James Bridges Mount Etna Cisternazza Crater

An original c.1837 watercolour painting, James Bridges, Mount Etna Cisternazza Crater.

This interesting topographical watercolour depicts the crater 'La Cisternazza' (cistern) which formed on Mount Etna in Sicily during the major 1797 eruption. James Bridges (1799–1865) was a landscape and portrait painter who travelled in Italy, Sicily and Germany. He contributed drawings to 'A collection of views from Switzerland, France and Italy', c.1822–3. His known drawings of Sicily include a sketch at the quarry Cave di Cusa, which formed part of a collection papers belonging to the architects Samuel Angell and William Harris, who conducted excavations on Sicily in 1822–3 (British Museum no. 2015,5009.7). Also in the British Museum collection is a watercolour showing a view towards Etna, painted by Bridges in 1837 (no. 1959,0411.28).

This was a time of public fascination with the spectacle, horror and awe of volcanic eruptions. Whilst Vesuvius was the usual terminus of the European Grand Tour, Etna was much less frequently visited during the late 18th and early 19th centuries. Its mythology had nevertheless long been the subject of many paintings and numerous works of prose, verse, and drama produced and consumed across Europe. The major eruption of 1797 was particularly emotive for its violence and spectacularity. It resulted in the collapse of the top part Etna, creating a huge crater known as the Cisternazza, meaning cistern, because water collects in the pit.

This was also a time of intense scientific enquiry and advancement. On the verso of the painting Bridges refers to the seminal publication 'Principles of Geology' (1830–33) by the Scottish geologist Sir Charles Lyell (1797–1875). Lyell discusses Etna and describes the 'Cisterna' as a forty-foot chasm 'of which a vertical section is now seen of alternating stony lavas and scoriae'. Bridges's drawing captures these marked striations and the crater's vertiginous depths.

In a wider sense, Etna played a key role in contemporary debates about the age of the earth and the agencies of geomorphic change. Lyell's book was so important due to his 'uniformitarian' thinking, which interpreted geological change as the steady accumulation of minute changes over enormously long spans of time. This was to have a powerful influence on the young Charles Darwin.