
If there was a contest for the most dynamic moment in Western history—when art, architecture, design, tourism, science, collecting, taste, and worldly temptations suddenly synchronized—Michael Thomas’s bet would be on the mid- to late eighteenth century, specifically in the linked kingdoms of Naples and Sicily, a period and a place so ferociously fecund that the scholar compares its influence to the invention of the Internet.
As Thomas explains, “So much of Italy becomes exposed to the rest of the world at that time: the archaeological discoveries of Pompeii and Herculaneum, British architects like Robert Adam bringing those ancient decorations into the houses they design in Great Britain, and the opening of the Capodimonte porcelain factory,” the last of which would concentrate all the above onto dinner tables in Europe and beyond. Add to this the fiery convulsions of mounts Vesuvius and Etna, the classical attitudes of Emma Hamilton and the connoisseurship of her husband, Sir William, the allure of Admiral Horatio Nelson, the glitter of the Neapolitan court, and the hordes of young milords seeking wine, women, and costly souvenirs à l’antique, and you get a drama that will be vibrantly navigated in The Legacy of Vesuvius: Bourbon Discoveries on the Bay of Naples, opening in September at the Meadows Museum in Dallas and curated by Thomas, an archaeologist who is associate provost and a professor of arts and humanities at the University of Texas in the same city.

Bourbon father-and-son monarchs Charles VII and Ferdinand IV head up the cast of adventuresome characters. The former, who would eventually reign, confusingly, as Charles V of Sicily and Charles III of Spain, was an enthusiastic supporter of the digs at Herculaneum (revealed in 1738) and Pompeii and Stabaei (1748), episodes that Victorian scholar Frances A. Gerard described as ultimately “vomiting forth Caryatides [sic], Vases, Statues, Bas-reliefs, [and] Antiques of all kinds.” His Majesty himself couldn’t resist pitching in on a visit to a dig, retrieving an ancient gold ring that he wore with pride. Within a couple of decades, word got out— news came a bit slower back then—and international culture vultures followed. Among them were Johann Joachim Winkelmann, the eminent German historian and author of two pioneering studies about the area’s ongoing excavations, one of which, written in 1762 and published in English in 1771, noted that the work was so far from being thorough that “a fine field of discovery must remain to posterity.” Angelica Kauffmann, a young Swiss artist, traveled to Naples around the same time, and her experiences—and the classicism it sparked—would lead her to become a favorite of the Georgian aristocracy. As for Ferdinand IV (a.k.a. Ferdinand III of Sicily and Ferdinand I of the Two Sicilies), and his own wife, Marie-Antoinette’s sister Maria Carolina of Austria, they embarked on a brief but consequential reign of patronage, one effort of which was the founding of the Archaeological Museum of Naples.

One gallery in The Legacy of Vesuvius will be devoted to period prints from Campi Phlegraei (1776–1779), a galvanizing publication about regional volcanic eruptions that artist Pietro Fabris produced under the patronage of Sir William Hamilton, the antiquarian British ambassador to Naples. “Always smoldering [and] always active,” Thomas observes, Vesuvius became arguably the most popular artistic subject of the era, evidence of Naples becoming a hotbed of science and art. Fabbris’s haunting images of rivers of lava and choking clouds of smoke, often being observed from not-so-safe distances by periwigged tourists, inspired many other period views of those geological disturbances and were followed closely in popularity by illustrated records of excavations and landscapes, the latter more scrubby than lush and thus more captivating to Enlightenment eyes than the picturesque European art norm.
“It’s all about place,” Thomas says, noting that Antonio Joli and other visiting artists showed “royals at play, hunting parties, and Maria Amalia [Charles VII’s German consort] visiting the Arch of Trajan in Benevento, though all that activity is shown as secondary” to the detailed views, the vedute, of the scenery. At press time, Thomas reported that the Meadows Museum was negotiating with Princeton University Art Museum to borrow “a painting that we love.” That prize would be Kauffmann’s Pliny the Younger and His Mother at Misenum, 79 A.D. (1785). Based on Pliny’s own recollections, it depicts the two—she frightened, him interrupted in his studies—along with assorted terrified servants, as Pompeii and Herculaneum were about to be smothered by the volcano erupting across the bay and forgotten to history until, as The Legacy of Vesuvius records and amplifies, a later era’s first shovel bit into the Neapolitan soil and the whole world changed in a seeming instant.
The Legacy of Vesuvius: Bourbon Discoveries on the Bay of Naples • Meadows Museum, Southern Methodist University, Dallas, Texas • September 15 to January 5, 2025 • meadowsmuseumdallas.org