The Pompeian style in Latin America

The discovery of Pompeii in 1748 had a profound impact in various fields, but particularly in art. The findings were officially published in the Antichità di Ercolano esposte, which was only printed in a limited edition for Charles of Bourbon to give as a gift to prominent individuals and institutions. Nevertheless, the illustrations contained in this work(and in its translations into English, German and French) reached a wider audience that included scholars, artists and decorators,and became a source of inspiration in the eighteenth century, forming an artistic style known as ‘Pompeian’. Numerous examples of decorations in this style have been studied in Sweden, Germany, France, England, Italy and Spain, but although the Pompeian style also spread to the entire American continent, as attested by architectural, photographic and journalistic evidence, until recently attention has only been paid to examples in the United States. In the present article, we analyse various examples of Pompeian design and decoration located in Latin America,and show how the widespread popularity of classical antiquity was used as a stimulus for modernisation by elites who sought new aesthetic references in a quest to break cultural ties with the mother country