Techniques mimétiques et productions volcaniques. L’art du pinceau, les sciences de la nature et la question de l’imitation dans les beaux-arts

Abstract

If art is to imitate nature, then many eighteenth-century landscape painters, in choosing to paint what is real, were often content to represent what is plausible. At a time when the resurgence of Vesuvius activity in Naples was accompanied by an increase in the Grand Tour phenomenon and its market, several painters working for demanding scholars and collectors specialised in faithful representations of Vesuvius. Using these eruptions and geological specimens, from working on site to carefully reworking them in the studio, they experimented with new techniques capable of best restoring the materiality of the specimens and the effects of the phenomenon. Painters, collectors and scientists thus pooled their skills to understand and represent, in the laboratory and the studio, a phenomenon that had yet to be deciphered. Before the divorce between artistic representation and scientific illustration began in the nineteenth century, what was at stake for the artist and the scientist in this mimicry of pictorial technique?