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Painting and the rise of volcanology: Sir William Hamilton's Campi Phlegraei
Painting and the rise of volcanology: Sir William Hamilton’s Campi Phlegraei Joachim von der Thiisen The art lover and collector Sir William Hamilton became one of the keenest and most knowledgeable observers of volcanic activity in 18th-century Italy. Hamilton’s enthusiasms are reflected in the ._. illustrations of the Cumpi Phkgraei, produced under his direction. While some of Pietro Fabris’s gouache paintings project the volcano as an unfathomable and sublime force, others depict it as an accessible and almost measurable phenomenon. The artwork in Cumpi Phlegraei marks the moment in the development of a visual style for geology, when the painterly has not yet disappeared, but has started to give way to the new ‘geognostic’ mode.
When, in 1631, Vesuvius erupted violently after having been dormant for more than 300 years, it aroused great interest among the educated in Europe. As long as one could remember, cattle had grazed in the crater, and now vineyards, forests and whole villages were lost. A similarly cataclysmic event occurred 38 years later when Mount Etna erupted. The death toll was 4000. Athanasius Kircher, the polymath and German Jesuit, was among the learned and curious who felt the urge to travel to Southern Italy. The results of Kircher’s subsequent explorations - he even had himself lowered into the crater of Vesuvius found their way into his famous work, Mundus Subterruneus (1665). Yet, rather disappointingly to a modem reader, Kircher moved all too quickly from observation to speculation. The most striking illustrations of his work were those that depicted the interior of the earth as a big nucleus of fire sending its flames through long conduits to volcanic orifices (Figure 1). With Kircher, we enter a hundred-year period of grand theories on the history and the interior of the Earth. Thomas Bumet, in his Sacred Theory of the Earth (1681), divided the Earth’s history into four distinct phases, of which the second and the third were catastrophic: aquatic forces had reigned in the phase of the Deluge, while igneous processes marked the phase in which mankind had since been living. In Bumet’s view, the observable volcanic phenomena in the present world were the harbingers of the apocalyptic fire that would destroy the earth before it could finally be rebuilt as paradise.
Joachimvan der
In the 18th century, we find Buffon advocating a hot (and slowly cooling) interior of the earth. However, Buffon did not connect volcanic phenomena to this heat source, thiuking that the crust of the earth had cooled too much. He stated that superficial material (sulphur, coal and bitumen) was the fuel of volcanoes and would result in eruptions when coming into contact with water. Hence, for Buffon all volcanoes had to be near the seat. In the later 18th century, the influential teachings of Abraham Werner did not assign any major role to volcanic forces, since Werner believed in the sedimentary origin of all rocks, a view later usually referred to as ‘Nepttmist’. To Werner, volcanoes were recent and peripheral phenomena*. The opposite view was put forward in 1785 by James
Hutton who described heat as the central agent in the history of the earth, responsible even for the formation of limestone and other sedimentary rockss. Hutton’s theory came to be known as ‘Pluto&‘. One should add, however, that the potential dogmatism of these latter-day cosmogonists was tamed by their strong empiricist stance: both Werner and Hutton insisted on fieldwork and precise observation. Whether they thought that volcanoes were peripheral or central phenomena, all early geological theorists believed that volcanoes had their origin in subterraneous fires. Most thought that large deposits of coal or pyrites firelled these fires. Another universally held view was that there was a close link between all forms of earthquakes and volcanic
Thijsen
received his PhD from Stanford University. He is a lecturer in Comparative Literature at the University of Utrecht. He recently published a book on the transformations of the sublime in 18th-century culture (in Dutch).
Figure 1
106
0160-9327/99/$ -see
Endeavour Vol. 23(3) 1999
Athanasius
Kircher (1665) Mundus Subterraneus, I, p. 180.
front matter 0 1999 Elsevier Science Ltd. All rights reserved. PII: SOl60-9327(99)01214-4
Figure 2
Pierre-Jacques
Volaire, Erupfion of Vesuvius in 7777 (Rome, priv. COIL).
eruptions. Following a conviction handed down from antiquity, eruptions were even seen as beneficial: they acted as safety valves for the ever-active subterraneous igneous fields. If not released through a volcano, pressures would build up and cause earthquakes, resulting in much more widespread destructiona.
Fiery phenomenon It comes as no surprise, then, that 18thcentury painters were so eager to portray active Mount Vesuvius as a purely fiery phenomenon. Throughout the 18th century, Vesuvius was a most obliging spectacle for travellers to Italy. The volcano was almost continuously active, especially after 1750, when Naples became part of the itinerary of the Grand Tour. The French painter Volaire, the Englishman Wright of Derby and the Austrian Wutky, were among the artists who perfected a technique that catered to the affluent tourist. They had found a successful formula in painting Mount Vesuvius at night when the lava flow could be seen most clearly. Sometimes these painters heightened the grand effect by the inclusion of another light source: the cold and bluish light of the moon, usually reflected by the sea (see Figure 2). Yet there was a definite drawback to this mode of representation. When Mount Vesuvius was painted as a purely fiery phenomenon at night, many distinguishing features were lost. Little remained, except for a very generalized image of a sublime force. Indeed, there was almost no difference between a painting of an eruption at night and the artistic rendering of an 18th century fireworks display. Vesuvius tended to become a baroque fireworks machines. In one important sense, however, it was legitimate and even necessary to paint the volcano as a sublime spectacle. Central to the experience of the sublime was - as it still is - the feeling of being overwhelmed,
of transcending the human sphere, of being confronted with an inexhaustible horizon of meaning. As Goethe put it when he saw Mount Vesuvius for the last time during his Italian journey, while looking from a window of the Capodimonte Palace in Naples: We stood at a window on the upper floor, Vesuvius straight ahead of us; the lava flowing down, the flame of which was distinctly glowing as the sun had set some time ago; the mountain raging violently [. . .] Down from there to the sea a band of incandescence and glowing vapours; for the rest, sea and earth, rock and vegetation distinct in the dusk, clear, peaceful, in magic tranquillity. [...I Here we had a text before us for which millennia would not suffice to exhaust its meaning6.
at the volcano. In fact, Hamilton even collected a number of large nocturnal views of Vesuvius for his residence, the Palazzo Sessa. And when he embarked on his great publication project on all matters VOlCamC in Southern Italy, the Campi Phlegraei (1776-1779), he had his personal painter, Pietro Fabris, add some gouache paintings that treated Vesuvius in the accepted sublime style (Figure 3)s. Some years earlier, Hamilton had even chosen a painting in transparent colours on glass, to accompany one of his letters on Vesuvius to the Royal Society in London. This painting, now lost, had apparently been sent together with an apparatus for back-lighting9. But a love of the sublime vista is perhaps not unexpected in a Knight of the Order of the Bath a connoisseur and collector of antique vases and gems, and a lover of contemporary artlo. What is more remarkable is the fact that Hamilton, the aristocratic virtuoso, cuts short all learned and metaphoric associations of Mount Vesuvius when he sets himself the task of recording the observable features of the erupting mountain. An astonishingly dry phenomenalism takes over as soon as Hamilton has his first encounter with the volcano during the major eruption of Vesuvius in 1776-1777. He himself makes pencil drawings of the changing forms of the crater, adding them to his second letter to the Royal Society. And when he finds the gifted artist Fabris, he instructs him to employ the same kind of straightforward phenomenalism.
Painters of Mount Vesuvius who adhered to the aesthetics of the sublime often consciously evoked this richness of meaning that Goethe alluded to. Their paintings reverberated with the metaphoric, the symbolic and the historical. They activated in the viewer a meditative response to what one could call the cultural halo of the famous mountain. Part of this cultural halo was the thought that Vesuvius was the burial mound of an ancient civilisation (as at Pompeii, Herculaneum and Stabiae), that it belonged to the mythological configuration of an ‘entrance to the underworld’, that it metaphorically represented (southern) passion and temperament, and that it symbolized political upheaval and revolution7.
Sublimity versus phenomenonalism It is interesting to see that the most astute observer of Mount Vesuvius in the 18th century, Sir William Hamilton, the British envoy to the court of Naples, did not exclude this sublime perspective from his ways of looking
Figure 3 Pietro Fabris (1779) Campi Phlegraei, Frontispiece of Supplement.
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Vol. 23(3) 1999
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Figure 4
ColoUrSOf eruptive material. It is interesting to note that Hamilton seems to have kept a hand in the arrangement of these rocks, for it looks as if a collector had arranged the specimens. They are ordered according to aesthetic principles, echoing the older formula of the Naturalienkabinett. In one of these plates an excavated piece of Roman jewelry was even added (Figure 4). Yet unlike his mineralcollecting predecessors, Hamilton was well aware that the ordering of volcanic material in his Campi PhZegraei was arbitrary. Hamilton had no ambition to add this field to his other areas of collecting and connoisseurship. He himself said that he had no mineralogical knowledge and that he intended to offer these illustrations to those who were more competent. Yet knowing that images would not suffice for analysing the Vesuvian rocks and minerals and that a chemical examination was necessary, he shipped considerable quantities of rock specimens to England.
Pietro Fabris, Campi Phlegraei, plate 44.
Figure 5 Pietro Fabris, CamDjPhlearaei, plate 17 (The Campi Flegrei seen from the . C&vent of the Camaid&). .
In Hamilton’s letters and publications on Italian volcanoes, we see the same modesty that became characteristic of the early practitioners of what we now call volcanology. Frenchmen Guettard and Desmarest showed a similar attitude towards their objects of study (mainly Mount Etna and the extinct volcanoes of the Massif Central). Although in general outlook Guettard and Desmarest remained close to the Wernerian ‘Neptunist’ position, they deliberately shied away from all great explanatory theories 11. Similarly, Hamilton criticized all speculative theorists in his letter of dedication in the Campi Phlegraei: It is to be lamented that those who wrote most, on the subject of Natural History, have seldom been themselves the observers, and have too readily taken for granted systems, which other ingenious and learned men, have perhaps formed in their closets, with as little foundation of self experience: the more such systems have been treated with ingenuity, the more they have served to mislead, and heap error upon error. Accurate and faithful observations on the operations of nature, related with simplicity and truth, are not to be met with often . . .12.
108
Endeavour Vol. 23(3) 1999
F’roto-volcanology developed at a distance from the great cosmogonic theories that kept many contemporary natural historians occupied. Some of the most splendid gouaches in the Campi Phlegraei - engraved and handcoloured for the book edition - show the complex and widely varying structures and
Figure 6
Volcanoes as a constructive force Hamilton had begun without any training in natural history. By the 178Os, however, he had become a respected expert on all things volcanic. The German ‘volcanologist’, Raspe, for instance, asked Hamilton to inspect certain rock layers in the Rhine valley. Hamilton obliged, identifying the rocks of the Siebengebirge as basaltic, which to Raspe and Hamilton already meant ‘volcanic’l3. Hamilton had educated himself through stubborn observation (he climbed Mount Vesuvius a total of 68 times) and extensive reading, and through his correspondence with other students of volcanism. In plate 17 of the Campi Phlegraei (Figure 5) one can detect Hamilton with one of his many telescopes looking at the ‘Burning Fields’ from a vantage point at Camaldoli. During his 30 years of observation, Hamilton generated some significant ideas about volcanic phenomena and the principles involved14. First, he thought that the heat source was deep-seated. He dismissed the burning coal-field theory that most of his contemporaries clung to. Second, he correctly identified water and steam as important
Pietro Fabris, Campi Phlegraei, plate 39 (Fossa Grande).
agents, adding to the danger and explosiveness of volcanic eruptions. Thud, he suggested - after identifying Monte Somma as the former Vesuvius, and after studying the volcanic layers below the cities of Herculaneum and Pompeii - that volcanoes reached far back in the history of the earth. This was quite in contrast to the accepted view. Fourth, and most importantly, Hamilton considered volcanoes a constructive force, rather than a merely destructive one, as so many in the 18th century still maintained, following the Bumet tradition. For Hamilton, the whole region around Naples, with its beauty and variety, had been built up by volcanoes. Thus the title of his work, which had been borrowed from the name for the relatively
small area to the north-west of Naples, was applied to a much larger region, even extending to the Liparian Islands and Sicily. This led to the expectation that the visible geological features of the Campania and the islands would betray their volcanic origin. Yet there was also the question of the sea floor which must have been broken and uplifted. Hamilton was not surprised to find fractured limestone, sometimes with the imprint of fossils, in an area dominated by volcanic
action. He was very careful not to make too big a claim; in fact, he did not consider Capri a volcanic island. Although Hamilton was not always sure which of the more lightcoloured rocks were of igneous rather than sedimentary origin, he nevertheless directed Pietro Fabris to draw as painstakingly as possible the different layers where they were exposed in quarries and on hill-sides. Here. however, the art of Fabris encountered certain difficulties. While, by 1770, the sublime vista of a distant mountain could rely on an accepted set of artistic techniques, and while even the drawing of small rocks found support in an established artistic tradition, in the phenomenalism of drawing objects at close range, there were no such models for painting the middle ground. In this zone the problems of selection loomed large. What to choose from an ensemble that was incredibly rich in detail, what to stress, what to leave out? This became a crucial problem whenever Fabris had to paint crater structures and forms of lava at a medium distance’s,
Landscape artists at the end of the 18th century tended to make the middle ground the playing field of the picturesque. For the picturesque, with its stress on variety, irregularity and roughness, offered a guiding principle with which the overly detailed could be turned into an advantage. The picturesque, however, would not do for a kind of painting that had to be ‘geognostic’, in the terminology of the Werner school. In geognostic drawing and painting, repetitive features had to be thrown into high relief, just as the regularity of structures had to be laid bare for the discerning eye. It is clear that a painter had to be thoroughly trained for what to look for in the rock sections of the ‘middle-ground’, and it seems that Hamilton could not always provide Fabris with the un~biguous information that would guide his eye. Given this limitation, however, it is remarkable how far Fabris was able to go in this relativeiy uncharted territory (Figure 6). Indeed, he paved the way for those geognostic artists that were to arrive a few years later when Werner’s concept of rock formation had been taken up by painters and when the basalt controversy would further sharpen the perception of landscape artists. Notes and references 1 This is the view put forward in the first volume of Buffon’s Hismire Naturelle Genne’mle et Purticulitre, separately titled as Theorie de la Terre (1749). .4 later Supplement (1775) shows Buffon cautiously
speculating on a more deep-seated origin of volcanoes 2 Werner, A.G. (1787) Kurze Klass$kation und Beschreibung der Verschiedenen Gebjrgs~rten, Dresden 3 Hutton, J. (1788) Theory of the earth:
or an investigation of the laws observable in the composition, dissolution and elevation of the land upon the globe, Trans. Roy. Sot. Edinburgh 1,209-3 14 4 Strabo (s.d.) Rerum Geographicorum. For a representative 18th~century statement: D’Holbach, P.H.T. (1967) ‘Volcans’ (17721 in Encyclopedic ou Dictionnaire Raisonnt des Sciences, des Arts et des Metiers, Vol. 16, p. 443, reprint
Frommann-Holzboog
5 On Joseph Wright of Derby’s shortcomings in this respect: Hamblyn, R. (1996) Private cabinets and popu1~ geology: the British audiences for volcanoes in the eighteenth century, in Transports: Travel, Pleasure, and l~pin~t~ve
Geography, 1600-1530
(Chard. c. and Langdon: g., eds), pp. 196-200, Yale University Press 6 Goethe. J.W. (1974) italienische Reise [1816-18173 Werke, Vol. 11 (Von Einem. H., ed.j, pp. 345-346. Beck 7 On the semantic range of the revolutionary volcano metaphor, see Von der Thiisen, J. (1996) Die Lava der Revolution fliesst majestatisch: Vulkanische Metapho~k zur Zeit der Franztisischen Revolution, Fruncicc, Forschungen zur westeuroptiischen Gesc~~chte 2312, pp. 113-143 8 Hamilton, W. (17761779) Campi Phlegraei: Observutiorzs on the VScanoes oj the Two Sicilies, As They have been Comnzuni~ate~~ to the Royal Socirt); oj.!.ondon, Naples
9 It was added to Hamilton’s second letter to the Royal Society, written on 29 December 1767. The text of the letter in Hamilton, W. (1776-1779) Campi Phlegruei, pp. 22-32. Naples. See also Thackray. J. ( 1996) ‘The Modem Pliny: William Hamilton and Vesuvius’, in Vrses and Volcanoes: Sir William Hamihon and His Collection (Jenkins. I. and Sloan, K.. eds), pp. 66-67, British Museum Press 10 On Hamilton’s wide-ranging interests: Fathergill, B. ( 1969) Sir Wj~~~urn~~rn~~ron~ Envoy Extrctordinnry, Faber & Faber; Jenkins, 1. and Sloan, K. (eds) (1996) Vases and Volcanoes: Sir William Ham~~ton und His Collection, British Museum press; (1997) J. His?. Collections 9/Z, special issue
on Hamilton 11 Den Tex, E. (1998)E-enVoorspel van de Modeme Vulkaankunde in West-Europa,
pp. 18@191 and 253-2.54, Koninkhjke Nederlandse Akademie van Wetenschappen 12 Hamilton, W. (1776-1779) Campi Phlegruei, p. 5, Napies 13 Den Tex. E. (1998) Eepr Vocwspel van de Moderne Vulkaankunde in West-Europa, p. 198, Koni~lijke N~erlandse Akademie
van Wetenschappen 14 See especially Sleep, M.W.C. (I 969) Sir William Hamilton (1736-1803): His work and influence in geology, Annuls Sci. X,319-338
15 Rudwick correctly points to plates 9 and 33 as two of Fabris’s less successful gouaches in the Campi Phlegraei. Rudwick, M. (1976) The emergence of a visual language for geological science 1760-1840. l-fist.Sci. 14. 173
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When, in 1631, Vesuvius erupted violently after having been dormant for more than 300 years, it aroused great interest among the educated in Europe. As long as one could remember, cattle had grazed in the crater, and now vineyards, forests and whole villages were lost. A similarly cataclysmic event occurred 38 years later when Mount Etna erupted. The death toll was 4000. Athanasius Kircher, the polymath and German Jesuit, was among the learned and curious who felt the urge to travel to Southern Italy. The results of Kircher’s subsequent explorations - he even had himself lowered into the crater of Vesuvius found their way into his famous work, Mundus Subterruneus (1665). Yet, rather disappointingly to a modem reader, Kircher moved all too quickly from observation to speculation. The most striking illustrations of his work were those that depicted the interior of the earth as a big nucleus of fire sending its flames through long conduits to volcanic orifices (Figure 1). With Kircher, we enter a hundred-year period of grand theories on the history and the interior of the Earth. Thomas Bumet, in his Sacred Theory of the Earth (1681), divided the Earth’s history into four distinct phases, of which the second and the third were catastrophic: aquatic forces had reigned in the phase of the Deluge, while igneous processes marked the phase in which mankind had since been living. In Bumet’s view, the observable volcanic phenomena in the present world were the harbingers of the apocalyptic fire that would destroy the earth before it could finally be rebuilt as paradise.
Joachimvan der
In the 18th century, we find Buffon advocating a hot (and slowly cooling) interior of the earth. However, Buffon did not connect volcanic phenomena to this heat source, thiuking that the crust of the earth had cooled too much. He stated that superficial material (sulphur, coal and bitumen) was the fuel of volcanoes and would result in eruptions when coming into contact with water. Hence, for Buffon all volcanoes had to be near the seat. In the later 18th century, the influential teachings of Abraham Werner did not assign any major role to volcanic forces, since Werner believed in the sedimentary origin of all rocks, a view later usually referred to as ‘Nepttmist’. To Werner, volcanoes were recent and peripheral phenomena*. The opposite view was put forward in 1785 by James
Hutton who described heat as the central agent in the history of the earth, responsible even for the formation of limestone and other sedimentary rockss. Hutton’s theory came to be known as ‘Pluto&‘. One should add, however, that the potential dogmatism of these latter-day cosmogonists was tamed by their strong empiricist stance: both Werner and Hutton insisted on fieldwork and precise observation. Whether they thought that volcanoes were peripheral or central phenomena, all early geological theorists believed that volcanoes had their origin in subterraneous fires. Most thought that large deposits of coal or pyrites firelled these fires. Another universally held view was that there was a close link between all forms of earthquakes and volcanic
Thijsen
received his PhD from Stanford University. He is a lecturer in Comparative Literature at the University of Utrecht. He recently published a book on the transformations of the sublime in 18th-century culture (in Dutch).
Figure 1
106
0160-9327/99/$ -see
Endeavour Vol. 23(3) 1999
Athanasius
Kircher (1665) Mundus Subterraneus, I, p. 180.
front matter 0 1999 Elsevier Science Ltd. All rights reserved. PII: SOl60-9327(99)01214-4
Figure 2
Pierre-Jacques
Volaire, Erupfion of Vesuvius in 7777 (Rome, priv. COIL).
eruptions. Following a conviction handed down from antiquity, eruptions were even seen as beneficial: they acted as safety valves for the ever-active subterraneous igneous fields. If not released through a volcano, pressures would build up and cause earthquakes, resulting in much more widespread destructiona.
Fiery phenomenon It comes as no surprise, then, that 18thcentury painters were so eager to portray active Mount Vesuvius as a purely fiery phenomenon. Throughout the 18th century, Vesuvius was a most obliging spectacle for travellers to Italy. The volcano was almost continuously active, especially after 1750, when Naples became part of the itinerary of the Grand Tour. The French painter Volaire, the Englishman Wright of Derby and the Austrian Wutky, were among the artists who perfected a technique that catered to the affluent tourist. They had found a successful formula in painting Mount Vesuvius at night when the lava flow could be seen most clearly. Sometimes these painters heightened the grand effect by the inclusion of another light source: the cold and bluish light of the moon, usually reflected by the sea (see Figure 2). Yet there was a definite drawback to this mode of representation. When Mount Vesuvius was painted as a purely fiery phenomenon at night, many distinguishing features were lost. Little remained, except for a very generalized image of a sublime force. Indeed, there was almost no difference between a painting of an eruption at night and the artistic rendering of an 18th century fireworks display. Vesuvius tended to become a baroque fireworks machines. In one important sense, however, it was legitimate and even necessary to paint the volcano as a sublime spectacle. Central to the experience of the sublime was - as it still is - the feeling of being overwhelmed,
of transcending the human sphere, of being confronted with an inexhaustible horizon of meaning. As Goethe put it when he saw Mount Vesuvius for the last time during his Italian journey, while looking from a window of the Capodimonte Palace in Naples: We stood at a window on the upper floor, Vesuvius straight ahead of us; the lava flowing down, the flame of which was distinctly glowing as the sun had set some time ago; the mountain raging violently [. . .] Down from there to the sea a band of incandescence and glowing vapours; for the rest, sea and earth, rock and vegetation distinct in the dusk, clear, peaceful, in magic tranquillity. [...I Here we had a text before us for which millennia would not suffice to exhaust its meaning6.
at the volcano. In fact, Hamilton even collected a number of large nocturnal views of Vesuvius for his residence, the Palazzo Sessa. And when he embarked on his great publication project on all matters VOlCamC in Southern Italy, the Campi Phlegraei (1776-1779), he had his personal painter, Pietro Fabris, add some gouache paintings that treated Vesuvius in the accepted sublime style (Figure 3)s. Some years earlier, Hamilton had even chosen a painting in transparent colours on glass, to accompany one of his letters on Vesuvius to the Royal Society in London. This painting, now lost, had apparently been sent together with an apparatus for back-lighting9. But a love of the sublime vista is perhaps not unexpected in a Knight of the Order of the Bath a connoisseur and collector of antique vases and gems, and a lover of contemporary artlo. What is more remarkable is the fact that Hamilton, the aristocratic virtuoso, cuts short all learned and metaphoric associations of Mount Vesuvius when he sets himself the task of recording the observable features of the erupting mountain. An astonishingly dry phenomenalism takes over as soon as Hamilton has his first encounter with the volcano during the major eruption of Vesuvius in 1776-1777. He himself makes pencil drawings of the changing forms of the crater, adding them to his second letter to the Royal Society. And when he finds the gifted artist Fabris, he instructs him to employ the same kind of straightforward phenomenalism.
Painters of Mount Vesuvius who adhered to the aesthetics of the sublime often consciously evoked this richness of meaning that Goethe alluded to. Their paintings reverberated with the metaphoric, the symbolic and the historical. They activated in the viewer a meditative response to what one could call the cultural halo of the famous mountain. Part of this cultural halo was the thought that Vesuvius was the burial mound of an ancient civilisation (as at Pompeii, Herculaneum and Stabiae), that it belonged to the mythological configuration of an ‘entrance to the underworld’, that it metaphorically represented (southern) passion and temperament, and that it symbolized political upheaval and revolution7.
Sublimity versus phenomenonalism It is interesting to see that the most astute observer of Mount Vesuvius in the 18th century, Sir William Hamilton, the British envoy to the court of Naples, did not exclude this sublime perspective from his ways of looking
Figure 3 Pietro Fabris (1779) Campi Phlegraei, Frontispiece of Supplement.
Endeavour
Vol. 23(3) 1999
107
Figure 4
ColoUrSOf eruptive material. It is interesting to note that Hamilton seems to have kept a hand in the arrangement of these rocks, for it looks as if a collector had arranged the specimens. They are ordered according to aesthetic principles, echoing the older formula of the Naturalienkabinett. In one of these plates an excavated piece of Roman jewelry was even added (Figure 4). Yet unlike his mineralcollecting predecessors, Hamilton was well aware that the ordering of volcanic material in his Campi PhZegraei was arbitrary. Hamilton had no ambition to add this field to his other areas of collecting and connoisseurship. He himself said that he had no mineralogical knowledge and that he intended to offer these illustrations to those who were more competent. Yet knowing that images would not suffice for analysing the Vesuvian rocks and minerals and that a chemical examination was necessary, he shipped considerable quantities of rock specimens to England.
Pietro Fabris, Campi Phlegraei, plate 44.
Figure 5 Pietro Fabris, CamDjPhlearaei, plate 17 (The Campi Flegrei seen from the . C&vent of the Camaid&). .
In Hamilton’s letters and publications on Italian volcanoes, we see the same modesty that became characteristic of the early practitioners of what we now call volcanology. Frenchmen Guettard and Desmarest showed a similar attitude towards their objects of study (mainly Mount Etna and the extinct volcanoes of the Massif Central). Although in general outlook Guettard and Desmarest remained close to the Wernerian ‘Neptunist’ position, they deliberately shied away from all great explanatory theories 11. Similarly, Hamilton criticized all speculative theorists in his letter of dedication in the Campi Phlegraei: It is to be lamented that those who wrote most, on the subject of Natural History, have seldom been themselves the observers, and have too readily taken for granted systems, which other ingenious and learned men, have perhaps formed in their closets, with as little foundation of self experience: the more such systems have been treated with ingenuity, the more they have served to mislead, and heap error upon error. Accurate and faithful observations on the operations of nature, related with simplicity and truth, are not to be met with often . . .12.
108
Endeavour Vol. 23(3) 1999
F’roto-volcanology developed at a distance from the great cosmogonic theories that kept many contemporary natural historians occupied. Some of the most splendid gouaches in the Campi Phlegraei - engraved and handcoloured for the book edition - show the complex and widely varying structures and
Figure 6
Volcanoes as a constructive force Hamilton had begun without any training in natural history. By the 178Os, however, he had become a respected expert on all things volcanic. The German ‘volcanologist’, Raspe, for instance, asked Hamilton to inspect certain rock layers in the Rhine valley. Hamilton obliged, identifying the rocks of the Siebengebirge as basaltic, which to Raspe and Hamilton already meant ‘volcanic’l3. Hamilton had educated himself through stubborn observation (he climbed Mount Vesuvius a total of 68 times) and extensive reading, and through his correspondence with other students of volcanism. In plate 17 of the Campi Phlegraei (Figure 5) one can detect Hamilton with one of his many telescopes looking at the ‘Burning Fields’ from a vantage point at Camaldoli. During his 30 years of observation, Hamilton generated some significant ideas about volcanic phenomena and the principles involved14. First, he thought that the heat source was deep-seated. He dismissed the burning coal-field theory that most of his contemporaries clung to. Second, he correctly identified water and steam as important
Pietro Fabris, Campi Phlegraei, plate 39 (Fossa Grande).
agents, adding to the danger and explosiveness of volcanic eruptions. Thud, he suggested - after identifying Monte Somma as the former Vesuvius, and after studying the volcanic layers below the cities of Herculaneum and Pompeii - that volcanoes reached far back in the history of the earth. This was quite in contrast to the accepted view. Fourth, and most importantly, Hamilton considered volcanoes a constructive force, rather than a merely destructive one, as so many in the 18th century still maintained, following the Bumet tradition. For Hamilton, the whole region around Naples, with its beauty and variety, had been built up by volcanoes. Thus the title of his work, which had been borrowed from the name for the relatively
small area to the north-west of Naples, was applied to a much larger region, even extending to the Liparian Islands and Sicily. This led to the expectation that the visible geological features of the Campania and the islands would betray their volcanic origin. Yet there was also the question of the sea floor which must have been broken and uplifted. Hamilton was not surprised to find fractured limestone, sometimes with the imprint of fossils, in an area dominated by volcanic
action. He was very careful not to make too big a claim; in fact, he did not consider Capri a volcanic island. Although Hamilton was not always sure which of the more lightcoloured rocks were of igneous rather than sedimentary origin, he nevertheless directed Pietro Fabris to draw as painstakingly as possible the different layers where they were exposed in quarries and on hill-sides. Here. however, the art of Fabris encountered certain difficulties. While, by 1770, the sublime vista of a distant mountain could rely on an accepted set of artistic techniques, and while even the drawing of small rocks found support in an established artistic tradition, in the phenomenalism of drawing objects at close range, there were no such models for painting the middle ground. In this zone the problems of selection loomed large. What to choose from an ensemble that was incredibly rich in detail, what to stress, what to leave out? This became a crucial problem whenever Fabris had to paint crater structures and forms of lava at a medium distance’s,
Landscape artists at the end of the 18th century tended to make the middle ground the playing field of the picturesque. For the picturesque, with its stress on variety, irregularity and roughness, offered a guiding principle with which the overly detailed could be turned into an advantage. The picturesque, however, would not do for a kind of painting that had to be ‘geognostic’, in the terminology of the Werner school. In geognostic drawing and painting, repetitive features had to be thrown into high relief, just as the regularity of structures had to be laid bare for the discerning eye. It is clear that a painter had to be thoroughly trained for what to look for in the rock sections of the ‘middle-ground’, and it seems that Hamilton could not always provide Fabris with the un~biguous information that would guide his eye. Given this limitation, however, it is remarkable how far Fabris was able to go in this relativeiy uncharted territory (Figure 6). Indeed, he paved the way for those geognostic artists that were to arrive a few years later when Werner’s concept of rock formation had been taken up by painters and when the basalt controversy would further sharpen the perception of landscape artists. Notes and references 1 This is the view put forward in the first volume of Buffon’s Hismire Naturelle Genne’mle et Purticulitre, separately titled as Theorie de la Terre (1749). .4 later Supplement (1775) shows Buffon cautiously
speculating on a more deep-seated origin of volcanoes 2 Werner, A.G. (1787) Kurze Klass$kation und Beschreibung der Verschiedenen Gebjrgs~rten, Dresden 3 Hutton, J. (1788) Theory of the earth:
or an investigation of the laws observable in the composition, dissolution and elevation of the land upon the globe, Trans. Roy. Sot. Edinburgh 1,209-3 14 4 Strabo (s.d.) Rerum Geographicorum. For a representative 18th~century statement: D’Holbach, P.H.T. (1967) ‘Volcans’ (17721 in Encyclopedic ou Dictionnaire Raisonnt des Sciences, des Arts et des Metiers, Vol. 16, p. 443, reprint
Frommann-Holzboog
5 On Joseph Wright of Derby’s shortcomings in this respect: Hamblyn, R. (1996) Private cabinets and popu1~ geology: the British audiences for volcanoes in the eighteenth century, in Transports: Travel, Pleasure, and l~pin~t~ve
Geography, 1600-1530
(Chard. c. and Langdon: g., eds), pp. 196-200, Yale University Press 6 Goethe. J.W. (1974) italienische Reise [1816-18173 Werke, Vol. 11 (Von Einem. H., ed.j, pp. 345-346. Beck 7 On the semantic range of the revolutionary volcano metaphor, see Von der Thiisen, J. (1996) Die Lava der Revolution fliesst majestatisch: Vulkanische Metapho~k zur Zeit der Franztisischen Revolution, Fruncicc, Forschungen zur westeuroptiischen Gesc~~chte 2312, pp. 113-143 8 Hamilton, W. (17761779) Campi Phlegraei: Observutiorzs on the VScanoes oj the Two Sicilies, As They have been Comnzuni~ate~~ to the Royal Socirt); oj.!.ondon, Naples
9 It was added to Hamilton’s second letter to the Royal Society, written on 29 December 1767. The text of the letter in Hamilton, W. (1776-1779) Campi Phlegruei, pp. 22-32. Naples. See also Thackray. J. ( 1996) ‘The Modem Pliny: William Hamilton and Vesuvius’, in Vrses and Volcanoes: Sir William Hamihon and His Collection (Jenkins. I. and Sloan, K.. eds), pp. 66-67, British Museum Press 10 On Hamilton’s wide-ranging interests: Fathergill, B. ( 1969) Sir Wj~~~urn~~rn~~ron~ Envoy Extrctordinnry, Faber & Faber; Jenkins, 1. and Sloan, K. (eds) (1996) Vases and Volcanoes: Sir William Ham~~ton und His Collection, British Museum press; (1997) J. His?. Collections 9/Z, special issue
on Hamilton 11 Den Tex, E. (1998)E-enVoorspel van de Modeme Vulkaankunde in West-Europa,
pp. 18@191 and 253-2.54, Koninkhjke Nederlandse Akademie van Wetenschappen 12 Hamilton, W. (1776-1779) Campi Phlegruei, p. 5, Napies 13 Den Tex. E. (1998) Eepr Vocwspel van de Moderne Vulkaankunde in West-Europa, p. 198, Koni~lijke N~erlandse Akademie
van Wetenschappen 14 See especially Sleep, M.W.C. (I 969) Sir William Hamilton (1736-1803): His work and influence in geology, Annuls Sci. X,319-338
15 Rudwick correctly points to plates 9 and 33 as two of Fabris’s less successful gouaches in the Campi Phlegraei. Rudwick, M. (1976) The emergence of a visual language for geological science 1760-1840. l-fist.Sci. 14. 173
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