Volcanoes may have their inconveniences, but they have fascinated artists down the centuries, just as they have puzzled and seduced scientists. What are the five best paintings of these fiery giants?
We might almost say the best paintings of Mount Vesuvius, the classically cone-shaped mountain that rises above the Bay of Naples in southern Italy. No other volcano has been painted so often. In the 18th century, Naples was the destination of the Grand Tour, the epic artistic itinerary of Europe considered essential for a complete cultural education. Artists made this journey to keep up with aristocratic tastes, and Vesuvius was the perfect spectacle to portray to them, well-known to the public as well as painters. With his unerring eye for genre, Andy Warhol painted his own, rather good, Mount Vesuvius images in homage to this artistic cliche.
At the other end of the time scale, an ancient Roman fresco found in a house in Pompeii portrays the mountain whose AD79 eruption was to bury this provincial city. In the painting, the lower slopes are covered with trees, and the wine god Bacchus bears witness to the excellent grapes grown in its geologically enriched soil. Disturbingly, this lethal volcano appears more harmless than it does today.
To judge from this painting, Pompeiians saw Vesuvius as a gentle giant. But 18th-century travellers, schooled by the Enlightenment idea of the sublime to find wonder and power in sights that shock the soul, fed on the horror of the volcanic eruption. A 1760 daylight scene by Pietro Fabris seems, from its topographical clarity, to be an accurate record of a stream of lava sizzling down the mountain. By contrast, Joseph Wright's nocturnal visions of the mountain spewing fire are unfettered essays in the imaginative sublime.
Wright is probably my favourite volcano painter. But let's round out the five with a painting that gets away from Vesuvius. In 1862, the American painter Frederic Edwin Church created an eerie and imposing vision of an erupting Cotopaxi in Ecuador; it's a wondrous picture, which resembles a science-fiction vista from some distant planet. Church and Wright must battle it out as art's greatest volcano lovers.
