Filippo Morghen (1730-1807) engraver, painter, and printseller, was born in Florence to a father from Montpellier, who ran a lace shop. By 1760, he had moved to Naples, where he married the daughter of the painter Francesco Liano, staying there for the rest of his career, and becoming engraver to the King of Naples. He is best known for his engravings of classical ruins, especially those of Herculaneum, and the countryside around Naples. 

He was also responsible for this fantastical set of engravings: ‘Raccolta delle cose piu notabili vedute da Giovanni Wilkins erudito Vescovo Inglese nel suo famoso viaggio della Terra alla Luna’ [The  Suite of the Most Notable Things, Seen by Cavaliere Wild Scull, and by Signore de la Hire on Their Famous Voyage from the Earth to the Moon]. The title sheet – not present here – explains that the views are based on the voyages of Scull and La Hire. Though nothing is known of Scull – who may well be a fictitious character – Philippe de la Hire (1640-1718) was a renowned French astronomer. By the second edition – a year later – Scull had been replaced by the English Bishop John Wilkins (1614-1672), a distinguished natural philosopher, and author of ‘The Discovery of a New World, or, a discourse tending to prove, that ‘tis probable there may be another habitable World in the Moone’ (1638), and his companion piece, ‘A Discourse Concerning a New Planet’ of 1640. Morghen dedicates the work to another Englishman, Sir William Hamilton, who was plenipotentiary in Naples from 1764 to 1800.

In devising such a voyage, Morghen was clearly influenced by scientific progress of the previous century. Bishop Francis Godwin, for instance, had his ‘Man in the Moone’ (1638) carried there by a chariot pulled by geese. In the same year, and in a similar speculative vein, was Wilkins’ own work, who suggested a chariot in the shape of a goose; in Francesco Lana’s ‘Prodormo’ of 1670, a humble wooden car or boat is elevated to the moon by means of four metal globes from which their air has been exhausted.

Morghen’s explorers mix technological innovation, colonial imagination, and a sense of rococo excess. The lunar landscape looks remarkably like contemporary depictions and fantasies of the New World. Over the nine etchings they explore a landscape ripe with not unrealistic wildlife and plants, inhabited by tobacco-smoking, Native American-like residents. But mixed with this is a whimsical, size-altered imaginary world, in which we are never quite sure if the ”lunarians” are extremely small or the natural world around them exceptionally enlarged. Plate 8 depicts snails the size of dogs being fed to an enormous bird, and in several we see “pumpkins used as dwellings”. Yet in plate 9 we see a flock of normal-sized geese, and in plate 2 a normal-sized parrot (watching over the ensnaring of a rodent-like creature the size of a cow).

The prints were popular enough to go through at least three editions, and they have occasionally resurfaced during the twentieth century: four of the images were included in MoMA’s 1936 exhibition Fantastic Art, Dada, Surrealism.