The subject of the painting is not typical of the historical painting of Classicism. Unfolding against the backdrop of the disaster are personal stories full of fear, despair, and love. Bryullov showed the calamity affecting the whole people, persons of different age and estate. All these are already features of a new trend, Romanticism.

Ashes are falling from the sky, buildings are tumbling down, but despite all this the characters are trying to help their family. We see a young family with kids, a mother covering her daughters. Two brothers are carrying their elderly father, a young man is carrying his fiancée. According to Nikolai Gogol, the canvas demonstrates ‘supreme, physical and moral, perfection’ of man.

From 79 A.D. to the beginning of the first excavation in 1748, Pompeii was buried under a layer of volcanic ashes. It “conserved” not only buildings and objects but also remains of humans. The figures of Bryullov’s composition are a replica of real postures of the Pompeiians who had not escaped the disaster.

The artist used his contemporaries to paint the characters’ faces from. The prototype of the man covering his family with a cloak was an Italian, Domenico Marini. The facial features of the artist’s favourite muse, Countess Yulia Samilova, can be seen in a few characters — the mother with two daughters, the woman who has fallen from the chariot, the woman with her family in the centre of the composition.