Despite the title, the Antichità di Ercolano shows objects from all the excavations the Bourbons undertook around the Gulf of Naples.

The engravings are high quality and the accompanying text displays great scholarship, but the book lacks the information on context that would be expected of a modern archaeological work.

Le Antichità was designed more to impress readers with the quality of the objects in the King of Naples' collection than to be used in research.

The book gave impetus to the neoclassical movement in Europe by giving artists and decorators access to a huge store of Hellenistic motifs.

The excavations at Heculaneum began in 1711, when a well was being dug for the new country house of Emmanuel Maurice, Duke of Elbeuf at Portici.

The well turned out to have been sunk into the buried and richly ornamented proscenium of the theater of Herculaneum, and yielded several valuable marbles, including a statue of Hercules.

[2] The Prodromo delle Antichità di Ercolano (Preface to the Antiquities of Herculaneum) was prepared by Ottavio Antonio Bayardi, cousin of the prime minister Giovanni Fogliani, and issued by the Stamperia Reale in 1752.

The five volume work tells stories of Hercules and tries to prove that the city was in fact Herculaneum, which had not been in doubt since an inscription was found in 1738, but says nothing about the findings.

[4] In 1755 Charles appointed fifteen savants to a newly formed Accademia Ercolanese to study the artifacts and publish the findings.

[6] Despite the title, the Antichità di Ercolano shows objects from all the excavations the Bourbons undertook around the Gulf of Naples.

The largest four images from the portico are depictions of Theseus, Hercules and Telephus, Achilles and Chiron, and Marsyas and Olympus.

The engravers treat them as flat paintings, although in fact they were concave, and their shape shows where they were originally placed in the building.

[10] The images in the Antichità di Ercolano, with their Hellenistic origins, had huge appeal to Europeans of the time, and the book provided a great stock of classical motifs that could be used by designers and scholars.

Thus Nicolas Gosse and Auguste Vinchon seem to have used it for a series of Scenes from Ancient Life painted in gray-scale for the Louvre.

[12] Robert Adam, the British designer, copied figures in the book from the "Villa of Cicero" to the ceiling of the Red Drawing Room at Syon House in 1761-62.