Plaster Cast of Body, Pompeii

Giorgio Sommer was one of the most successful and well-known photographers of southern Italy in the nineteenth century, and his images served archaeologists and tourists alike. He was commissioned by Giuseppe Fiorelli, the first archaeologist to bring scientific method to the excavations at Pompeii. Under Fiorelli, archaeological evidence was to be documented at the site of its discovery, a dramatic shift from the antiquarian emphasis on aesthetics toward an anthropological appreciation of social and material context. Thus cavities created by decomposed organic matter were filled with plaster to give a more complete sense of a person's form, and figures of Pompeians (including, in at least one remarkable case, a dog) were revealed at the moment of their deaths.