The Coming of the Pompeians

By ROBERT HUGHES

From Italy to Boston, a blockbuster loan exhibition

In 1979 a mud slide buried Malibu fathoms under the Pacific. There it lay for nearly 2,000 years: the brown Mercedes 450s and the manuals on orgasm, the barnacle-encrusted Jacuzzis, tennis gear, waterlogged paperbacks on obscure Eastern cults, Cuisinarts, bud vases, I.U.D.s and LeRoy Neiman prints, jumbled with the bones of producers and promoters. Archaeologists even found the calcified remains of a Lhasa Apso, pathetically clutching in its teeth the rawhide doggie pacifier it had tried to keep while vainly fleeing the cataclysm: mute testimony to the suddenness with which nature had rebuked (but for future museumgoers, preserved) the frail pretensions of human culture. How like us--or so the visitor to the resurrected city, preserved in a giant tank at Sea World, might reflect--the Malibuvians were! How familiar their appetites, how quotidian their life! Curiosity, in this case, resurrects the cat. So it is with Pompeii.

Volcanically speaking, the eruption of Vesuvius on Aug. 24, A.D. 79, was a squib compared with the more recent explosions of Krakatoa or Mont Pelee. But no seismic event has ever had wider cultural repercussions. Buried under 12 ft. of deadly ash and scoriae, the city of Pompeii--a flourishing town on the Bay of Naples, filled with rich men's villas, tradesmen's houses and the workshops of the poor--was in the moment of its snuffing-out turned into the most complete social time capsule left by the Roman world. Since major excavations of its site were completed in the 19th century, Pompeii has been one of the supreme cliches of tourism and, short of an archaeological discovery of Atlantis, which seems improbable, it is likely to remain so. King Tut's tomb had more gold and better works of art, but it gives little impression of how Egyptians below Tutankhamun's level lived. Pompeii has everything, even some mild and (by modern standards) charmingly humane pornography. Thus it has been big cultural box office ever since 1834, when Bulwer-Lytton's The Last Days of Pompeii created the catastrophe novel as a form of entertainment. ("Alas! Alas!" murmured Ione, "I can go no farther; my steps sink among the scorching cinders. Fly, dearest!--beloved, fly! and leave me to my fate!")

So any exhibition based on Pompeii is sure of an audience. When the blockbuster loan show called "Pompeii A.D. 79" was seen in London, a million people went to it; one may assume that on its tour of Boston, Chicago, Dallas and New York City in 1978-79, that figure will be exceeded. The exhibition, which opened last week at the Boston Museum of Fine Arts, includes more than 300 objects, from encaustic wall paintings to bronze figures, pots and glass, on loan from the National Archaeological Museum of Naples and the Pompeii Antiquarium. There are even two plaster corpses, dog and man, eerie and Segal-like in their necrotic beauty. Short of a trip to Pompeii, the show gives the best view of life in this fat province of the ancient world.

In aesthetic terms, the level of the exhibition is decidedly uneven. Most of the glassware is routine, as is the pottery. Nor, in the 1st century A.D., was southern Italy a remarkable center for sculpture. The show includes some good late portrait busts of civic dignitaries, one well-preserved and almost neurotically sensitive marble head of an adolescent boy found in the House of the Citharist in Pompeii, and an imposing bronze figure, more than life size, of a citizen laying down the law in his official toga. There are also the bronze grotteschi and phallic knicknacks that seem to have been indispensable to fashionable taste in this seaside resort.

But neither Pompeii nor Campania as a whole in the 1st century can really be said to have had its own sculptural style. Instead, one gets agreeable but boneless replicas of a vanished Hellenistic vigor, as in the gilded marble statuette of Aphrodite with Priapus from the Naples Museum.

The paintings and mosaics, of course, are more interesting. The largest surviving body of painting from Roman antiquity was found in Pompeii and nearby Herculaneum, and when dug up it exerted a continual influence over such different artists as the old Renoir and the young Picasso. The most elaborate and complete of the Pompeian mural cycles could not be brought from Italy. But there are enough small detached panels and scenes to suggest the range of Pompeian painting. There are mythological scenes, infused with wry humor: the painting of Pan and Hermaphroditus, from the House of the Dioscuri, is perhaps the best-known of them, showing the randy goat god recoiling from his mistaken pass at a hermaphrodite. There are landscapes which, however faded and abused by time, still exhale the delectable freshness of spring in Campania: the feathery trees and picturesque wildness of one image of a ragged man propelling a sacrificial goat toward a mountain temple remind one of Salvator Rosa.

Some of the portraits, like the one of a young couple in ceremonial dress that recalls the big-eyed stare of late Egyptian funerary portraits, are of singular delicacy and sensitivity. At the opposite end of the scale, there are also the robust still-life and kitchen scenes, barnyard details of rabbits, fruit, hens and--in the House of the Epigrams-- a fluffy pet mongrel gazing at an aloe plant. The taste of the Pompeians, their broad materialism, their relish for everyday life, and their undemanding hedonism rise from their art like a message in a bottle. It may not have been a city of thought; but from a show like this one gets, and enjoys, the next best thing--an unrivaled opportunity for historical voyeurism.

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