English expedition arrived in 1818, followed by a French team in 1827, which published a richly illustrated Voyage de l'Arabie Pétrée (1830) that revealed Petra to the world. The next big milestone was Henry Layard's celebrated discovery of Nineveh and Nimrud (1845–47)—the French explorer Paul-Emile Botta had led the way in 1842—which produced, for the first time, a tangible image of ancient Assyria and seemed to ground parts of the Bible in solid archaeological evidence. Layard's account of his digs, Nineveh and Its Remains (1852), was a rousing exotic tale of adventure and became a Victorian bestseller, while the treasures that Layard shipped home—the sculpted panels from the temple of Sennacherib and a pair of enormous winged stone bulls—were proudly put on display at the British Museum. The nineteenth-century romance of archaeology no doubt reached its peak with Heinrich Schliemann's (1822–90) much-publicized discovery of Troy. A self-made man and adventurer, Schliemann was obsessed with Homer and went digging for Troy with the Iliad as his guide at the hill of Hissarlik in Turkey in 1870. There he found what he dubbed “Priam's palace” and “treasure” in 1873 and thereafter went on to excavate Mycenae in 1876, where he believed he had unearthed the bodies of Agamemnon, Cassandra, and Clytemnestra, as well what he called “Odysseus's palace” at Ithaca in 1878. Though Schliemann would be denounced later by professionals as a sensationalist and charlatan, his finds nonetheless deeply marked the Western imagination, and helped “confirm,” as Nineveh had earlier, another mythical origin of the West. Schliemann had also intended to dig at Knossos in Crete, but

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