Mt. Vesuvius: a cataclysmic force that inspired an artist, a rose hybridizer, and a 17th-century polymath.🌋 ⁣ ⁣ 🖼️ Fascinated with the destructive power of Mt. Vesuvius, Joseph Wright of Derby painted the erupting "Vesuvius from Portici" in 1774-76. The terrifying mass of volcano is magnified by the depiction of tiny buildings beneath the blast.⁣ ⁣ 🌹 Created in 1923 by Samuel McGredy II (known "The Irish Wizard" of the rose world) the 'Vesuvius' rose is a hybrid tea rose that produces a single, dark red bloom. ⁣ ⁣ 📕 In the 1630s, Athanasius Kircher explored the crater of Vesuvius just prior to its eruption. Of the experience, he notes that with the “groaning and shaking of the dreadful mountain...I believed I was peering into the realm of the dead." Kircher depicts the fearsome volcano in "Mundus Subterraneus" (1664), in which he speculated the core of earth was filled with fire.