Fire and Water

Vesuvius and Etna on the Italian coast are obviously popular Mediterranean motifs. Eduard Peithner von Lichtenfels dedicated a broad natural history panorama to both during their dormant phase. In particular, Vesuvius, analogous to its volcanic activities, serves, sometimes more, sometimes less, as a setting creating distance, for example Rudolf von Alt for the Port of Naples, or as an eruptive pictorial theme in Joseph Rebell’s work. Michael Wutky then heightens the threatening situation with a fiery lava flow observed from a safe distance in the foreground.

Joseph Rebell even stages the “Lighthouse in the Port of Naples by Moonlight”, which shows the returning sailing boat’s safe conduct into the harbor on the right, as a reliable antipode of an unpredictable Vesuvius. Moreover, a whole series of remarkable ‘sea marks’ are hidden in the maritime Belvedere. For example, “The Prestenizza Beacon on the Island of Cherso [Cres]” by Gottfried Seelos, who was provided with an Austrian Navy steamer for this work, belongs to a series of 35 watercolors of the “most outstanding beacons of the Austrian coastal country, most remarkable because of their location or history,” having been commissioned by the emperor in 1885 (“New Viennese Daily Newspaper”, 4 August 1888).

A wonderful “Night Cruise in the Lagoon” by Josef Carl Berthold Püttner shows the marking of a fairway in 1857 by fired ‘duck-dolphins’, which here serve as a ‘lateral marker’, including the farewell of an outbound Austrian two-masted paddle steamer. From 1770 onwards, people in Western and North-Central Europe began to occupy positions of maritime importance, where no lighthouse could be erected due to the depth of the water or the nature of the subsoil, with station-fixed ‘lightships’, which were thus also marked on the nautical charts. Wilfried Kirschl has captured such a ‘bateau-feu’ in Normandy for us in oil, the “FS Le Havre” with its characteristic red and white alternation on the ship’s side.

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