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Updated: June 4, 2025
A third of the latter city has now been restored to the light of day; but though it has yielded abundance of all the things that illustrate the domestic and public life, and the luxury and depravity of those old times, and has given the once secret rooms of the museum their worst attraction, it still falls far below Herculaneum in the value of its contributions to the treasures of classic art, except only in the variety and beauty of its exquisite frescos.
Let us picture then to ourselves a compact town, an irregular oval in form, surrounded by walls pierced by eight gates and embellished with twelve towers; its eastern extremity towards Nocera containing the Amphitheatre, and its most westerly point marked by the Herculaneum gate leading to the Street of Tombs.
Here the long-lost feudal-art of colouring glass re-discovered; there fresco-painting entirely revived, and on the grandest scale; while the ardent researches of another man of genius successfully analyses the encaustic tenting of Herculaneum, and secures the secret process for the triumph of modern Art.
Austria has nothing to fear, so long as she is friendly toward me. She shall share my triumphs; and, when at last all Europe is prostrate, the Emperors of France and Austria will stand side by side, and divide the world between them." "And one will take his Herculaneum, and the other his Pompeii," said the empress, sarcastically.
"In these things, which offer the jolliest possibilities, artists nowadays are very unresourceful," he said. "We have naïve German examples in the Gänsemännchen, the Männicken Piss, and the Tugendbrunnen in Nuremberg. One of the best classic examples is the drunken Silenus of Herculaneum.
A new experience in this kingdom of truth: gravitation, the circulation of the blood, the natural system of Linnaeus, correspond essentially in my mind to the discovery of an antique dug up at Herculaneum they are both only the reflections of one spirit, a renewed acquaintance with a being like myself.
If it be solemn to behold from this new City of the Dead, with its dark smoke hanging in the clear sky, how much more awful and impressive is it, viewed from the ghostly ruins of Herculaneum and Pompeii!
The importance of seeing the original, therefore, for purposes of study, is apparent. The uncial letters are very small and neat, upright and regular, and their breadth is nearly equal to their height. They are very like those in the manuscript rolls of Herculaneum.
We have to thank Pliny for our knowledge of the great eruption of Vesuvius which overwhelmed Pompeii and Herculaneum, and it was probably only due to the accident that the elder Pliny was one of the victims that we possess the two striking letters in which the disaster is described.
Of the buried cities of Herculaneum and Pompeii no traces were discovered till the year 1713, when some labourers, in digging a well, came upon the remains of Herculaneum about twenty-four feet underground. Little attention, however, was paid to the discovery at that time; but in 1748 a peasant, digging in his vineyard, stumbled on some ancient works of art.
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