Un acquerello nella Getty Research Library come esempio di documentazione settecentesca nella Villa San Marco a Castellammare di Stabia

Abstract

A few years ago, the Getty Library acquired a beautiful watercolour illustrating a typical Roman wall decoration. There is no indication
of the author, but the title is fairly precise: “Fronte di una Camera Antica scoperta nelle Reali Scavazioni di Gragnano l’anno 1752”.
The decoration shown can be identified as a wall in the Villa San Marco in Stabia, depicted before parts of it were removed to be exhibited
in the Museo Ercolanese in Portici. Two engravings published in 1808, without any reference to the object depicted, have
already been identified as representing two walls from the same room. It is an almost ideal case of documentation, since the watercolour
and the engravings show the original context and make it possible to identify the paintings now in the Museo Archeologico
Nazionale in Naples. The paper deals also with the history of the 18th-century excavations, in particular at Villa San Marco in Stabia,
with the documentation of the wall paintings discovered in the Vesuvian area, with the procedures for commissioning drawings
for the official publication, the Antichità di Ercolano, and, in connection with the question of the authorship of the watercolour and
the engravings, even with the use of monograms by the designers and etchers of the “Scuola di Portici”
The results of these studies confirm the previously published assumption that the drawings for the two engravings and the watercolour
were made by Camillo Paderni. They complete the profile of Paderni’s personality and his career as a designer of antique paintings,
first in Rome and then in Naples, where he became director of one of the most prestigious museums of his times. They also
highlight the problem of interpreting eighteenth-century excavation reports, which are often so unspecific that even the paintings
documented by the watercolour and the two engravings cannot be identified with certainty in the find reports.

Keywords: ancient wall painting, Camillo Paderni, Castemmammare di Stabia, eighteenth-century documents, eighteenth-century
excavations.