their pedestals bring additional drama and demonstrate the sublime power of nature over man, a common trope in Romantic painting. The figures provide small vignettes of individual experience that reference stories from classical mythology, renaissance painting or ancient literature such as Pliny the Younger's account given to Tacitus, but most of the characters preserve their dignity in the face of death indicating Bryullov's great debt to the principals of Classicism. Poses and figures are drawn from classical painting or from people the artist knew such as Yuliya Samoylova and her daughters. The soldier and boy rescuing an older man may derive from the story of Aeneas's rescue of his father from the destruction of Troy in mythology. To the scene is added an image of the artist himself as a Pompeian artist with his equipment balanced on his head. Reception The painting took so long to finish that Demidov threatened to cancel its commission, but when it was first shown at Bryullov's studio in Italy on Via San Claudio in Rome, it received a rapturous response. Sir Walter Scott is said to have studied the painting for an hour before declaring that it was not an ordinary painting, but an epic and Vincenzo Camuccini described it as a "flaming colossus". The Italian archaeologist Pietro Ercole Visconti wrote an article praising the painter and the painting. The Uffizi requested a self-portrait of the artist. In Milan, Bryullov was given a standing ovation in a theatre and carried through the city's streets wearing a garland of flowers. It was seen there by Edward Bulwer-Lytton whose novel The Last Days of Pompeii was published in 1834. In Bologna, gallery officials removed Raphael's St Cecilia from the walls and placed it in a private room when Bryullov asked to copy it. The reception was slightly cooler when it was displayed at the Paris Salon of 1834. It still won a gold medal, but some critics saw it as slightly outdated compared to Eugène Delacroix's Femmes d'Alger dans leur Appartement (1834), which was exhibited alongside it, the high emotional content leading one critic to comment in L'Artiste, "l'impression est moins voisine de la terreur que du ridicule" (the impression is less akin to terror than ridicule). Rosalind Blakesley attributes this slightly behind-the-times feel to the isolation of contemporary Russian art teaching from the latest French developments since the start of the nineteenth century and the