Pompeii in the 19th Century: Between Fiorelli’s Casts and the Brogis’ Pictures

The present paper aims to analyse the complex relationship between photography and archaeology in the second half of the nineteenth century, focussing on the archaeological excavations led in Pompeii by the Director Giuseppe Fiorelli between 1863 and 1875. Fiorelli introduced countless innovations in the methodology of the archaeological research; here will be analysed the discovery of the plaster casts, a new way of preserving human remains, exploring whether and to what extent the perception of the casts by the public has been inf luenced by their photographic images. Due to the large amount of pictures made in that period, a selection was deemed necessary; only photographs created by Giacomo and Carlo Brogi between 1879 and the beginning of the twentieth century will be taken into account in the present work. Contemporary written sources suggest that plaster casts were identified mainly as artworks and that they were approached in the same way as the great sculptures brought to light during the excavations. Photographs seemed to have played an essential role in this process of identification; this turns out to be particularly true for the pictures taken by the Brogi company, because of some peculiar features that will be presented and analysed. Images of the plaster casts highly inf luenced their perception, creating a mutual relationship that is still deep and fruitful; indeed the CT images produced by the ongoing scientific investigation into these objects, now widely known to the public thanks to their dissemination in the mass media, are surely going to reshape our views on these unique archaeological objects.