The excavations at Pompeii

Excavation begins of the town buried by Vesuvius in AD 79. Wall paintings, furniture and entire houses come to light.

The finds gave a new picture of everyday life in antiquity and gave impetus to neoclassicism throughout Europe.

The eruption of Vesuvius in AD 79 buried Pompeii under ash and pumice, and the neighbouring town of Herculaneum under scorching pyroclastic flows and volcanic deposits many metres deep. The towns were then largely forgotten. In the mid-18th century the Kingdom of Naples was ruled by Charles of Bourbon, who wanted to lend lustre to his new realm. He had excavations made at Herculaneum from 1738, and a few years later digging also began on the site of Pompeii, which at first was not even securely identified. The excavations were initially directed by military engineers, and the aim was to find statues, paintings and valuables for the king’s collections rather than to understand the towns. Tunnels were often dug and filled in again afterwards.

The finds were taken to a royal museum at Portici outside Naples. Drawing was forbidden there, and the king kept a close watch on who was allowed to see them. Instead, a lavish series of books with engravings was published from the 1750s and handed out as gifts to the courts and scholars of Europe. The German art historian Johann Joachim Winckelmann criticised the careless methods of the excavations in widely circulated writings. In the 19th century the work became more systematic, and in the 1860s Giuseppe Fiorelli began excavating the town block by block. It was also he who had the cavities left by the dead filled with plaster, so that their bodies emerged in their final postures.

Pompeii and Herculaneum became an obligatory stop for the young aristocrats making their Grand Tour of Italy. The light ornament of the wall paintings, with thin frames, tendrils and small figures on red, black or white grounds, was copied in salons, porcelain and furniture all over Europe. Gustav III visited Pompeii during his Italian journey of 1783–1784, and he bought ancient sculpture that was later shown in a museum of its own in the Royal Palace in Stockholm, one of Europe’s early public museums. The decorative painter Louis Masreliez, who had studied in Italy for many years, brought the Pompeian idiom to the royal interiors. In this way a buried Roman provincial town became one of the sources of the Swedish Gustavian style.