Karl Jakob Weber (12 August 1712 – 1764) was a Swiss architect and engineer who was in charge of the first organized excavations at

Herculaneum Herculaneum (; Neapolitan and it, Ercolano) was an ancient town, located in the modern-day ''comune'' of Ercolano, Campania, Italy. Herculaneum was buried under volcanic ash and pumice in the eruption of Mount Vesuvius in AD 79. Like the nea ...

Pompeii Pompeii (, ) was an ancient city located in what is now the ''comune'' of Pompei near Naples in the Campania region of Italy. Pompeii, along with Herculaneum and many villas in the surrounding area (e.g. at Boscoreale, Stabiae), was buried ...

and

Stabiae Stabiae () was an ancient city situated near the modern town of Castellammare di Stabia and approximately 4.5 km southwest of Pompeii. Like Pompeii, and being only from Mount Vesuvius, this seaside resort was largely buried by tephra ash ...

, under the patronage of

Charles VII of Naples it, Carlo Sebastiano di Borbone e Farnese , house = Bourbon-Anjou , father = Philip V of Spain , mother = Elisabeth Farnese , birth_date = 20 January 1716 , birth_place = Royal Alcazar of Madrid, Spain , death_da ...

. At first a soldier and military engineer, he joined the excavations in 1749. His detailed drawings provided some of the basis for the luxurious royal folios of ''

Le Antichità di Ercolano esposte The ''Le Antichità di Ercolano Esposte'' (''Antiquities of Herculaneum Exposed'') is an eight-volume book of engravings of the findings from excavating the ruins of Herculaneum in the Kingdom of Naples (now Italy). It was published between 1757 ...

'', by means of which the European intelligentsia became aware of the details of what was being recovered. Weber's unwilling collaborator was Roque de Alcubierre, previously in charge of the excavations, whose treasure-hunting technique provided the fine bronzes and other works of art that kept royal patronage stimulated. Alcubierre was jealous of Weber, whose system of excavating whole rooms with a concern for context makes him a heroic forerunner of today's architectural profession, and attempted to sabotage Weber's work. On Weber's death, the architect Francisco La Vega was put in charge of excavations. Weber's plan of the still-buried

Villa of the Papyri The Villa of the Papyri ( it, Villa dei Papiri, also known as ''Villa dei Pisoni'' and in early excavation records as the ''Villa Suburbana'') was an ancient Roman villa in Herculaneum, in what is now Ercolano, southern Italy. It is named after ...

at Herculaneum, which was being explored room by room by smashing openings through frescoed walls, is still the basis of our understanding of its layout, which was echoed in the construction of the

J. Paul Getty Museum The J. Paul Getty Museum, commonly referred to as the Getty, is an art museum in Los Angeles, California housed on two campuses: the Getty Center and Getty Villa. The Getty Center is located in the Brentwood, Los Angeles, Brentwood neighborhood ...

Malibu, California Malibu ( ; es, Malibú; Chumash: ) is a beach city in the Santa Monica Mountains region of Los Angeles County, California, situated about west of Downtown Los Angeles. It is known for its Mediterranean climate and its strip of the Malibu ...

. Weber was born at

Arth Arth is a village, a List of towns in Switzerland, town, and a municipalities of Switzerland, municipality in Schwyz District in the canton of Schwyz in Switzerland. The municipality consists of the villages Arth, Oberarth, and Goldau. The four ...

in the

Schwyz The town of Schwyz (; french: Schwytz; it, Svitto) is the capital of the canton of Schwyz in Switzerland. The Federal Charter of 1291 or ''Bundesbrief'', the charter that eventually led to the foundation of Switzerland, can be seen at the '' ...

canton of Switzerland, to a family of the Catholic nobility. He was trained at the gymnasium of

Lucerne Lucerne ( , ; High Alemannic German, High Alemannic: ''Lozärn'') or Luzern ()Other languages: gsw, Lozärn, label=Lucerne German; it, Lucerna ; rm, Lucerna . is a city in central Switzerland, in the Languages of Switzerland, German-speaking po ...

, then travelled to

Pavia Pavia (, , , ; la, Ticinum; Medieval Latin: ) is a town and comune of south-western Lombardy in northern Italy, south of Milan on the lower Ticino river near its confluence with the Po. It has a population of c. 73,086. The city was the capit ...

, Lombardy, pursuing a higher degree in mathematics at the Collegio Ghislieri. Not having a private income in spite of his noble background, he enlisted in a regiment of Swiss mercenaries stationed in the

Kingdom of Naples The Kingdom of Naples ( la, Regnum Neapolitanum; it, Regno di Napoli; nap, Regno 'e Napule), also known as the Kingdom of Sicily, was a state that ruled the part of the Italian Peninsula south of the Papal States between 1282 and 1816. It was ...

. The remainder of his career was passed in Italy. After a few years, he took examinations for admission to the corps of military engineers, and was accepted in the Royal Guard as engineer in 1743, where he joined the forces excavating Herculaneum in late 1749, initially at the request of Alcubierre, the Spanish military engineer who directed the royal excavations. In addition to the Villa dei Papiri he recovered much of the Theatre at Herculaneum, the Praedia of Julia Felix on the Via dell'Abbondanza at Pompeii, for which he drew up an

axonometric Axonometric projection is a type of orthographic projection used for creating a pictorial drawing of an object, where the object is rotated around one or more of its axes to reveal multiple sides.Gary R. Bertoline et al. (2002) ''Technical Graph ...

plan, and several villas at Stabiae, bringing the first professionalism to the Royal digs.

References

* Christopher Charles Parslow, 1995. ''Rediscovering Antiquity: Karl Weber and the Excavation of Herculaneum, Pompeii and Stabiae'' (Cambridge University Press)
Bryn Mawr Classical Review 96.12.10

External links

AD79 Year of Destruction
{{DEFAULTSORT:Weber, Karl 1712 births 1764 deaths 18th-century Italian people 18th-century Swiss people Italian archaeologists Italian engineers Swiss engineers Swiss-German people Italian people of Swiss descent People from the canton of Schwyz