Reinventing the Architectural Drawing in Pompeii: Objectivity and Romanticism around 1830

Abstract

In the 1820s and 1830s, a new generation of French architects who would later be defined as Romantic was dispatched to the Villa Medici in Rome. In parallel with their official work, these pensionnaires instigated a new way of drawing the monuments of antiquity. This new approach was based on a social and collective practice that incorporated the act of copying and ushered in a new standard of objectivity that came with its own graphic norms. Based on research into several hundred little-known drawings and previously unpublished archival material, this article takes Pompeii as a case study. It presents the epistemology of a purportedly revolutionary approach to drawing, highlighting the networks of exchange that structured the world of architecture within the context of academic training.