Page 40 - Joseph Wright of Derby: Virgils's Tomb & The Grand Tour.

© DULWICH PICTURE GALLERY

Fig.3. DAVID TENIERS, Mary Magdalene in Penitence. Dulwich Picture Gallery.

W right’s letter about Vesuvius is marked by its folk-lore: it was the stuff of inspiration. As Gilpin said,
casual use of the familiar phrase, ‘the bowels of the it made the imagination‘take fire’. In the Naples region,
earth’. Five years earlier, in 1767, the doctor, invent- old Mother Earth, the Goddess of Minerals, was at
or and poet Erasmus Darwin – Whitehurst’s friend her most fiery and ‘Sublime’, in the Burkean sense of
and Wright’s neighbour and doctor in later years – inspiring awe and terror: watching the eruption was
had used the same phrase to describe his exploration like touching the divine.
of the Blue John Cavern in the Peak District. ‘I have
lately travell’d two days journey into the bowels of the The scientific study of volcanoes was integral to
earth’, he told Wedgwood, ‘and have seen the Goddess of the contemporary hunt for the origins of the earth.
Minerals naked,as she lay in her inmost bowers’.5 Repeating In a different, yet parallel, way the contemplation of
this to the entrepreneur Matthew Boulton, Darwin Virgil’sTomb also displayed the eighteenth-century’s
varied his words ‘I have been into the Bowels of old Mother obsessions with origins: looking back atVirgil’s place
Earth, and seenWonders and learnt much curious know- in the history of poetry, particularly the epic; to the
ledge in the regions of Darkness...’. The scientific inter- Aeneid’s story of the founding of Rome; and to the
est in rocks and minerals fused with legend and mystery of poetic inspiration itself. This was a des-
cent into a different kind of underworld, metaphor-
5. Erasmus Darwin to Josiah Wedgwood, 2 July 1767; to Matthew ical rather than physical. Just to the north of Naples
Boulton 29 July 1767, Desmond King Hele ed., The Letters of was Cumae, where the Sibyl had presided over the
Erasmus Darwin, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge 1981. Apollonian oracle, singing the fates and writing her
prophecies on the oak leaves within her cave. The

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