The Last Day of Pompeii

• 1. Introduction

  ›

  The Last Day of Pompeii is a large history painting by Karl Bryullov, produced between 1830 and 1833, depicting the eruption of Mount Vesuvius in AD 79. When it was first shown at Bryullov's studio in Rome, Sir Walter Scott studied it for an hour before declaring that it was not an ordinary painting but an epic. That response tells you something essential: this canvas arrived in the world already bigger than itself.

  How does a painting become the first work by a Russian artist to earn an international reputation? What does it mean to stand between two rival styles, pleasing neither side entirely yet winning gold medals and garlands of flowers? And why did Russians look at a scene of ancient catastrophe and see a prophecy about their own city? Those are the questions this documentary will answer.

• 2. The Road to Rome

  ›

  Bryullov arrived in Rome in 1823 alongside his brother Aleksandr, having travelled through Venice and Florence. The timing mattered. The Roman city of Pompeii, south of Naples, was under active excavation at the time, with serious work having begun on Pompeii and its neighbour Herculaneum in the middle of the previous century. Artists already knew the site held promise. John Martin had painted The Destruction of Pompeii and Herculaneum in 1822, and engravings of the ruins circulated widely.

  Aleksandr was a participant in a scientific study and restoration of the Pompeii baths in 1825-26, which eventually yielded his book Thermes de Pompei, published in Paris in 1829. Karl, meanwhile, may have visited Pompeii as early as 1824. He saw Alessandro Sanquirico's set designs for Giovanni Pacini's opera L'ultimo giorno di Pompei, performed at Naples and at La Scala in Milan, and he visited the Naples museum to examine artefacts recovered from the site.

  His 1827 visit to Pompeii proved decisive. According to the scholar Rosalind Blakesley, the remains of the Via dei Sepolcri, the Street of the Tombs, affected Bryullov so strongly that he resolved to set his painting there. Contemporary letters show he studied Pliny the Younger's eyewitness account of the disaster, the same letters to Tacitus in which Pliny records that his uncle died. He also read Alessandro Manzoni's novel I promessi sposi, published in 1827, with its historically grounded account of a disastrous plague and the reactions of individuals caught in it.

  All of these threads converged in 1828, when Bryullov painted a compositional sketch at the request of Countess Maria Razumovskaya. The main canvas was commissioned by Count Anatoly Demidov, whom Bryullov had met in Naples, for the sum of 40,000 francs, to be completed by 1830. By the end of that year, Bryullov had only outlined the figures on the canvas in two colours and had barely addressed the question of colour at all. A journey to Bologna and Venice to study works by Tintoretto and Titian finally gave him the answers he had been searching for.

• 3. Between Two Worlds

  ›

  Bryullov said he could not have completed the work without Raphael's The School of Athens, painted between 1509 and 1511, as his model. The classical forms in the painting are recognisable as those used by the Renaissance masters. Yet alongside them sit features drawn from the Romantic tradition: dramatic colouring, the deliberate use of chiaroscuro, and a high emotional charge.

  Neoclassicism was the predominant style in Russia at the time, and the painting uses it. The bodies of the figures are perfected in the classical manner, their poses drawn from ancient painting or from real people Bryullov knew, including Yuliya Samoylova and her daughters. Some poses echo stories from classical mythology: the soldier and boy rescuing an older man may be a reference to the myth of Aeneas carrying his father from the ruins of Troy. One figure in the composition is the artist himself, depicted as a Pompeian painter balancing his equipment on his head.

  But the Romantic impulse pulls in another direction. Nikolai Gogol wrote that Bryullov's colouring was possibly brighter than it had ever been, that his paints "burn and hit you in the eye". A horse bolts into the depths of the canvas, unseating its master, creating a deep recession that Neoclassical painting typically avoided. Statues topple from their pedestals, dramatising what Romantic painting called the sublime power of nature over the works of man.

  Bryullov also filled the canvas with authentic detail gathered at Pompeii and in the Naples museum: the artefacts carried by the figures, the paving and kerb stones underfoot. Other works Raphael's The Fire in the Borgo, painted between 1514 and 1517, and Nicolas Poussin's plague scene from 1630, are also thought to have shaped the composition. The result was a painting that critics in France and Russia both admired and questioned: the perfection of the classical bodies seemed at odds with the desperate nature of the scene around them.

• 4. Triumph Across Europe

  ›

  Demidov had threatened to cancel the commission because the painting was taking so long to finish. When it was at last displayed at Bryullov's studio on Via San Claudio in Rome, the response erased any lingering doubt. Vincenzo Camuccini called it a "flaming colossus". The Italian archaeologist Pietro Ercole Visconti wrote an article praising both the painter and the work. The Uffizi requested a self-portrait from the artist.

  In Milan, the welcome was extravagant. Bryullov received a standing ovation in a theatre and was carried through the city's streets wearing a garland of flowers. It was in Milan that Edward Bulwer-Lytton saw the painting; his novel The Last Days of Pompeii was published in 1834. In Bologna, gallery officials removed Raphael's St Cecilia from its wall and placed it in a private room when Bryullov asked to copy it. That gesture, removing one of the great works of the Renaissance to make space for a living artist's request, conveys better than any review how the painting was regarded.

  At the Paris Salon of 1834 the reception was somewhat cooler, though the painting still won a gold medal. Some French critics found it slightly outdated compared to Eugene Delacroix's Femmes d'Alger dans leur Appartement, which was exhibited alongside it. One critic wrote in L'Artiste that the impression was less akin to terror than to ridicule. The scholar Rosalind Blakesley links this hesitation to the isolation of Russian art teaching from the latest French developments since the beginning of the nineteenth century and to the unresolved tension in the work between its two competing styles.

  Five foreign academies made Bryullov an honorary member. The volume of positive reviews and critical commentary was large enough that the Society for the Encouragement of Artists published a collection of them in Russian translation.

• 5. Meaning in Russia

  ›

  The painting arrived in Russia in August 1834 and was received, Gogol wrote, with as much enthusiasm by those with a refined taste as by those who knew nothing about art. Bryullov was made an honorary free associate of the academy and awarded the Order of St Anne, third class. He was appointed a professor at the academy in Saint Petersburg and placed in charge of history painting. He met the Tsar.

  Ivan Turgenev called the painting "the glory of Russia and Italy". Alexander Pushkin was moved to write a poem about the destruction of Pompeii. Russians read the canvas as proof that their art stood equal to the art of the rest of Europe, and it in turn elevated the social standing of painters within Russia itself.

  But Gogol went further. He described the painting as a "bright resurrection of painting, which has been for too long in some sort of semi-lethargic state", and he was not alone in drawing a parallel between the doomed city of Pompeii and contemporary Saint Petersburg. For some viewers, the painting was a forecast of divine retribution for the modern city's decadent Western ways. The dissident Alexander Herzen read it differently: as an allegory about the collapse of European monarchies, or the tyrannical power of the Russian state over the individual. A single canvas carried both of those interpretations simultaneously, without settling either one.

  After his triumph, Bryullov was expected to produce further large history paintings. Most of his subsequent attempts in that genre remained unfinished. He was criticised for one work that he completed in only seventeen days in 1834. Instead, he found a new direction in portraits of the Russian elite, including the royal family.

• 6. Ownership and Legacy

  ›

  In 1834, Count Demidov, who had paid 25,000 rubles for the painting, presented it to Tsar Nicholas as a bid to win his favour. It was first exhibited in the Winter Palace. In 1836, Nicholas donated it to the Imperial Academy of Arts, where it stayed until 1851, when it was installed as the centrepiece of the Russian painting display at the New Hermitage.

  The canvas now belongs to the collection of the State Russian Museum in Saint Petersburg. The novel it inspired, Edward Bulwer-Lytton's The Last Days of Pompeii, became world-famous. The painting that preceded it, for which Bryullov spent years studying ruins and museum artefacts and letters written in the shadow of Vesuvius, remains the work that made Russia legible to the rest of the art world for the first time.