It seems a way to go to watch a 14 minute 30 second film, but even if to see James P Graham’s breathtaking footage of Stromboli were your only reason for visiting the Volcano: Turner to Warhol exhibition at Compton Verney, Warwickshire this summer, I reckon it would be worth it.

Film maker Graham’s two-screen video installation, Iddu — study in 60 degrees, is a beautifully constructed panoramic film of an astonishing island and is utterly magical.

I sat in the gallery in my comfortable seat expecting to watch pyrotechnics. But this film is far more than that. It’s a film about a love for the island as much as a film about the extraordinary explosive activity that is a continuous theme of the place.

Stromboli, a perfect peak of a volcanic island sitting in the Tyrrhenian Sea north of Sicily, is home to one of the most active volcanoes on Earth.

The breathtaking footage in Iddu, which means ‘him’ in Sicilian dialect, took me round this unique island, dawn to dusk, seamlessly blending disparate elements: fountains of molten rock, red dots spraying against pitch back night sky, chunks of incandescent lava tumbling down mountain slopes, showers of volcanic bombs splattering the sea; in contrast, the tranquil moon, waves rhythmically scratching at the shore, bone dry reeds swaying in the wind, and to finish, bees buzzing to drink at a dripping rusty shower head. The drip, seen close-up, in slow-mo, forms an inverted cone.

Originally conceived as a 360° work, Iddu (2002-7) is a technically challenging piece of work shot using a circle of 12 cameras, four years in the making, reduced from over 12 hours of filming (240 rolls of Super-8 film, if you want details). Though not as fully immersive an experience as it must be to see it in its 360° version, this 60° rendering is incredibly powerful.

Moreover, the soundtrack’s booming, crackling, hissing or soothing sounds, heard through all the exhibition galleries, add atmosphere to the rest of this marvellous show.

And it is marvellous. With volcanoes as its subject what else could it be? It’s bound to be a success. It’s a fascinating and thorough exhibition, and it’s had the best serendipitous pre-publicity it could ask for: the perfectly timed eruption of Iceland’s Eyjafjallajökull in April. Although a small eruption by volcano standards, the ash cloud sent out by this volcano brought widespread disruption: a potent reminder of the power of natural phenomena.

Volcano: Turner to Warhol is the first exhibition to explore the history of our perceptions of volcanoes, and it offers a huge variety of artistic responses, from paintings to photographs, prints, books, diaries and so on.

I liked the way the exhibition is organised. It is logical and agreeable, moving through a volcano’s phases, dormancy, to eruption and aftermath, and the realms of history, myth and literature, finally to extinction. In the resource room you also find a pile of ash from Eyjafjallajökull.

Volcano is curated by Turner scholar, lecturer on Faraday, James Hamilton, University Curator at the University of Birmingham, and the Alistair Horne Fellow at St Antony’s College, Oxford from 1998-99.

Though the exhibition has an artistic viewpoint, it does not forget science.

It pays homage with geologists’ notes beside certain works, one or two scientific instruments, including a barograph recording the effect on the airwaves at Edgbaston of the Krakatoa eruption on August 27, 1883, and a copy of Sir William Hamilton’s Campi Phlegraei (Fields of Fire) loaned from the Bodleian Library.

Hamilton, a British diplomat based in Naples during an intense eruption cycle on Vesuvius (1760s-70s), sent a series of letters containing observations on Etna and Vesuvius to the Royal Society in London.

They were published in this wonderful book, illustrated with coloured engravings by Pietro Fabris. A delightful painting hanging nearby shows Hamilton and his wife sitting in their Naples apartment, a smoking Vesuvius visible through the window.

This work by David Allan and other paintings such as Volaire’s spectacular (and fanciful) oil painting, Vesuvius Erupting at Night from Compton Verney’s permanent collection of Neapolitan paintings was the inspiration behind the exhibition.

Like Volaire’s, many of those shown are products of the artist’s imagination: Warhol’s huge bold energetic acrylic, Vesuvius, pictured; Joseph Wright of Derby’s gouache Vesuvius in Eruption; JMW Turner’s Eruption of the Souffrier. This last, on the island of St Vincent, was not witnessed by Turner, but painted from a drawing given him by a plantation owner. James Hamilton points out that if you take out of the Turner painting all aspects of eruption, explosions, violent colouring, it could easily be from Turner’s Picturesque Views of England and Wales, Buttermere for instance. And so it could.

In contrast, many are very much made from observation: outstanding works by Icelandic artists, for example; Keith Grant’s Eruption Column at 20,000 feet, Heimaey, Iceland observed from an airplane; Michael Sandle’s dramatic drawings of the 1981 Mount St Helens eruption in the USA. Even more on the spot, an astonishing painting by a Congolese artist records the fiery red slick of a lava stream from a nearby burst crater racing down the hillside on its way to destroy his village as it did hundreds in 1977.