Geoscience Reference
In-Depth Information
The literary source, however, is clearly Bulwer Lytton's
description of a Roman sentry:
the lightning flashed over his livid face and polished helmet,
but his stern features were composed even in their awe!
He remained erect and motionless at his post . . . he had not
received the permission to desert his station and escape.²7
This gap between artistic and literary image and scientific
reality is one that becomes increasingly apparent during the
eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. The size and nature of
the gap varies according to scientific discipline, to the extent
that it is perfectly clear that classical Greek sculptors' under-
standing of anatomy was far in advance of medical discovery,
while in the nineteenth century artists lagged a long way behind
scientists in the understanding of astronomy, for example. These
are truisms, and can be easily explained, but it illuminates the
fact that in art and science progress is a shared commodity, with
obligations for cooperation thereby implied. As nature abhors a
vacuum, so knowledge of the natural world grows by taking its
nutrients from every direction.
It may reasonably be said that art shook science into getting
ahead with volcanology. Who can look at images of a struggling
Typhon trapped beneath Mount Etna, or contemporary engrav-
ings of the 1631 eruption of Vesuvius without experiencing a
primitive fear of hideous death? By titling his topic
The Vulcanos
in the seventeenth century, Anathasius Kircher's British editors
put his subject at a measured distance, but then by giving it the
subtitle
Burning and Fire-Vomiting Mountains
they underscored
the visual reality of the subject. As every publisher knows, a good
subtitle sells.
The diiculty we must face when looking at the eruptions
painted by Wright, Volaire or Wutky in the late eighteenth century
is that they take the viewer so close to the lava flow that the
veracity of their paintings is immediately doubted. We want to
believe it, but we cannot. The posing Rococo figures in Volaire's
Vesuvius Erupting at Night
, for example, painted
contre jour
, and
