A common theme in Northern European flood myths are the church bells of submerged cities. This motive can be found all along the ccoasts of Brittany, Wales, England, Germany and Poland. The popular folk song “Bells of Aberdovey” relates to the legend of the sunken kingdom Gwydneu (more commonly known as Cantr’er Gwaelod) off the coast of Wales. The song is most likely not an original folksong at all but a composition from 1785 for an English Opera with lyrics in English not Welsh. The today popular Welsh version was first printed in 1905.
About the motif of submerged bells see also the art installation by Marcus Vergette in this post.
In 1783 an unsual seismic event sequence occured along the Strait of Messina between the island Sicily and mainland Italy. Katrin Kleemann from LMU Munich writes: “Between 5. February and 28. March 1783, five strong earthquakes shook Calabria and Sicily and were followed by hundreds of aftershocks in the following years. The earthquakes caused ten tsunamis.”
That same year additional earthquakes were reported from western France and Geneva on July 6., in Maastricht and Aachen on August 8., and in northern France on December 9. This was not too long after the disastrous earthquake and tsunami that hit Lisbon in 1755.
All these events were widely communicated and written about all across Europe. It was the age of enlightment and the disasters challenged religious, philosophical and political views of the time but also sparked artistic creativity.
Societies were in high demand for images of the disasters and artists, who naturally could not work from first hand observation and experience, were forced to invent formal solutions for this problem.
One strategy was to combine different temporal levels in one painting: the moment before the event, the aftermath, and sometimes even events that had no logical connection other than in the public mind.
Katrin Kleemann writes about this image: “This hand-colored copper engraving portrays the Strait of Messina from the north at the moment the earthquake struck. To the left it depicts the coast of Calabria, to the right the harbor of Messina, and to the far right an erupting Mount Etna, although it did not actually erupt in 1783”, but in 1780 and then again in 1787.
Another striking example is the painting »Vue de la Palazzata de Messine au moment du tremblement de terre« by French artist Jean Houel.
Hans-Rudolf Meier writes: “Jean Houel published in his »Voyage pittoresque« one year after the earthquake in the Sicilian port. Houel, who had traveled in Sicily before the earthquake and had not himself seen the extent of the destruction—to say nothing of the event itself—successfully recorded before and after in one picture by depicting the palace in the margins as a ruin, but showing it still intact in the middle of the picture. Here the special quality of buildings for impressive representations of the effect of a disaster becomes evident: on a building the sudden transformation from a consummate cultural achievement to a ruin can be perceived as a symbol of transience. In Houel’s engraving the observer, similar to today’s television viewer, witnesses the moment of destruction from a secure distance. The churning sea in the foreground cannot bridge this distance either, but it is intended to suggest something of the danger—and thus the authenticity—to which the fictive recorder of the scene might have been exposing himself.
In her essay on the motive of Mount Vesuvius, Valerie Hammelbacher traces the beginning of the image of disaster in art history back to the Britsh enlightment and the philosophy of physico-theology. More often referred to as natural theology, this school of thought challenged the prior concept of natural disaster as divine punishment and instead tried to find scientific explanations while maintaining the idea of divine power. Thomas Burnets treaty “The Wisdom of God manifested in the Works of Creation” (1691) ushers in the age of physico-theology. According to Burnets and his colleagues, any natural phenomenon is logical, useful, immaculate and thus beautiful. This includes a disaster like the eruption of Mount Vesuvius which could now become a topic for fine arts. Consequently, natural disasters were a popular, technically challenging yet rewarding motiv for painters in the following decades. In his painting from 1780 English painter Jospeh Wright of Derby (1734 – 1797) depicted the eruption of Mount Vesuvius as a sacred epiphany.
After the famous earthquake from 1755 that destroyed much of the city and could be felt all across the Mediterranean and Europe, the people of Lisbon had to rebuild the city. Portugals prime minister Sebastia Jose de Carvalho e Mello (1699 – 1782) was particularly influential in modernizing the old city. He conducted a survey among local priests to find out as much as possible about how people experienced the disaster. He also changed the layout of the city significantly.
This map shows Lisbon before the disaster:
This is a plan for the new Lisbon after the earthquake by architects Eugénio dos Santos and Carlos Mardel:
