As a Classics Major who takes a sort of masochistic comfort in translating ancient texts and laughs at the oftentimes ridiculous customs of ancient Rome (one emperor was known to elect state officials based on “enormitate memborum”), I was more than thrilled when I first heard about the National Gallery’s new exhibit, “Pompeii and the Roman Villa: Art and Culture Around the Bay of Naples.”
Boy, was I disappointed when I actually saw it.
The entrance seems almost theme-park-esque: a set of corny murals of “Pompeii” lines each wall as you walk into the first hall, and little blurbs about the city attempt to teach the onlooker about the true lives of Roman citizens. The enormous weekend crowds can make it feel like a sort of historic Disneyland: hard to navigate and, more often than not, claustrophobic. All I was missing was my commemorative plastic “Pompeii!” 24 Oz. cup. The crowds might be more manageable if you go when its not a rainy Saturday afternoon, perfect for an outing to the Gallery; nevertheless, it was off-putting to elbow a little girl in the face just to see the bust of Nero.
If you can look past the pedantic explanatory blurbs and the faux-gardens sporadically placed in an effort to make viewer feel as if they are actually in Pompeii, the exhibit was quite impressive. The National Gallery should be lauded for the enormous amount of effort that went into putting the whole thing together; the mere transportation of the fragile statues, frescoes, jewelry, and marble furniture from their resting place in Italy to D.C. is itself enough to make up for the massive crowds drawn to the exhibit. One remarkably well-preserved fresco that would have surrounded an entire dining room in a villa depicts Apollo with his nine muses, while another fresco, about five inches thick (the dimensions of a wall in a dorm-room), was mounted nearby.
She may not have eyes, but she’s seen more volcanoes than you have. (Courtesy NGA.GOV)
The Gallery commendably decided to fill the final room with a nice selection of 18th and 19th-century artwork depicting the volcano that allowed the exhibit to take place. The portraits of the disaster take various forms, from the moving oil painting depicting a stoic Roman sentry, standing his guard as Vesuvius erupts, to a slew of paintings depicting the eruption itself. As the Goethe quote that hangs above these paintings points out, “There have been many disasters in this world, but few have given so much delight to posterity.”
