Archaeological Archives at the Getty Research Institute: The Halsted B. Vander Poel Campanian Collection

1In 2002 the Getty Research Institute (GRI) acquired the Halsted B. Vander Poel Campanian Collection, a research archive for the history of excavations at Pompeii, and, to a lesser extent, Herculaneum and other sites located around the Bay of Naples. Assembled from 1958 to 1997 by Vander Poel and his research team, the collection comprises 643 linear ft. of material, which is housed in 661 boxes, 151 flat-file folders, and 32 tubes of rolled material. The collection includes scholars’ archives, rare books, photographs, prints, maps and plans, drawings, and the documentation of research projects and publications on Pompeii conducted or commissioned by Vander Poel himself1.

2This article offers a descriptive overview of Vander Poel’s interest in the subject of Pompeii and the collection he amassed, and describes the relationship of the Campanian Collection to the Getty Research Institute and the history of the J. Paul Getty Museum. The most exhaustive resource related to the Vander Poel collection is the Finding Aid created as the collection was being catalogued and processed at the GRI2.

3Halsted Billings Vander Poel (1911-2003) was the grandson of C.K.G. Billings, a wealthy industrialist. The family estate, where Vander Poel was born, was purchased by John D. Rockefeller in 1917 and was subsequently donated to the city of New York—it now forms a portion of the property where the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s Cloisters Museum resides today. Vander Poel was educated at Yale, served in the United States Navy during the Second World War, and worked in the Truman and Eisenhower administrations. He was a life-long collector, starting with rare manuscripts of English literature, many of which are in the Vander Poel Literary Collection at the Library of Congress in Washington D.C. He later broadened his collecting to include Old Master paintings, American portraits, and English decorative arts.

4By 1957 he had moved to Rome and became involved in a number of American-led education and restoration projects in the city. During this period he became acquainted with the archaeologists Matteo Della Corte and Tatiana Warscher, scholars whose life-long work had been dedicated to studying Pompeii. Vander Poel became their benefactor and committed substantial resources to the realization of their projects. Their papers form a considerable portion of the Campanian archive at the GRI.

5As Vander Poel’s interest in Pompeiian archaeology grew, he set out to create a research library and archive that could document archaeological investigations in the Bay of Naples—a project that Vander Poel was devoted to for 40 years (1958-1997). The topic, like the site of Pompeii, is vast. The main problem to overcome was to find a way to effectively synthesize the multitude of excavations that had been undertaken in the region and the variety of documents that had been created over a period of a few hundred years into a comprehensive history. Along with assembling a corpus of material, Vander Poel’s goal was to create new publications, primarily the multi-volume Corpus topographicum Pompeianum and to update publications of objects in the Museum of Naples. He also envisioned new editions or translations of historic texts. Vander Poel put a great deal of energy into these projects himself, but also assembled a research team known as the Research in Campanian Archaeology (RICA) to help him conduct research and expand his collection3. The research material collected and generated by the RICA is also part of the Getty archive (Series VIII).

6Vander Poel’s ambition to create a comprehensive archive on Pompeii is linked to his acquisition of Matteo Della Corte’s papers, which form a substantial portion of the larger Vander Poel archive. The Della Corte papers contain correspondence, totaling about 3,000 letters, telegrams, and postcards, publications, and writings by Della Corte and others. Della Corte’s research materials include 71 field notebooks (fig. 1-2) and thousands of small drawings and tracings of inscriptions along with personal papers and effects. The breakdown of this part of the collection (Series I) is 101 linear feet of material (84 boxes) and 22 flat files.

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7Della Corte began working at Pompeii in 1902, and for the next 60 years was a major figure at the site. He held the posts of Inspector (1909-1923), Chief Inspector (1923-1926), and Director (1926-1942). His work focused on epigraphic studies, with a special interest in the site’s now-celebrated graffiti. In the early twentieth century Della Corte was one of the few serious scholars working on this aspect of the site. He published extensively on this topic for decades, a body of work that has come under heavy criticism by later scholars for its weak methodologies.

8His legacy is also marred by conflicts and difficulties with colleagues and his superiors in Naples, which to range from the personal and professional to the political. Della Corte embraced Fascist ideals and apparently kept records on colleagues who did not share his views. As the archive reflects, Della Corte’s removal was requested a number of times. He was finally removed from his administrative post in 1942, but remained in site working on inscriptions into the 1960s.

9Nevertheless, Della Corte’s work is an important contribution to the field, particularly as the site has sustained damage and loss. Now invisible or destroyed inscriptions and graffiti are preserved for future scholarship in his notebooks. Perhaps understanding the potential importance of the work, Vander Poel befriended Della Corte in the 1950s and secured the acquisition of his papers after Della Corte’s death in 1962. Vander Poel himself organized the collection to a considerable degree—creating summaries of the material, English translations, typescript copies, and indices. Vander Poel and the RICA also added their own notes to the papers and some memorial objects to the collection (Series I.F).

10The papers of the Pompeiian scholar Tatiana Warscher are the second major component of the Vander Poel archive (Series II). Warscher was a student of the eminent historian and classicist Michael Rostovtzeff in St. Petersburg. After fleeing post-revolution Russia, Warscher first went to Berlin, then Paris, and settled in Rome in 1924. Rostovtzeff, who had himself fled to Paris, encouraged Warscher throughout her early career to work on the systematic documentation of Pompeii. Their correspondence is part of her papers held at the Getty.

11Warscher’s life-long project was the Codex Topographic Pompeianum, an ambitious work aimed at the documentation of every structure in Pompeii. Warscher photographed the site for nearly 50 years—this corpus of material, now preserved in the Vander Poel archive, provides a wealth of visual information about the site from before the Allied bombing during the Second World War and the effects of post-excavation weathering and deterioration (fig. 3-4)4.

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12Like Della Corte, Warscher met and befriended Vander Poel in the 1950s. But in contrast to Della Corte, Warscher seems to have become more of a mentor to Vander Poel. Vander Poel’s own research on Pompeii mirrors or continues Warscher’s projects. Warscher bequeathed her papers to Vander Poel, she died in December of 1960. The papers themselves are 40 linear feet, roughly 80 boxes of material, and are divided into correspondence, writings, photographic documentation, personal papers, and memorial objects.

13As with those of Della Corte, Vander Poel also, in part, personally processed Warscher’s papers —adding descriptive summaries and other useful information about the papers. It is clear that Vander Poel attempted to elevate the status, or importance, of Della Corte’s and Warscher’s works. Along with the care and resources he committed to their projects and papers, Vander Poel commission life-sized commemorative bronze portraits of each of them, copies of which are in the archive (Series VII, fig. 5-6); in addition, copies were given to the American Academy in Rome5.

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14Roughly twice the size of the Warscher papers is Series VI of the archive, the production materials related to the Corpus Topographicum Pompeianum (CTP). Warscher had been working on this project since the 1930s, but Vander Poel began a new phase of the CTP in 1958 and continued the project well into the 1990s. Five volumes have been published, and an additional five were planned6. The research files for other projects by Vander Poel and the RICA are also included in the archive (Series V, VI, VII). For example, some of the projects aimed at publishing revised additions of historic sources, such as Rocque Joaquin de Alcubierre’s text in which he describes his excavations in the region during the mid-eighteenth century7.

15Another project spurred on by Warscher’s work was Vander Poel’s own excavations at the House of Meleager (Series III). For a few seasons in the early 1960s, Vander Poel personally led an excavation at the site (fig. 7).

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16During the course of this project, he revised the plan of the building, traced and analyzed the cisterns and water systems of the house, and discovered a previously unknown subterranean room. Another aspect of his project was to define some of the earlier, pre-eruption, layers of the city by digging soundings.

17RICA created a reference library of approximately 1,400 books and 400 volumes of periodicals, some of which are rare Neapolitan publications. In addition to these more modern publications are 600 rare books—of which a dozen or so are publications from the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, 95 from the eighteenth, and the remaining hundreds from the nineteenth century. This library was also acquired by the GRI in 20028.

18The rare books assembled into this collection, as one would assume, represent the canon of well-known historic accounts of excavation in Southern Italy, travel narratives, and antiquarian catalogues of objects and inscriptions. There is also a substantial representation of works on Vesuvius and volcanology as well as more generic early works on Roman history. With his extensive background in literature and manuscript collections, Vander Poel would certainly have enjoyed the rare books in their own right, but the library was also used as essential reference and research tool for his team (fig. 8).

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19One can observe how these books functioned within the collection by examining Vander Poel’s copy of Le Antichità di Ercolano, esposte, the famous official Bourbon sponsored publication of the antiquities found in Herculaneum9. Due to the GRI’s collecting strategies of the 1980s, in which entire libraries from estate sales were acquired, the GRI holds multiple copies of this eight-volume work. Copy four is the Vander Poel copy. Unlike the others in the collection, which are in a pristine condition, the Vander Poel copy was annotated in the original by the RICA team, in an attempt to cross-reference the publication of its images in other sources, or to label the current location of the object(s) depicted (fig. 9).

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20This annotation gives us a sense of how the Vander Poel archive was conceived of and used—it was a research tool, with the objective of creating the ability to track and synthesize the existing material on the topic.

21A lesser-known object acquired in the collection, and one that straddles the book and print collection, is a suite of bound prints by Carlo Labruzzi, Via Appia illustrata ab urbe Roma ad Capuam10. Commissioned to commemorate a 1789 trip along the Via Appia by the English antiquarian Sir Richard Colt Hoare and Labruzzi, the work includes 24 large format etchings (fig. 10-11).

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22In comparison to Delle antichità di Ercolano, this is a relatively rare work and off of the core topic of Campanian archaeology. What it demonstrates is the luxury, or leeway, that Vander Poel’s team enjoyed in their ability to broadly collect what was available to them on the market11.

23There are hundreds of loose prints in the collection, 65 of which are original maps. The one depicted here, the Weber map of 1754 (fig. 12), also includes annotations, on separate sheets of paper but preserved in the archive and in the collection’s finding aid.

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24Perhaps the most beloved object in the archive is the small sketchbook by Sir William Gell, dating to 1830 (fig. 13-14)12.

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25An early nineteenth-century archaeologist and topographer, Gell was commissioned by the London-based antiquarian group the Society of Dilettanti, to document and publish ancient sites in the Eastern Mediterranean and Italy. One of his most important works was Pompeiana, an early and widely popular English-language guidebook to the ruins of the ancient city. The Vander Poel sketchbook is a late work by Gell. It contains Gell’s notes for a revised second edition of Pompeiana and focuses on material discovered during the excavations conducted between 1826 and 1829.

26Photography is the most abundant visual material in the archive. There are several nineteenth- and twentieth-century souvenir albums that depict the well-known sites of Pompeii, scenic views of Naples, and famous objects in regional museums (Series VII.B). One example is an elaborate red leather bound album (fig. 15-16) containing the work of Giorgio Sommer, a photographer who set up a studio in Naples in 1857 and supplied tourists with keepsakes for decades.

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27Much more numerous, and possibly of greater interest to specialists, are the thousands of lesser-known photographs distributed throughout the archive. These include systematic site views, such as those in the Warscher papers as well as catalogues of small finds and extensive reference photography for frescoes in the Naples depot (Series II-VI). This photo-study material also includes reproductions of works by Piranesi and unpublished sketches and drawings, such as the Edward Falkener materials. Falkener was an English architect who studied and sketched the ruins of Pompeii in the 1840s. In the 1970s, Vander Poel contacted his heirs and commissioned photographic copies of the drawings (Series V.B).

28Other reproductions in the archive include thousands of pages of photocopied articles, books, journals, and documents from other archives (Series VII)13.

29Lastly, a section of “Non-Campanian” materials in the archive (Series X), consist of this including small research files on sites in other Italian regions or farther afield, as well as miscellaneous files. There are three additional scholars’ archives, or, more accurately, portions of their papers, which belong to etruscologist Friedrich-Wilhelm von Hase, vulcanologist Henry James Johnston Lavis, and the Egyptologist Margaret Murray14.

30The Vander Poel archive is a reference source for the study of ancient Pompeii and an excellent resource for studying the history of archaeology around the Bay of Naples. It is also a reflection of Vander Poel himself, his ability and interest in amassing these materials, his independent archaeological enterprises, and his atypical manner of assembling a research archive. The archive also reflects one of the GRI’s key collecting strategies as it holdsample material related to the history of archaeology. Having the Vander Poel archive encourages the GRI to continue to collect Pompeiian related archives, in effect drilling down deeper into this subject15.

31When contextualizing this collection within the Getty’s holdings, one must also reflect on J. Paul Getty’s realized vision of creating a full-scale replica of Herculaneum’s Villa of the papyri in Malibu, California to house his art collections (fig. 17).

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32After years of planning and construction, the Getty Villa opened to the public in 1974. In addition its extensive collection of antiquities, the Getty Villa contains replicas of ancient mosaics and statues found at Pompeii and Herculaneum. Small period rooms were included as part of the display in the first years it was open (fig. 18-19); these rooms are no longer part of the display.

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33Similar to Vander Poel, Getty’s experiences in Italy shaped his collecting and legacy-building endeavors. The small library that eventually became the GRI, now one of the largest arts libraries in the world, was originally a collection of resources assembled with the objective of supporting the curatorial projects at the Getty Villa. Decades later, in the Ranch House—Getty’s formerhome that sits on a hill overlooking the Getty Villa—is located a sliver of the Vander Poel collection. The vast majority of the Campanian Collection is held in the state-of-the-art vaults at the Getty Center, but after the renovations to the Getty Villa (1996-2005), an extension of the GRI library was created in the Ranch House for the curatorial staff and visiting scholars. This reconstitution of the original Getty Museum curatorial library includes a section on the art and architecture of Pompeii and Herculaneum; it contains many books from the Vander Poel collection.