When news of the discoveries at Pompeii and Herculaneum reached Europe in the latter part of the 18th century, this had an enormous influence on the arts, but particularly on interior design and decoration - medallions, furniture, porcelain, plasterwork, panels. Here are just a few examples: 

• 'Pompeii red' - the bright colour painted on the walls of houses in the excavated city - became extremely popular at the end of the 18th and beginning of the 19th century.
  
  
• Silver dishes found at Pompeii and Herculaneum set a new fashion in design. The future third president of the United States, Thomas Jefferson, created silver pieces influenced by the Roman examples.
  
  
• The influence of the two sites was particularly pronounced in Germany in the 1820s and '30s. Ludwig I of Bavaria (reigned 1825-48) commissioned a copy of Pompeii's House of Castor and Pollux at Aschaffenburg on the River Main.
  
  
• Prince Napoleon (known as 'Plon-Plon') created an elaborate 'Palais pompéien' in 1857. This became 'the rendezvous of all Paris, both of the Court and the Arts'.
  
  
• British architects were also beguiled by the Pompeiian style, led by Robert Adam (1728-92), architect of the king's works. In 1775, 20 years after he visited Herculaneum and Pompeii, he came up with a design for an 'Etruscan' room at 20 Portman Square, London, which was never actually installed. However, many of his other designs that did see the light of day - including an 'Etruscan' dressing-room at Osterley outside London - had their roots in the pumice ash of Pompeii. In 1759, James 'Athenian' Stuart (1713-88), who visited Pompeii in 1754, created and built a purely Pompeiian 'Painted Room' in London's Spencer House. And the work of Charles Cameron (1745-1812) at St Petersburg for Catherine the Great was full of Pompeiian motifs.
  
  
• Pompeii's fate had an enormous impact on musicians and writers. In 1827, Giovanni Pacini's opera The Last Days of Pompeii - complete with an erupting Vesuvius at the end - was a hit at La Scala in Milan. Seven years later, the English writer Edward Bulwer-Lytton wrote a bestseller with the same title. The French writer Madame de Stäel's Corinne (1807) - the 'worst great novel ever written' - contained long descriptions of Pompeii: 'Here, for a long time, man lived, loved, suffered and then perished - but where will you find his feelings, his thoughts?'
  
  
• Vesuvius itself - especially when erupting - inspired many artists. Among those who painted it were Joseph Wright of Derby (1775), J M W Turner (1817) and Samuel Palmer (1837).

 

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