A Quartet of Pompeian Pastiches

Abstract

SHORTLY AFTER the excavation of Pompeii began in earnest about 1790, so-called Pompeian or Etruscan styles in architecture, interior decoration, and furniture swept across Europe and America. Everyone knows such examples of the fashion as Syon House near London (as redecorated by the Adam brothers) and Schliemann's home in Athens (which is now the Greek Supreme Court). Few people recall, however, that in addition to countless Pompeian rooms and Pompeian garden houses and fake Pompeian ruins, four serious attempts were made in four different countries to build a reproduction of a complete Pompeian villa. All four of these seem to owe something to the tremendous vogue of Bulwer-Lytton's The Last Days of Pompeii, which was published in 1834. Though all four obviously have much in common, each is interestingly shaped by the distinctive characteristics of the country in which it was built. Thus the history of these buildings and the differences between them make an amusing and revealing study. The first of these modern Pompeian villas was to have been the private museum of an amateur archaeologist king. Not content with reproducing in Munich the Athenian Propylaeum and a host of Renaissance buildings, Ludwig I of Bavaria in 1842 began erecting a Pompejanum in his castle garden at Aschaffenburg. Here he intended to display the objets d'art and house-furnishings his excavators had dug up at Pompeii and elsewhere. Unfortunately, before his plan was completed, Ludwig was forced to abdicate because of the scandal of his affair with the dancer Lola