Cities of the Dead

In February 1863, Giuseppe Fiorelli performed the ultimate materialization; his plaster casts (gessi) made manifest the dead of Pompeii for everyone to see. This chapter attempts to view Fiorelli's achievements in the context of the fetishistic morbidity from which it is deemed to have departed. It examines the contexts in which a British audience may have couched their responses to Fiorelli's Pompeii and recalls a world in which archaeology was just one of a range of new sciences that presented themselves, often equipped with similar jargon and tools, particularly the camera, as alternative ways of accessing that other world at Pompeii.

By contextualizing Pompeii in this now rather alien landscape, it is easier to understand how the city slipped so readily into nineteenth-century imaginations.