Antiquities Exhibits

Luigi Bazzani, who spent 30 years documenting the ongoing excavations of Pompeii with watercolors. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Luigi_Bazzani 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 baseboa...

The Neo-Pompeiian art of Eduardo Ettore Forti now online on Wikipedia. Like many neo-classical painters of the late 19th century, Ettore Forti, became enthralled by ancient Roman life after the rediscovery of Pompeii in 1748 and the subsequent excavations. Although many of his extant paintings feature scenes of merchants selling carpets, jewelry, or antiquities to well-to-do Roman ladies, he also painted scenes of chariot  racing, musicians, city folk gossiping around a fountain, and even coaches bearing emperors careening down the roads leading back to Rome. These images can now be viewed online in a gallery on Ettore Forti's Wikipedia page. I searched the internet for over a week to collect as many images of his work as I could find and upload them to Wikimedia Commons (since they are now in the public domain). I strongly believe images bring history to life so I've been working hard to identify images in the public domain that portray ancient life and uploading them to W...