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Virtue & Power

Museum

Museo Archeologico Nazionale di Napoli

Holder of nearly everything portable that came out of Pompeii and Herculaneum, which is why the sites and the museum have to be read together.

Naples, Italy

Scope

Vesuvian material, the Farnese antiquities, and Egyptian and epigraphic collections.

History of the collection

Formed around the Farnese collection inherited by the Bourbon kings of Naples, and expanded enormously by the excavations at Herculaneum from 1738 and Pompeii from 1748, which were royal undertakings.

Collection notes

Most of the paintings and mosaics a visitor sees at Pompeii today are reproductions; the originals are here. A reader who studies the site without the museum is looking at copies.

The Alexander Mosaic, from the House of the Faun, is the principal image of Alexander in battle to survive from antiquity. It is usually identified with Issus and sometimes with Gaugamela; it carries no label and the identification is an inference.

Objects in this catalogue