Abstract

The eighteenth-century “discovery” of the buried cities of Herculaneum and Pompeii revolutionized the way in which individuals thought about their relationship with the ancient world. The accounts of British visitors between 1738 and the end of the century reflect a new historical sensibility, one predicated upon the extraordinary proximity between present and past that these sites seemed to promise. In this essay, Charlotte Roberts examines the work of four individuals—Camillo Paderni, Johann Joachim Winckelmann, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, and Sir William Hamilton—all of whom used the prevailing vocabulary associated with Herculaneum and Pompeii in order to articulate individual and in several cases innovative arguments on subjects as diverse as the validity of Neapolitan Bourbon rule, the ideal of Greek art, and the history of the earth. Their ideas indicate that these excavations, in a small but significant way, helped to shape a diverse range of eighteenth-century thought.

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