April 29th, 1830
On Tuesday again to the Museum and the King’s Palace; rather fine, good house, very ridiculous pictures of the royal families of Naples and Spain. The Duchess of Floridia’s apartment (old Ferdinand’s wife) is delightful; the rooms are furnished with blue satin and white silk, opening upon a terrace covered with orange-trees, ANTIQUE PAINTING flowers, and shaded walks, and looks over the Bay. A few fine pictures, but not many. There is a bath, built after one of those at Pompeii.
From what I saw at the Museum, I see no reason to doubt that the ancients were as excellent in painting as in sculpture; there are some very exquisite paintings taken from Pompeii. Then we are not to believe that the best have been found, or that a provincial town contained the finest specimens of the art. Painted on walls, they appear deficient in light and shade, but the drawing and expression, and sometimes the colouring (allowing for spoiling), are very good. There are some Cupids playing at games, and driving chariots, very like the Julio Romanos in the Lanti Villa at Rome, which indeed were borrowed from the ancient frescoes discovered in the Baths of Titus. The bronzes taken out of Herculaneum and Pompeii are very interesting, because they display the whole domestic economy of the ancients, and their excellent taste in furniture, sacrificial instruments, &c., but there is nothing particularly curious in the fact of their pots and pans being like our pots and pans, for if they were to boil and stew they could not well have performed those operations with a different kind of utensils. However, all the people marvel at them; they seem to think the Romans must have been beings of a different organisation, and that everything that is not dissimilar is strange. What is really curious is a surgical instrument which was lately found, exactly similar to one invented thirty years ago in France. The lava would not touch bronze; the iron was always encrusted and spoilt, but the bronze things all look like new.