Pompeii at the Peabody Library, 1824
In May 2015, the Sheridan Libraries made one of their most important acquisitions relating to classical antiquity: this pristine first-edition portfolio of the ruins of Pompeii with twenty-four color aquatint plates finished in masterful contemporary hand coloring based, presumably, on the original colors of the ruins as they were first seen and drawn. The result is this masterpiece by Jakob-Wilhelm Hüber and the Zurich printing house of Henri Fuessli in 1824.
Hüber’s work is considered by some to constitute the finest colored aquatint book of the early nineteenth century, and certainly one of the most important relating to the rediscovery in 1749 and subsequent excavations of Pompeii and Herculaneum—ancient cities that had remained hidden beneath the ash and pyroclastic flow of the eruption, nearly seventeen centuries earlier, of Mount Vesuvius. In one quiet and thoughtful image a contemporary traveler is shown copying the text of an ancient monumental epigraphic fragment, described in the book only in general terms though the memorial impulse of the book pilgrim is clear.
Despite the Romantic delights proffered by Pompeii’s ruins to many a traveler on the Grand Tour during the early-to-mid-nineteenth century, many of the frescoes and reliefs pictured in Hüber’s masterpiece had since faded owing to decades of continuing exposure to the intense light of Southern Italy. That fact makes this copy all the more essential as a site of permanent preservation of the arts of antiquity and rare in the extreme, for this is the only recorded edition of this essential book in the history of classical archaeology in the Western Hemisphere. Only five other copies are known to exist in Europe: one at the British Library, two in German research libraries, and two in Swiss collections.
When this volume joined the collections of the Peabody it was in very good company indeed. When the Peabody Library was forced to close during the American Civil War amid a years-long occupation by Union troops, members of the Library Committee formulated and published vast “desiderata lists” in 1861 and again in 1863. There they included a host of titles, rare and recently printed, under the subject heading “Antiquity, Archaeology, Mythology,” including the first comprehensive published account in English of the Pompeian archaeological excavations, Sir William Gell’s Pompeiana (1817–19), roughly contemporary to Hüber’s labors there. Indeed, the recent acquisition of this outstanding work in many ways “completes” the Peabody’s deep holdings of rare books on Pompeii, including a complete run of the rare and gorgeously illustrated Le antichità di Ercolano (1752–92) and the Niccolini brothers’ vast and brilliantly colored chromolithographic study Le case ed i monumenti di Pompei (1854–96).
—Kelsey Champagne, Earle Havens
Bibliography
Göran Blix, From Paris to Pompeii: French Romanticism and the Cultural Politics of Archaeology (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2009), esp. 9–27; Shelley Hales and Joanna Paul (eds.), Pompeii in the Public Imagination from its Rediscovery to Today (Oxford University Press, 2011); Charlotte Roberts, “Living with the Ancient Romans: Past and Present in Eighteenth-Century Encounters with Herculaneum and Pompeii,” Huntington Library Quarterly 78:1 (Spring 2015), 61–85; Fausto Niccolini and Felice Niccolini, Houses and Monuments of Pompeii, Valentin Kockel and Sebastian Schütze (eds.) (Cologne: Taschen, 2016).
