Contents - Musée Maillol

English artists, just like their French colleagues, played a principal role in this rediscovery.
Robert Adam, Robert Mylne and Nathaniel Dance left for Italy in 1754; Dance didn’t reach
Pompeii until a decade later, accompanied by his brother George Dance Jr, who was to play
a decisive role in the spread of English Neo-Classicism. These examples, despite their
sometimes substantial differences, are persuasive proof of how, between 1740 and 1760,
the first generation of “reinventors” of antiquity, homing in on Herculaneum, Pompeii and
Paestum, formed a kind of fellowship that followed the same route and provoked the same
enthusiasm. This class of people, full of rivalries, were desperate for new discoveries; they
engaged in lively debate about the preeminence of Greek art over Roman; they collected
archeological artifacts, studied them, made drawings of them and cultivated a new taste in
many European countries. The forest of names that made up such a group is a veritable
labyrinth of paths that converge and separate. They all remain in the shadow of two giants,
however: Piranesi on one side and Winckelmann on the other – both completely different
from one another.
The Napoleonic era signalled a decisive step in the excavations at Pompeii. No longer was
the work focused only on gathering archeological artifacts; now it was also about conserving
the buildings. It wasn’t long before an entire town came out of the earth.
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