Word: herculaneum
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...Ingres took with every last detail of her costume and massive jewelry--the cascading rose-embroidered fabric, the tassels on the bodice--almost defies belief. On the other it harks back in time. Her pose is taken from that of the goddess of Arcadia in an antique mural from Herculaneum that Ingres saw in Naples; whence her bizarre hand, that pampered starfish of flesh. Then there is the profile reflection of her face in the mirror, one of the most discreetly enigmatic "presences" in all painting...
...mind and pocket of the man whose name it bears: J. Paul Getty, the oil billionaire who in 1974 had installed his collection of Roman and Greek antiquities, French furniture and medium-level European paintings in a preposterous $17 million replica of the Villa dei Papiri in Herculaneum, overlooking the Pacific at Malibu. Those who sneered at this as the Disneyism of a crackpot Scrooge McDuck were staggered when, after Getty died in 1976, it turned out that he left his museum almost $700 million--the largest endowment ever given to a cultural institution...
...Antique, are lost to us; try as we may, we cannot feel the reverence for it that he did. For Canova, the Antique was a truth mine. He visited every ancient site in Italy he could get to -- Naples, Paestum, the newly excavated sites of Pompeii and Herculaneum; his connections gave him access to private hoards of statuary from Rome to Venice...
...During the night of Feb. 2-3, 1990, masked men surprised six unarmed guards watching a storeroom in Herculaneum, ancient Pompeii's bedfellow in fate when Mount Vesuvius erupted in A.D. 79. After breaking through a wall, the thieves took four hours to select 223 of the most precious antiquities, as if they had a dealer's catalog in hand. Estimated value: $18 million. None of the relics have resurfaced...