Hardeep Dhinsa (King's College London)
Upon seeing the frescoes uncovered at Pompei in the second half of the eighteenth century, Lady Miller was astounded ‘that these people should have any knowledge of the Chinese and their gardens, ornaments, &c. is surprising. I observed one representation of a Chinese temple built on piles over a piece of water.’ Others were not as impressed. ‘Much of the greatest part of them are but a very few degrees better than what you will upon an ale-house-wall...A vast deal of it looks like such Chinese border and ornaments, as we see painted upon skreens,’ observed Mr Freeman.
For eighteenth-century viewers, perhaps one of the more unexpected phenomena after the discovery of Pompeian frescoes were their striking similarities to the perceived styles of Indian, Chinese and sometimes Arabic painting. Painting was, after all, believed to have been the highest valued among all the arts by Pliny, but for avid collectors the newly-discovered frescoes did not surpass the aesthetic beauty of sculpture (Bignamini and Hornsby, 2010). The frescoes exhibited a number of worrying characteristics: the temples did not conform to the traditional proportions of Greco-Roman architecture, the ornamentations was seen as too exotic, and worst of all they depicted scenes of excess associated with non-European cultures (Coltman, 2006).
This paper explores these orientalist interactions with Pompei that are often overlooked in the histories of art and archaeology. It will do so in three broad sections. First the circumstances influencing the reception of Pompei and Herculaneum will be considered, outlining the growth of collecting and the growing importance of antiquity to Enlightenment culture with a particular emphasis on racial formations (Bindman, 2002). The second section analyses contemporary comparisons to Indian and Chinese painting and what this can tell us about constructions of Western identity using modern theoretical frameworks (Bernal, 2020; Dyer, 2017). It will include the existing sentiments towards ‘oriental’ artistic styles and how the Pompeian frescoes disrupted the clear-cut boundaries between ‘Europeaus...regitur ritibus’ and ‘Asiaticus...regitur opinionibus’ (Linnaeus, 1767). Finally, these sentiments will be contextualized within a wider network of colonial artistic hierarchies to understand how non-European cultures were primitivized through cultural objects. Primary examples of this are the phallic objects uncovered in Pompei, which were immediately compared to the objects ‘quite on the level with those which Captain Cook found in some of the South Sea islands.’ It is my hope that this paper stimulates further discussion on a much-maligned phenomenon.