“Pompeii is as much the name of an event as a place,” we read in the catalogue for the current exhibition at the Getty Villa. “It is the most famously dead of all ancient cities, yet the one that comes most vividly alive to us today.”
Our fascination is more of a fixation, which is unlikely to cease any time soon. Most of us know the story: Mount Vesuvius erupted one day in 79 A.D., spewed pyroclastic cluster bombs into the air, and rolled out a red carpet of steamy lava that cloaked surrounding towns for 16 or 17 centuries. What was destroyed for all time was, ironically, largely preserved for all time as well.
“The Last Days of Pompeii,” which takes its title from the influential Bulwer-Lytton novel of 1834, explores the obsession that visual artists over the past three centuries have had with the ruined city. The presentation is divided into three parts: “Decadence” goes the Sodom and Gomorrah route, implying that pride went before the fall (think: the golden calf), and that divine wrath punished the citizens of Herculaneum, Oplontis, Stabiae, and Pompeii for their excessive waywardness.
“Apocalypse,” the second part, focuses on the event itself – statues toppling, crowds fleeing, lava lapping at the heels of young and old. “Resurrection” examines the later spin on the original event, which often means applying moral codes or modern stereotypes that are simply the wrong size, shape, and color. Or, as Jon. L. Seydl puts it, three centuries of “the imaginative projections of staged fictions.”
Well, and why not? We are drawn to these sorts of things, just look at what we’ve pumped into the Titanic, and what we’ll continue to portray and theorize (controlled demolition, anyone?) about the downfall of the World Trade Center twin towers.
The perspective is always changing, and the Getty show, by way of the artwork on display, “presents Pompeii not as a window to the past but as a mirror of an ever-changing present.” It’s a bit like when Elder Cunningham in “The Book of Mormon” starts injecting snippets from “Star Wars” and “The Lord of the Rings” into his account of the Mormons’ sacred bible in order to make it more palpable and riveting.
An example of this has to do with the erotica uncovered in Pompeii, much of which was kept under lock and key. As Mary Beard explains, “If the Secret Cabinet in the nineteenth century was in part a state of mind, it was a state of mind that was retrojected onto the ancient world. This, of course, should make us think about our own engagement with the sexual images of Pompeii. We are partly seeing the preoccupations of the ancient world, but maybe we are seeing our own too.”
There is also the story of Gradiva, an imaginary, communal muse and Pompeiian pin-up girl for the Surrealists. Freud, Dalí, and Masson were taken by this elusive woman who was the eponymous heroine in a novella written in 1903 by Wilhelm Jensen.
A little-known fact about the excavated Pompeii is that in 1943 Allied planes bombed the heck out of it – over 160 hits were recorded and damage was extensive. The irony – and this could nestle into the “Decadence” category mentioned above or validate the Japanese notion of the “divine wind” – was that in the following year Vesuvius erupted and, thanks to a wind shift, hot ash covered most of the planes of the Twelfth Air Force’s 340th Bombardment Group: “The destruction of these eighty planes was the greatest single loss of Allied aircraft in the entire Second World War.”
Bringing it home
During the latter 19th century, scientific advancement added even more fuel to the public’s being mesmerized with ill-fated Pompeii. The first had to do with the advance and dissemination of photography – in this case primarily images by Giorgio Sommer (1834-1914) – and the second had to do with being able to form body casts of decayed humans, that is to say, the cavities left in the volcanic ash. Or, as the catalogue puts it, “the plaster casts made what should be temporal – a dead body – permanent through the intervention of new technology.”
This may not have come about had there not already been a hefty market for plaster casts of classical statues, since artists – and most collectors – could not aspire to obtain the originals. And thus, through a kind of serendipity, what resulted served to bring home the human tragedy of Pompeii. At the Getty Villa, this is emphasized as we ascend the staircase to the exhibition and come upon a modern casting of the “Young Woman with a Garment Rolled Around Her Hips from Region VI.” Although this is far removed from the original victim, the sight of such an object injects a most solemn note. The young woman is laying face down, one hand covering her mouth, the other a balled fist. There is (hard to deny) something of a sublimated erotica to this deathly vision as well.
Another cast, the more famous image of the writhing guard dog that no one took the trouble to unchain, was recast in multiples by artist Allan McCollum in 1991. The catalogue shows 16 dogs, their barks stifled but not the resonance they kick into the air, whereas the Getty shows just four. One of McCollum’s goals was to “represent this enormous, monumentally sad absence of a whole world we’ll never retrieve again.”
The catalogue contains an illustrated essay on Pompeii-themed movies, the Vesuvian eruption itself something of the granddaddy of all disaster films. Many of the costumes and set designs were taken from 19th century paintings, which were in themselves inaccurate, and so there’s been a perpetuation of stereotypes down through the ages.
The exhibition is compelling from start to finish, and theatergoers who recently saw Alfred Molina in “Red” at the Mark Taper Forum, which depicted Mark Rothko’s struggles over his Seagram murals commission in the 1950s, will be thrilled to see work related to that endeavor on view. In short, each era presses upon the template of Pompeii its own stamp, and as long as artists have imagination there’s at least one monumentally dead city that will never be left at rest. Someone will always come by to stir up the ashes.
The Last Days of Pompeii: Decadence. Apocalypse. Resurrection is on view through January 7 at the Getty Villa, 17985 Pacific Coast Hwy, Pacific Palisades. Hours, Wednesday through Monday, 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. Free, but a ticket is required for admission and parking is $15. Call (310) 440-7300 or go to getty.edu/visit.
