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| The Eruption of Mt. Vesuvius by Pierre-Jacques Volaire |
Pierre-Jacques Volaire painted
The Eruption of Mt. Vesuvius, which takes Mount Vesuvius’s eruption and combines serenity and devastation. It was painted in 1771, just a few years before Europe’s Romanticism movement, in what can be described as the Pre-Romanticism period. During the Pre-Romanticism movement, the public slowly fell away from the more grandeur and sophisticated Neoclassical attitude, and accepted sincerer things. Landscape paintings and simpler forms of expression characterize this movement, and these art types cluttered the artistic scene. The painting’s importance can be narrowed down to its historical significance. In AD 79, Mount Vesuvius erupted and completely devastated a Roman city called Pompeii. This painting depicts what it possibly could have looked like. When describing Volaire’s painting, a few things come to mind. It can be seen as a landscape painting, a disaster narrative painting, and it lacks many colors overall. Landscape paintings offer a serene feeling to the viewer, as standstill painting that gives a feeling like a quiet countryside, meadow, or log cabin. Disaster narratives, such as a painting of a ship tossed at sea or a poem about a raging storm, present nature’s power and show man’s limitations against nature. Despite the typical view of landscapes as serene and disaster narratives as chaotic, Volaire took up the challenge in combining these two opposite concepts into one piece, and added different color and contrasts aspects to aid this process.
In order to understand more about the painting, more must be known about the artist. But unfortunately, not much is known about Pierre-Jacques Volaire. When referring to great artists, Volaire does not fit such a crowd. His paintings will not be found in many museums, and upon hearing his name, not many people will acknowledge that they know who he is. However, what is known about his life does point to his artistic lifestyle. He came from an artistic family tree, because he was the grandson, son, and nephew of famous artists and decorators in Toulon, France. In fact, as a child, his father was the official city painter of Toulon. When Volaire first began, he worked with Vernet, another painter, on several projects. Although, once Volaire traveled to Naples, it happened there that he finally began his solo work. There, he first started making a name for himself and separated from his collaboration with Vernet. In Naples, he began his various paintings on Mount Vesuvius. In his paintings he focused primarily tending “towards a more concise and more efficient painting” (Saiello). In order to do this, he used fewer colors, utilizing contrasts, and would produce a lighter effect in his paintings. He decided against making his paintings extremely extravagant with many colors and, instead, opted to let his works come across as soberer and more poetic. In doing this, his Vesuvius landscape paintings can be viewed as both chaotic and serene, in a sense. Chaotic because of the destruction illustrated from the erupting volcano, yet serene due to his calming colors and simple, precise design.
Volaire specialized in landscape paintings, and most of his works fit under that particular category.
Landscape paintings have existed since ancient times, when Greeks and Romans would paint landscapes on walls. However, once the Roman empire fell, landscape paintings seemed to die off and became less popular. They were viewed simply as religious or biblical paintings during its decline. Later, the Netherlands began to pick the style back up, and not until the 17th century did the classical landscape painting begin to rise and be recognized as a popular art form. Generally, the typical landscape piece featured a quiet countryside filled with trees, rocks, or the occasional animal. However, Volaire decided to take a new approach. Instead of the typical landscape gentleness, Volaire chose to take Mount Vesuvius’s eruption and create a landscape scene that was otherwise chaotic. Firstly, landscapes usually have more color. In
The Eruption of Mt. Vesuvius, there seems to be only two color options: orange, and black, or what could be described as dark. These two colors create a genuine contrast when combined into one painting with no other colors. The difference in color between the lava, the moon, and the dark colors keep the viewers’ eyes in constant movement, always noticing different aspects of the contrast. Artists do this intentionally, because this keeps the viewer from getting bored with the piece and moving on to another one. Even the people in the painting are bathed in a menacing glow from the volcano, and had they not been painted this way, they would end up being almost completely overlooked in the painting. As long this contrast remains present, the viewer will notice different things constantly. Volaire elected to let the painting’s main focus be the volcano, rather than the city or the people. Quite a bold move, considering Volaire made the volcano much larger than it needed to be. In fact, he could have chosen to set the volcano way back in the background and allow the people fleeing the city to become the main subject of the painting. But Volaire wanted to be different. By permitting the volcano to sit as the monstrosity that it is, it creates a sense of hopelessness for the city folk, as if the volcano looms too large to escape from. In comparison, the city sits extremely small in the painting, almost as small as the people. Obviously, Pompeii could not have been that small, but creating the city as little as it seems illustrates that the volcano will ultimately win. This also plays into the historical significance, as Mount Vesuvius did, in fact, end up overcoming the city completely.
A piece on a natural disaster such as Mount Vesuvius’s eruption can be classified as a “disaster narrative” style painting. Disaster narratives can come in many forms: poetry, fiction, drama, and landscape style paintings, to list a few. Disaster narratives exhibit the power nature holds and show how sometimes nature can be too much for man to contain. Therefore, it can also demonstrate the limitations of man as a whole. This painting would really be viewed as a polar opposite of the typical landscape paintings. Most people would tend to think of a more laid back scene as a landscape rather than a volcano erupting. Volaire combined landscape paintings with disaster narratives to create quite a piece. Apparently, during the late 18th century, volcanoes did become a popular painting subject, and Volaire seemed to be another to hop on the volcano craze.
The Eruption of Mt. Vesuvius was not the only volcano painting Volaire painted either. Volaire’s other paintings on Vesuvius contained the enormous mountain, and most have similar names. His obsession for the mountain remains evident in his paintings, as he produced several “Vesuvius at night” creations. Combining his love for landscapes and volcanoes resulted in the fusion of serenity and disaster in his Vesuvius paintings and they display his talents.
This painting illustrates what happened a long time ago in AD 79. Mount Vesuvius happens to be the most dangerous volcanoes in Europe. In AD 79, this statement rang true as it devastated Pompeii and another city nearby. Vesuvius would cause occasional tremors around Pompeii, and people did not think much of them. However, on this particular day in AD 79, this unfortunate overlooking came to doom the people in Pompeii.
Thousands of Romans who lived there perished as the volcanic ash covered the city and burned the residents. The ash fell so quickly and heavily, that the entire city was blanketed and preserved, to the point where even bodies were left almost exactly as they had died. As unfortunate as the destruction of Pompeii was, its preservations lead to remarkable archaeological discoveries. Nearly everything we know about Roman life and culture during those times comes from what was revealed from Pompeii. This historic eruption aided future generations and helps us understand exactly how the Romans operated so long ago. In painting this work, Volaire raises the event’s importance and helps us keep in mind that nature can cause catastrophic damage in the blink of an eye, and we need to be prepared for something like this. By creating the people in the painting so minute, Volaire displays man’s helplessness against such an occurrence. He did not have to create the people so small, but he did it to relay this message to the viewers. Man may not be as powerful as we would like to think, as demonstrated by the events that happened with Mount Vesuvius. Volaire aided the Pre-Romanticism period with this painting, forcing man back down to earth from his elevated ways of the Neoclassicism movement beforehand.
Although not well known, Pierre-Jacques Volaire created a piece that transcends the status quo, and makes a name for himself in the process. Creating a piece that seems both destructive and, in some sense, elegantly calm, makes him differ from the norm and allows the viewer to translate it in their own way. As calming as landscapes can be, and as riveting as disaster narratives are, Volaire makes them one in the same. His color choices and use of contrast add a calmer feeling to the painting as a whole, and illustrate his sober and poetic feel. The historical significance behind the painting reflects the event’s importance that occurred in AD 79. Even though Pompeii was a great city, its end state reveals much about the Roman life, and serves a great educational value to archaeologists. The painting remains, possibly, Volaire’s most popular works, and the reasons for this point to its complex nature and the ability to view it however one pleases. Volaire does not disappoint in this painting and its importance in history makes this a timeless piece that will allow viewers to reflect on what it was possibly like for the citizens of Pompeii during that fateful day in AD 79.
Works Cited
Daly, Nicholas.
http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/victorian_studies/v053/53.2.daly.html
http://www.getty.edu/education/teachers/classroom_resources/curricula/landscapes/background1.html
Saiello, Emilie Beck.
http://www.thearttribune.com/Pierre-Jacques-Volaire-1729-1799.html
http://www.britannica.com/art/oil-painting
http://www.color-wheel-pro.com/color-meaning.html
