Giuseppe Fiorelli's Plaster Casts

Fausto and Felice Niccolini, Le case ed i monumenti di Pompeii: disegnati e descritti (Naples, 1854-1896), Volume 2, Plate 17

In this image, we see the confluence of three major technological advances in the nineteenth century: chromolithography, photography, and Giuseppe Fiorelli's well known plaster casts. Like chromolithography, which supplanted the earlier technique of coloring prints by hand, photography was invented in the first decades of the 1800s, i.e. only a generation before the publication of Le case ed i monumenti di Pompeii. Fausto and Felice Niccolini utilized photography to produce several of their images. They also worked closely with the archaeologist Giuseppe Fiorelli, who had only recently developed a technique for pouring plaster into the cavities left in the hardened lava by the decay of organic material. Fiorelli thus revolutionized the study of Pompeii. The casts' gruesome appearance also drew large number of tourists to the site and inspired highly sentimental reconstructions of the Pompeians' final hours.