The Aesthetics and Politics of Volcanoes: William Hamilton’s Campi Phlegraei

Climate researchers have been able to show how the aerosols of dark-ening ash can be read in the coloration of sunsets in historical paintings as an ef-fect of volcanic eruptions. As a result, riots broke out, conspiracy tales spread, and anti-Jewish riots occurred – and in this eerie atmosphere Mary Shelley wrote her novel Frankenstein on Lake Geneva (1818). But there were also scientific advances and technological inventions.

The Lover of the Fire Mountains

Hamilton was deeply committed to his passion for volcanoes, which for him sym-bolized temptation and doom at the same time. Again and again, he was driven to Vesuvius, which was as pleasurable as it was dangerous. According to his own count, the passionate dancer and horseman climbed it a total of 58 times up to 1779 alone.

Volcanoes, especially Vesuvius, but also Etna and Stromboli, which Hamilton also visited, are not least a metaphor for the eruption of passions. It was not a coin-cidence that his passion for his young wife Emma – just like the passion of her lover, the naval hero Lord Nelson – broke out against the backdrop of the mountains of fire. Hamilton’s desire for her is thoroughly a form of pyromania.

Susan Sontag gave her novel about William Hamilton the title The Volcano Lov-er (1992). In essayistic passages that run through her historical narrative, she de-velops a theory of passions: for collecting, antiquity, the arts, and volcanoes, as well as for a loved one. In Emma’s appealing performances – her so-called atti-tudes, a kind of mimic and gestural choreographies – the order of classical antiquity and the chaos of the volcanoes were, as Sontag suggests, balanced as apparently irreconcilable opposites.

In psychology, volcanoes are viewed as a significant key to the mind. In his study (Freud 1907) of Wilhelm Jensen’s novella Gradiva (1903), Sigmund Freud turned the eruption of Vesuvius into an allegory of psychoanalysis: “There is really no bet-ter analogy for the repression that makes something psychic at once inaccessible and preserves it than the burial, as it became Pompeii’s fate and from which the city was able to rise again through the work of the spade” (Freud 1907: 39–40, our translation). Elsewhere he pointed out: “The burial of Pompeii, this disappearance with preservation of the past, bears a striking resemblance to the idea of repres-sion” (Freud 1907: 49–50, our translation).

William Hamilton dealt not only with the eruptions of the volcanoes, but also with their consequences: with the change of the landscape and with the burial of human life as well as human culture. He regularly visited the excavations in Pompeii, which were systematically started in his time.