Denon in Pompeii Essay by Erminia Passannanti Conference in Chalon-sur-Saône (France) - May 1999
Denon in Pompeii
Essay by Erminia Passannanti
Conference in Chalon-sur-Saône (France) - May 1999
During the 18th century, the growing interest in the sublime translated into a search for a new kind of sensibility, which was meant to confer a degree of supremacy on aesthetics over the rigidity of prescribed rules. This was achieved by granting authority and freedom to intellectual drives such as curiosity, imagination, an appetite for novelty, and an inclination towards aesthetic pleasures.
Such a disposition could be considered an ideological foundation for the increasing passion among North European aristocrats, writers, artists, and travelers for the Grand Tour—the pursuit of novelties capable of affecting the modern mind with enlightenment and emotion, erudition and thrill. When, in 1780, Dominique Vivant Denon landed in Naples, Edmund Burke’s study of the sublime had already gained fame and would later influence the writers of the Romantic period.
A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and the Beautiful provided an engaging account of the sensory, imaginative, and judgmental relationship between the mind and its appreciation of nature and art. According to Burke, this pleasure was as much built on wonder, fear, and terror as it was on reason. Indeed, this was merely a later development of the elective approach to knowledge discussed by Kant and Voltaire, both of whom supported the application of creative and critical thinking to the understanding of the world.
This kind of disposition is clearly visible in Denon’s account of his ascent of Vesuvius and his visits to the ruins of Pompeii, where he could admire both the destructive power of nature and experience the sublime in the fine objects of art being unearthed. We should imagine his wonder before the terrifying and pathetic sight of human remains, the broken architecture of magnificent Pompeian villas, and the ruins of temples and theatres—all destroyed during the eruption of August 24, 79 AD.
Over the next 24 hours following that terrible eruption, both Pompeii and nearby Herculaneum were buried under cubic kilometers of ash and pumice. A striking written record of this catastrophe was given by Pliny the Younger, who reported the seismic event with great detail. His vivid account remains a precious tool for reconstructing what happened on that day.
During Denon’s visit to the Kingdom of Naples as chargé d’affaires, the ruins of Pompeii had already begun to be excavated, thanks to King Charles of Bourbon, father of Ferdinand, who allowed archaeologists to establish the Royal Cabinet in Portici. This early form of a museum housed the findings—statues, vases, jewelry, and architectural elements—displayed to please a select audience.
It is worth noting that the key image for both the Enlightenment philosophy of the period and the act of excavating ruins was that of “casting light upon what is dark,” an action that metaphorically implies a systematic exposure of everything to critical scrutiny. Indeed, for the philosophy of the time, nothing was sacred, and doubt was believed to be the measure by which reality was to be examined, as Descartes had asserted.
However, these rationalistic principles were in conflict with a rising dichotomy that became evident at the end of the 18th century: the struggle between body and mind, science and morality, and the emergence of a new taste for the sublime—a doctrine that reintroduced metaphysical concerns in response to the Enlightenment’s rejection of them.
My argument is that these conflicting attitudes towards reality are most evident in Denon’s report of his visit to Pompeii. He exposes himself directly to the effects of tragedy by recalling the consequences of a natural calamity on a civilization. His account of the rediscovery of the ancient ruins is imbued with a pessimistic mood and a sense of inevitable decline, opening up a latent, and perhaps even involuntary, skepticism, as if Hell itself were gaping within the Kingdom of Naples from the mouth of the erupting Vesuvius.
Denon visits the excavation sites under the hammering heat of midday and descends into the cool darkness of the Villa of Diomede, where he sees the corpses of victims found buried in the cellar of this once-luxurious house. He admires the beauty of a young woman’s bust, cast in the hardened cinders, and later recalls this experience in words that suddenly reveal an obscure sense of loss—an anxiety before a strange and rare phenomenon: nature imitating, in those rigid corpses, the perfected forms of works of art.
In some way, Denon’s contribution to Voyage dans le Royaume de Naples allowed him to divert his attention from the human misery he witnessed in Naples—a reality he found deeply unsettling—and from the fate of a society on the verge of revolution. Through this archaeological mission, he temporarily confined himself to the remote, idealized, crystallized life of an ancient civilization and the sublime nature of its sudden and most tragic end. Later exhibited in the Cabinet Royal in Portici, at the very moment their secrets were violated by the curious gaze of observers, these corpses—like objects of art—embodied both the personal and the collective aspects of death. They bore no names to claim past identities, yet they lived in an imperishable present of radical exclusivity, side by side with frescoes, statues, vases, urns, and the ruins of imperial Pompeii. Their peculiar death had restored them to a form of perennial life.
We may consider this experience the starting point of Denon’s future passion for the antiquities he later collected in Egypt for the Louvre after Napoleon’s conquest. Archaeology and Orientalism, in this context, represented the unknown, the irrational, the original, the unfathomable—the “otherness” that provided the vocabulary, imagery, and rhetoric for the new aesthetics of the sublime. This symbolic voyage, oscillating between an idealized past and a present marked by natural, political, and social instability, reveals that Denon’s journey to the Kingdom of Ferdinand and Carolina was far from utopian. It was, in fact, a metaphysical pilgrimage, embodying a dialectical exchange between life and death—a relationship recorded with emotional clarity and intellectual acuity in some of the most striking passages of Voyage dans le Royaume de Naples.
NOTES
Alongside his diplomatic mission in Naples, Denon undertook an extensive journey of exploration, which heightened his awareness of social and ethical relativism. This experience provided him with the foundation for a new kind of criticism of Bourbon politics in Naples, particularly evident in his condemnation of the unfair treatment and execution of the rebel Angiolillo De Luca (citation needed). In this passage, Denon expresses his accusations against King Ferdinand’s ignorance, intolerance, abuses, and parochialism, portraying his rule as a brutal despotic monarchy where no reform seemed possible.
The eruption of 79 AD began with a towering column of ash and pumice that shot over twenty kilometers into the air before collapsing to the ground, generating pyroclastic flows. These flows, accompanied by falling stones and rock powder, were followed by a blast of burning hot air rushing through the streets, laden with ash. The citizens of Pompeii had no chance of escape. Their tragic deaths were later sublimated and memorialized in the still postures of their bodies, as well as in the murals, inscriptions, and artifacts that remain as haunting relics of their fate.
