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.

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