Luigi Bazzani, who spent 30 years documenting the ongoing excavations of Pompeii with watercolors

Luigi Bazzani, who spent 30 years documenting the ongoing excavations of Pompeii with watercolors.
I have been working very hard on a Wikipedia page for Italian Neoclassicist painter Luigi Bazzani. I researched and identified 70 of his paintings of which 47 are watercolors of various villas and other structures in Pompeii just after they were excavated. I was amazed at the veritable kaleidoscope of colors originally unearthed and sad that we have, with only a few exceptions, just a skeleton of what remains of the once vibrant Roman city today. Although I was very excited to visit Pompeii the first time in 2005, I was admittedly a bit disappointed at how little remained of the artwork. Most frescoes and mosaics had been hacked out and either whisked away to museums or, in some cases, to the royal collection of various European monarchs. I was so excited to find just a small, damaged painting of a little centaur forgotten near the baseboard in one of the villas. The signage at the time was really poor too, and, although the visitor's center gave you a map, it was difficult to be sure you had found a particular structure you were looking for. (We searched and searched and never did find the brothel!) Some of the plaster casts of human victims were just displayed in glass enclosures out in the weather and the glass was so dirty you could hardly see the cast. I had a brief visit to Pompeii again in 2007 by accident. A friend and I had visited Poppea's villa in Oplontis (another lavish villa with much of its artwork just hacked out and packed off) and gotten turned around and ended up in a really dangerous part of Naples. A local businessman saw we were lost and in his opinion, in peril, so he offered us a ride over to a nice restaurant adjacent to Pompeii who was owned by a friend. I'm really glad we had that opportunity to see a bit of Pompeii again, though. Not only was our lunch delicious, but I found the forum baths that I had not seen before and was thrilled to find some of the reliefs on the vaulted ceiling still intact. I also got to see the famous "Cave Canem" mosaic - two actually - another guard dog mosaic was not far from the first. We tried to get into the Villa of the Mysteries but it was being renovated and I've now seen what a wonderful job was done there. There is no reason such conservation couldn't have been applied elsewhere in Pompeii. From what I've read, though, much of the money raised for conservation just fattened the wallets of corrupt administrators. Italy has had quite a problem with that in their cultural conservation program even though tourism is their number one industry. From some of the really nice improvements I've seen online lately, though, hopefully that is a problem of the past.
Just a note about my image processing. Many of the images I found online were taken at the Bazzani exhibit several years ago at the National Archaeological Museum in Naples. The paintings were illuminated with lighting that really threw off the white balance. I have done my best to correct the white balance for both the lighting and slight yellowing of the watercolor paper due to age. I wanted the colors to appear as they once did when Bazzani first painted them. I have another one hundred images of his paintings to upload but sadly, the source does not identify the structures by name. I will place those in a Wikimedia Commons subcategory and provide a link to it on the Wikipedia page when I finish uploading them.


Image: Villa interior with signature Pompeian red paint, watercolor, by Luigi Bazzani.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Imperial Italic G Roman helmet found near Hebron at the Israel Museum in Jerusalem

Image
Imperial Italic G Roman helmet found near Hebron at the Israel Museum in Jerusalem. This distinctive Imperial Italic G-style helmet was a 2nd century development derived from the earlier Coolus-style helmets with a domed bowl fashioned after La Tène III helmet types. The original Coolus-style helmets were named after the city of Coolus in northeastern France where a helmet of the Coolus type was dredged from the River Marne. Ro man helmets were typically constructed of a copper alloy or bronze. Some were spun on a lathe rather than hammered into shape with a turned, cast-soldered or riveted crest knob. The brow-guard was designed to protect the front of the face from downward-slashing sword blows, just as the neck-guard was intended to deflect blows aimed at the nape of the neck and shoulders. The Hebron helmet is also constructed with post-Dacian Wars crossbars on the crown, thought to have been part of the original construction, as evidenced by the brass lunate decorations applie
Read more

A Brief History of Ships' Eyes

Image
(condensed from the Master's thesis of Troy Joseph Nowak, Texas A&M University, 2006, "Archaeological Evidence for Ship Eyes: An Analysis of Their Form and Function  ( https://nautarch.tamu.edu/pdf-files/Nowak-MA2006.pdf#:~:text=bows%20of%20ancient%20Greek%20ships%20between%20the%205th,guided%20the%20ship%20and%20helped%20to%20avoid%20hazards .) Between the Bronze Age and the 3rd century BCE, all types of watercraft used in the Mediterranean from small boats to large galleys were commonly adorned with eyes on their bows.  In Greece, the earliest clear depiction of a ship with eyes is a Late Helladic clay ship model decorated with circular eyes discovered at Phylakopi, Melos. However, ship representations with eyes do not reappear in the archaeological record again until the Geometric Period.  Excavations in the Dipylon cemetery at Athens have yielded an impressive collection of Late Geometric I [c. 760 to 735 BCE] ceramics decorated with ships. Eyes adorn the bows of these
Read more

Roman and Byzantine mosaics at the Haleplibahçe Mosaics Museum in Şanlıurfa, Turkey.

Image
Roman and Byzantine mosaics at the Haleplibahçe Mosaics Museum in Şanlıurfa, Turkey. Opened in 2015, the modern 6,000 square meter Haleplibahce Mosaic Museum houses the remains of the mosaic pavements of a large Roman villa uncovered during a municipal construction project i n Şanlıurfa, Turkey. Şanlıurfa, also known as Urfa, is built on the site of the ancient Greek city of Edessa. Discoveries include mosaics depicting the life of Achilles, including his mother, Thetis, holding him by the heel and dipping him into the waters of the River Styx, his training by the centaur, Chiron, and his departure for the Trojan War. Another pavement depicts Amazon queens hunting wild beasts. Mosaics from other archaeological areas depict various animals, Ktisis, a figure personifying the act of generous donation or foundation often found in 6th century Greek mosaics, and a 2nd century CE depiction of the myth of Orpheus. The Orpheus mosaic was recently repatriated from the Dallas Museum of Art.
Read more