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amethyst73As pretty much everyone with an ounce of history knowledge knows, the Roman city of Pompeii was destroyed by the eruption of Mount Vesuvius, just shy of 2000 years ago. There's currently a temporary exhibit at Boston's Museum of Science that features a sizable number of well-documented artifacts, and which is well worth your time should you be able to go. (I can't find anything online about where else this exhibit will travel, if it does.)
The exhibit starts out with a set of items that were, for me, the most stunning artifacts in the whole thing: several frescoes. The ancient world painted on wet plaster, and because the walls of the buildings were buried under and protected by several feet of volcanic ash and rock, they survive to this day, where frescoes that were exposed to the elements for centuries didn't. It was kind of amazing to look at these colorful, realistic paintings: first, just the novelty of having paintings from way back then is wow-making all on its own. But what's more startling to me is that the depictions are so lifelike. Roman artisans clearly had the ability to paint a woman (and birds and plants etc) that looked like a real woman (or whatever). How is it that those techniques were so completely lost for so long? Western civilization didn't get the hang of it again for a thousand years or more.
There's a large collection of dishes and oil lamps and the like, virtually all of which are decorated to one extent or another. The metalwork in particular tends to have lots of cool little detail work, even if it's not terribly extensive. Even the valves on a water pipe look like they have a tiny bit of decorative work on them. The main undecorated items were things like a large metal tripod and some pots that were probably used only for cooking and not for serving; I'm guessing the masters of the large houses didn't much care about having the utilitarian items that only the slaves worked with be fancy in any way. (Or maybe the exhibit was skewed towards pretty stuff because that's what the public finds interesting to look at.)
The other jaw-dropping section of the exhibit was a series of body casts. Not a few people were caught in Pompeii when the suffocating wet ash started falling from the sky, and the stuff hardened around the people when and how they fell, as it were. Someone realized that there were all these human-shaped cavities in the volcanic leavings and cleverly started pouring plaster into the cavities. The results are striking. Often they're surprisingly detailed: there's a young woman on whom the folds of her tunic are clearly defined. Sometimes they're less so, but full of emotion: a man reaches towards a woman as he dies. My favorite of the body casts was this dog, which was the cleanest and most precise cast of the lot - you can easily make out tiny details like the poor beast's teeth. The most disturbing item in this section was a large (roughly 10' by 10') flat section from nearby Herculaneum, which was similarly destroyed: 32 human skeletons in various disarrayed positions after being hit by the pyroclastic flow. I chose not to take a picture of that, and I sincerely hope that piece doesn't revisit me in nightmares. Urgl.
Unsurprisingly, there were at least a couple of school groups roaming the exhibit at the same time as we were. Most of them had clipboards with questions of some sort; I suspect that's the only way to make sure school kids actually pay some attention to a museum exhibit. I would be willing to bet that the questions specifically avoided any reference to the little case with the four oil lamps with erotic art on them (one of which had a running phallus on it). I'm also guessing they stayed away from the case with the loaded dice in it. The kids also provided us with a moment of entertainment: As we were examining the body casts, there was a small group of them arguing whether it was _ramen_ noodles or _Roman_ noodles. Peter set them straight after a minute or two of listening to them earnestly discussing the question in the way that only eighth graders can.
We didn't bother spending much time in the final room, which mostly consisted of activities for the younger set. We did learn there that Mount Shasta, which is in our part of the world, is in fact a volcano. Useful bit of information, that.
The rest of the Museum of Science has been updated quite a bit from when I was a kid. The 'old' T. Rex, who was built back in the 60's and was pretty much the mascot of the museum at the time, has been relegated to the great outdoors, with his dragging-on-the-ground tail mostly embedded in the outer wall. There's now a new dinosaur exhibit which includes a 'new' T. Rex in running position with his tail properly up. It also has one of only five complete Triceratops fossils ever found, which is kind of neat. We didn't have time to really look at most of the rest of the museum as we had a commitment late in the afternoon.
The exhibit starts out with a set of items that were, for me, the most stunning artifacts in the whole thing: several frescoes. The ancient world painted on wet plaster, and because the walls of the buildings were buried under and protected by several feet of volcanic ash and rock, they survive to this day, where frescoes that were exposed to the elements for centuries didn't. It was kind of amazing to look at these colorful, realistic paintings: first, just the novelty of having paintings from way back then is wow-making all on its own. But what's more startling to me is that the depictions are so lifelike. Roman artisans clearly had the ability to paint a woman (and birds and plants etc) that looked like a real woman (or whatever). How is it that those techniques were so completely lost for so long? Western civilization didn't get the hang of it again for a thousand years or more.
There's a large collection of dishes and oil lamps and the like, virtually all of which are decorated to one extent or another. The metalwork in particular tends to have lots of cool little detail work, even if it's not terribly extensive. Even the valves on a water pipe look like they have a tiny bit of decorative work on them. The main undecorated items were things like a large metal tripod and some pots that were probably used only for cooking and not for serving; I'm guessing the masters of the large houses didn't much care about having the utilitarian items that only the slaves worked with be fancy in any way. (Or maybe the exhibit was skewed towards pretty stuff because that's what the public finds interesting to look at.)
The other jaw-dropping section of the exhibit was a series of body casts. Not a few people were caught in Pompeii when the suffocating wet ash started falling from the sky, and the stuff hardened around the people when and how they fell, as it were. Someone realized that there were all these human-shaped cavities in the volcanic leavings and cleverly started pouring plaster into the cavities. The results are striking. Often they're surprisingly detailed: there's a young woman on whom the folds of her tunic are clearly defined. Sometimes they're less so, but full of emotion: a man reaches towards a woman as he dies. My favorite of the body casts was this dog, which was the cleanest and most precise cast of the lot - you can easily make out tiny details like the poor beast's teeth. The most disturbing item in this section was a large (roughly 10' by 10') flat section from nearby Herculaneum, which was similarly destroyed: 32 human skeletons in various disarrayed positions after being hit by the pyroclastic flow. I chose not to take a picture of that, and I sincerely hope that piece doesn't revisit me in nightmares. Urgl.
Unsurprisingly, there were at least a couple of school groups roaming the exhibit at the same time as we were. Most of them had clipboards with questions of some sort; I suspect that's the only way to make sure school kids actually pay some attention to a museum exhibit. I would be willing to bet that the questions specifically avoided any reference to the little case with the four oil lamps with erotic art on them (one of which had a running phallus on it). I'm also guessing they stayed away from the case with the loaded dice in it. The kids also provided us with a moment of entertainment: As we were examining the body casts, there was a small group of them arguing whether it was _ramen_ noodles or _Roman_ noodles. Peter set them straight after a minute or two of listening to them earnestly discussing the question in the way that only eighth graders can.
We didn't bother spending much time in the final room, which mostly consisted of activities for the younger set. We did learn there that Mount Shasta, which is in our part of the world, is in fact a volcano. Useful bit of information, that.
The rest of the Museum of Science has been updated quite a bit from when I was a kid. The 'old' T. Rex, who was built back in the 60's and was pretty much the mascot of the museum at the time, has been relegated to the great outdoors, with his dragging-on-the-ground tail mostly embedded in the outer wall. There's now a new dinosaur exhibit which includes a 'new' T. Rex in running position with his tail properly up. It also has one of only five complete Triceratops fossils ever found, which is kind of neat. We didn't have time to really look at most of the rest of the museum as we had a commitment late in the afternoon.
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Date: 2011-11-23 02:12 am (UTC)Medieval art historians will argue quite strongly that realistic depiction wasn't "lost;" it simply wasn't artistically desirable to paint representational art.
And it is important to remember that Pompeii is like Katrina; yes, people died, but mostly they were either too poor to buy transportation out or those who were foolhardy enough to ignore the warnings of the earthquakes and 3 days of smoking mountain prior to the major ashfall.
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Date: 2011-11-27 09:43 pm (UTC)I was also interested looking at the Wikipedia entry for Pompeii that there's a fair amount of evidence that it happened in November rather than August 24th - which is plastered all over the exhibit, but maybe it's hard to update a traveling exhibit like that?