The Eruption of Vesuvius

"The Eruption of Vesuvius" on May 14th, 1771 by Pierre-Jacques Volaire (1729 -1790, or before 1802) illustrates another central theme of the late 18th century, as well as a changing view of nature.

This Kantian idea of the dynamically sublime is also invoked in Pierre-Jacques Volaire's much smaller painting of Vesuvius. With trembling admiration, the viewer is conscious of his own diminutiveness and limitations in the face of this process fully beyond his influence. The scientific interest in nature that arose with the Enlightenment is also clearly manifested in this work.

Volaire illustrates the eruption with the precision of an eye witness, which he was: The lava shooting up of through the narrow vent of the volcanic cone, the escaping sulphurous smoke and the rain of ashes that results, the flow of liquid rock over the flanks to the foot of the cone into the crater, where narrow rivulets run together into a broader, fearful, red-hot stream, which threatens to gush down towards Portici and Torre del Greco into the sea.

With this authentic-looking, fresh and flowing painting, Volaire documented one of the smaller eruptions of Vesuvius, which was constantly active between 1769 and 1779, and which became a magnet for European educational travel. In that sense, it was also the scene of an early form of "catastrophe tourism".