A Prospect and a Description: The Pleasures of the Imagination in Eighteenth Century Naples, Lesley Murphy

To the eighteenth century traveller, a visit to Naples meant an encounter with Nature and Antiquity that necessitated an aesthetic as well as an intellectual response. As Romantic Sensibility began to trump Reason in the 1780s, the subjective came to dominate the objective as a mode of apprehension, and the Sublime gained ascendancy over the Beautiful as tourists sought to be thrilled as well as charmed by what they saw. This paper compares two responses to a famous Grand Tour site of classical origin, the Grotto of Posillipo, located on the northern side of the Bay of Naples: an etching from William Hamilton’s luxury folio on volcanoes, Campi Phlegraei (1776), and an extract from a suppressed travel memoir, Dreams, Waking Thoughts and Incidents (1783), by William Beckford, considering both in the light of these dichotomies and the interplay of the cultural shifts and philosophical tensions characteristic of the age.