From the February 2025 issue of Apollo. Preview and subscribe here.
In the Art Institute of Chicago, there hangs a work by Pierre-Jacques Volaire, The Eruption of Vesuvius (1771). It shows the volcano spluttering with flames and ash. The French artist, who painted Vesuvius many times, was playing to the ever-growing tourist trade at the time. The Grand Tour took in a visit to the recent uncoverings of Pompeii and Herculaneum so that the beauty of ancient Roman design could be appreciated in situ. Visitors such as the poet Thomas Gray had eagerly visited the archaeological site of Herculaneum and watched with anxiety as smoke rose up from the active volcano in 1740 (it erupted six times between 1707 and 1794). Part of the attraction of visiting these sites was about coming into close contact with the same volcano that had brought such devastation to these ancient towns. Volaire’s painting is most vividly remembered for the contrast of cool night sky in inky blues and the burst of bright yellows and oranges erupting from the volcano. Perhaps more curious is the array of small figures in the foreground of the work. Some are watching the horror of the lava; others seem to be escaping it. The smallness of the figures adds to the sense of the enormousness of the volcano. This is often considered to be a key characteristic of the sublime: ‘an agreeable kind of horror’ as Joseph Addison described it in relation to the Alps.
The reality of living through such a horror must be very far from agreeable. Paintings such as this are, of course, a record of events. But they also have a second, more curious function: they frame the event through a new aesthetic lens and, in doing so, change the way it is commemorated.
The Eruption of Vesuvius (1771; detail), Pierre-Jacques Volaire. Art Institute of Chicago
On a recent trip to Naples – a city where the accretions of history are more evident than they are in many other European cities – the experience of viewing the world through different lenses was particularly clear. At least two sensibilities hang over the city: the Roman – most clear in the Farnese collection that is at the heart of both the National Archaeological Museum and the Museo di Capodimonte – and the Bourbon. The works of art that appear through both lenses offer various visions of success – nobles in their finery, conquering heroes, religious triumph. And, in both cases, the material success is adumbrated by the disappearance of the ruling houses that commissioned or bought the artworks. A more contemporary awareness of the fragility of these worlds is apparent in the Capodimonte, where the work undertaken to restore the palace and protect the art, not least the climate control, makes clear the frailty inherent in the buildings and the oil on canvas or board.
This raises a question about exactly what it is that art is commemorating. Are works that depict the real always doomed to be records of failure and absence? Some artists have approached this subject aslant: in 2001, Michael Landy destroyed all his belongings in an empty shop on Oxford Street. Among these objects were works of art by friends including Gary Hume and Tracey Emin. Emin, of course, lost many of her works in a conflagration of a different sort, the fire at the Momart warehouse in 2004 – though the idea of the work lived on and in some cases the work itself was recreated. At another remove, Robert Rauschenberg once asked Willem de Kooning to send him a drawing so that he could erase it. In that exchange, Rauschenberg’s idea created another shade of meaning for the now non-existent de Kooning artwork. In January, wildfires swept through southern California, causing an as yet untold loss of people, buildings and objects. Art cannot bring things back to life but perhaps it can help us find a new way of thinking about devastation.
From the February 2025 issue of Apollo. Preview and subscribe here.