Every genius has a secret weapon. For Lawrence Alma-Tadema, that weapon was a man named Geremia Discanno.
You won't find Discanno's name on the front of any Alma Tadema paintings. He didn't sign the canvas. He didn't take the bow at the Royal Academy.
But without him, the masterpieces we know and love might never have existed.
The Problem of Distance
By the 1870s, Alma-Tadema was living permanently in London. He was famous, busy, and increasingly wealthy. But his heart—and his subject matter—was in southern Italy.
He painted Pompeii. He painted the specific ruins of the Bay of Naples. But travel in the 19th century was slow. He couldn't just pop over to Italy for the weekend to check the pattern of a mosaic floor.
He needed eyes on the ground.
The Spy in the Ruins
Geremia Discanno was an Italian artist living near the excavations. Alma-Tadema hired him not as a collaborator, but as a data collector.
For decades, the two men maintained a correspondence that was essentially an espionage operation.
Alma-Tadema would send specific requests from his foggy London studio: "I need the exact design of the floor in the House of the Faun." Or "I need the precise molding of that column in the Temple of Isis."
Discanno would go to the site. He would make meticulous watercolors and drawings. He would measure everything. And then he would mail these "Portfolios" back to London.
The Hidden Archive
When you look at the background of famous Alma Tadema paintings, you are often looking at a Discanno drawing.
The "Red Portfolios"—huge binders kept in Alma-Tadema's studio—were filled with thousands of these sketches. They were categorized by subject: "Furniture," "Architecture," "Costume," "Jewelry."
When Alma-Tadema started a new painting, he wouldn't guess. He would pull down the relevant portfolio. "I need a bronze tripod from 1st century Pompeii," he would decide. He would flip through the sketches until he found one Discanno had drawn thirty years earlier, and he would paint it into the scene.
Is It Cheating?
Some purists might call this cheating. Shouldn't the artist paint from life?
But Alma Tadema paintings were not about "impressions." They were about reconstruction. He saw himself as a historian as much as an artist. Just as a historian uses primary sources (letters, documents) to write a book, Alma-Tadema used Discanno's visual data to write his painted history.
He wasn't copying. He was citing his sources.
The Photographic Revolution
Discanno also sent photographs. Alma-Tadema was one of the first major artists to embrace photography as a tool.
He owned over 5,000 photographs of archaeological sites. He would famously take a photo of a ruin, paste it onto a piece of cardboard, and then draw his figures on top of it to get the scale exactly right.
This explains the "cinematic" quality of his work. The cropping, the perspective, the depth of field—it all mimics the camera lens.
In the end, Discanno was the unsung hero of the operation. He was the legs of the operation, allowing the brain in London to reconstruct a world that had been lost for two thousand years. Every time you marvel at the accuracy of a mosaic in one of the great Alma Tadema paintings, you are seeing the ghost of Geremia Discanno, kneeling in the dust of Pompeii, measuring history one inch at a time.
