Naples and the rise of a tradition of conservation: the restoration of wall paintings from the Vesuvian sites in the eighteenth century

The discovery of ancient Herculaneum and Pompeii brought to light problems of conservation that had never before been faced on such a large scale, and, in the case of paintings, the need to invent methods of intervention in an area of restoration that was almost without precedent. The decision to detach the wall paintings from their original contexts, thus transforming them into suitable pictures for the royal collections; the search for a form of protection that would preserve the original colours; the unprecedented choice of not integrating the lacunae; the attention to faithfulness of graphic reproduction: these elements characterized the birth and the strengthening of a tradition of conservation that was marked by unexpected intuitions, ingenuities and some manifest contradictions.