Had Domenico Zampieri – Domenichino – been a happy man, he might never have painted a landscape. For all his talent, he was by nature timid and unsure, traits that invited jealous enemies – “of whom no painter ever had more”, as one Victorian apologist put it – to persecute him both as a person and as an artist. His landscapes – a low genre of art in the 17th century – were
Nobody at that time would have associated the increasing tremors and smoking mountain peak as a sign of impending disaster, so, everyone in the region was taken by surprise and for the most part vaporized soon after the volcano erupted.
A bag with tools, on the Roman soldier’s back below his skull, was also found with the skeleton of the Roman soldier. (Parco Archeologico Di Ercolano)
Reinterpreting The Beached Old Roman Soldier
In BBC2 s 2013 documentary
The Other Pompeii: Life and Death in Herculaneum , presenter Wallace-Hadrill told the story of the tragic event of 79 AD. “We all make the mistake of seeing ancient Roman society as comprising of only rich and poor people,” said Hadrill, but “Herculaneum gives us back the middle people – and they are extraordinary,” said the presenter.