The cities of Herculaneum and Pompeii were buried under lava-flows from Vesuvius in A.D. 79. More than one and a half millennia later, they began to be excavated: Herculaneum in 1738, Pompeii ten years on. The precision of this starting-date makes it possible to determine by what stages the buried treasure began to enrich the cultural repertoire of the European, and to see how that material's dissemination through printed word and image, and ultimately through painting and architecture, was inhibited by political, cultural, and moral forces. It can be seen as a bibliographical test-case, affording insights into how, when, and why information is published — or not published - and what mediums are used. I shall be examining how the Bourbon monarchy in Sicily used its monopoly over the antiquities as a tool of political power, discouraging all distribution of published information except that which it controlled; how contemporary aesthetic standards dictated what was preserved, causing many books to be called into being in order to record the rest of the information before it vanished; and how reception of archaeological evidence was often hindered by considerations of decency.
展开▼
