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Abstract:
Painting with Lava: Volcanoes’ Representations during the 19th Century. Volcanoes are among the main protagonists of scientific images since at least the early 18th century. Within the history of visual culture related to Earth sciences, they appear as one of the most recurrent subjects, especially between the 18th and the 19th century. Such images, while having spectacular features, also provided accurate visual evidences of volcanic phenomena. This contribution explores volcanoes’ representations during the 19th century, at crossroads between aesthetics, scientific research and its dissemination. The progresses in the field of Earth sciences that marked this century, in fact, led to their major popularization, especially through illustrated journals geared towards a broader public. The aim is to study how such images bear witness of the interaction with the established pictorial models and the technical and scientific visual culture that especially develops with the progress of geology and the production of volcanoes’ geological maps. For instance, the Etna’s geological map by Sartorius von Waltershausen (between 1848 and 1861) reveals the importance of pictorial elements in this scientific undertaking, such as the use of color (Abate and Branca, 2015; 2018). The Etna and the Vesuvius being among the most studied active volcanoes, the focus is on their representations and subsequent dissemination through journals published in Italy and France in the second half of the century, revealing the numerous contacts between these two scientific milieus. Finally, these representations also embody and visualize the development of an historical dimension of geology and volcanology ante litteram.
