Houston Community News >> Pompeii Exhibition Coming to Houston Museum of Fine Arts
12/9/2007 Houston-- Pompeii: Tales from an
Eruption Sheds New Light on Ancient City´s Affluent Lifestyle, Horrific
Final Hours
The Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, Concludes International Tour;Exhibition on View March 2-June 22, 2008
Houston—In their final terrifying hours on August 24 and 25, A.D. 79, residents of Pompeii and the nearby coastal resort towns of Herculaneum, Oplontis, and Terzigno in southern Italy gathered objects precious to them and tried to escape the fury of Mount Vesuvius. The erupting volcano eventually buried Pompeii under 10 feet of ash and pumice, then waves of superheated gases and boiling mud traveling down Vesuvius´s slopes at speeds of nearly 100 miles an hour brought instant death to all still remaining in Pompeii and the other cities. The thriving, prosperous communities lay buried—silenced and forgotten for 1,700 years before being rediscovered through excavations which revealed that this horrific tragedy had preserved a wealth of information about the people, their belongings, and how they lived.
While work continues at Pompeii today, the city´s archaeological superintendent, Pietro Giovanni Guzzo, has organized an exhibition of nearly 500 objects excavated largely in the last 15 years. These new finds, supported by well-documented research, greatly expand what is known about the people of Pompeii and their neighbors, and what happened just before their deaths. The exhibition, Pompeii: Tales from an Eruption, closes its international tour at the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, where it will be on view from March 2 to June 22, 2008 in the Caroline Wiess Law Building, 1001 Bissonnet Street. The show´s bronze and marble sculptures, large-scale frescoes, jewelry, tools, table silver, armor, coins, skeletons, and plaster casts of the bodies of the victims now tell the stories of life at the Bay of Naples in the days of the early Roman Empire.
"Houston is fortunate to be one of the few venues in the world to show this heartrending and yet uplifting exhibition," said Peter C. Marzio, MFAH director. "It speaks at once to man´s creativity and achievement—in the first century and in the years of ongoing excavations—and to our fears. This exhibition offers visitors the rare opportunity to see a number of objects being shown for the first time outside of Italy and to contemplate the lives and the world of the people who owned them."
At the MFAH, the exhibition will be installed in the expansive Upper Brown Pavilion of the Law Building. Current photographs of Pompeii, including a panorama of one of the city´s main streets stretching nearly the length of the 300-foot gallery, will provide an overall sense of place and identify specific locations where victims, artworks, and other objects have been found. The exhibition includes about 240 objects from Pompeii, more than 100 each from Herculaneum and Oplontis, and about 20 from Terzigno. Notable works from Pompeii include an exquisite full-length statue of Apollo, god of music, found at the House of Menander, a wealthy in-law of Emperor Nero; a floor mosaic with a central image of Medusa found at the House of the Centenary; and a wall from the Building of the Triclinia with a deep red fresco depicting Nero as Apollo playing the lyre. From Herculaneum there are a marble head of an Amazon, a full-length statue of the goddess Hera, and a cast of 32 skeletons found in a boat shelter near the sea shore. The sculptures, both traveling for the first time, were found at the Villa of the Papyri, which may have been the home of Julius Caesar´s father-in-law, Lucius Calpurnius Piso Cesonius. From all four sites there are numerous examples of ancient coins and gold jewelry—necklaces, armbands, rings, earrings, and pendants.
"With about two-thirds of Pompeii now excavated, the citizens´ appreciation of fine art and craft continues to reveal itself," said Frances Marzio, MFAH curator in charge of the exhibition in Houston. "Coupling recent discoveries with information about the places they were found and what people tried to take with them as they fled deepens our understanding of what these ancient people considered important."
The City in A.D. 79
At the time of the eruption, Pompeii was a busy, sophisticated port city with a population of 10,000 to 20,000. The narrow stone streets were lined with shops and taverns. A new aqueduct system provided water to the city´s fountains and running water in most homes. Herculaneum, located about nine miles northwest of Pompeii, was a resort home to about 5,000 wealthy residents of Rome, including Roman senators. The country villages of Oplontis and Terzigno were situated in between. The prosperity of the area, ironically, stemmed from the vineyards and olive orchards planted in the rich volcanic soil.
The well-to-do decorated their mostly windowless homes with wall-size frescoes depicting scenes of Roman politics and Greek mythology and theater. Their floors were covered with intricate mosaics made from tiny pieces of stone and glass. Gardens and courtyards were adorned with bronze and marble statues of gods and goddesses. Residents wore fine jewelry made of gold and precious stones. They drank their wine from silver cups decorated with designs in high relief. They were entertained by gladiators wearing finely wrought armor at the 22,000-seat Pompeii amphitheater. And on August 24, A.D. 79, many of them failed to recognize the disaster about to befall them until it was too late.
The eruption began with a curious dark column rising from Mount Vesuvius´s summit into the daytime sky, eventually reaching a height of 20 miles, blocking out the sun and turning day into night. People weren´t alarmed initially because they didn´t know what it meant, and, in fact, had no word in their vocabulary for volcano. As the column rose, ash and stone began to rain down on the cities. Roofs collapsed on those who tried to take shelter in their homes and other buildings. Then, as the column itself collapsed, pyroclastic surges—waves of superheated gases and volcanic slurry—rolled over the region in minutes, burying and preserving everything. When the volcanic explosions subsided on the morning of August 25, an estimated 3,000 people had been killed, about 10 percent of the area population.
Discoveries at Pompeii
Although some ruins were discovered in 1594 and 1600, the site was not recognized as Pompeii until 1763. Excavations at that time were conducted with little regard for context. It would be another century before systematic excavations were organized under the direction of the Italian archaeologist Giuseppe Fiorelli, who also recognized cavities in the hardened layers of ash as places where bodies had been and developed the method of filling them with plaster to recreate casts of Pompeians in their final moments.
The casts, which continue to be made today, are amazingly detailed because fine volcanic ash is a remarkable preservative. Tales from an Eruption includes nine casts of people and one of a dog. Among the people is a child straddling a semi-reclining adult, both of whom are looking upward. They are part of a family found at the House of the Golden Bracelet, a three-story home decorated with brightly colored frescoes, and named by archaeologists for the thick gold armband worn by a woman found there. The family had tried to escape down a narrow staircase leading to their outside garden when the stairs collapsed on them. The 1.3-pound bracelet is in the form of a two-headed snake—snakes in ancient Italy represented good luck—connected by a portrait medallion each has in its mouth. The bracelet, other jewelry, and fragments of frescoes found at the house are included in the exhibition.
In many cases, objects found near the bodies indicate what they may have considered their most prized possessions. A woman found near the city´s Harbor Gate was holding a silver and gold statuette of Mercury, the god of safe passage. Among the jewelry she had with her were two gold rings set with emeralds. Some belongings found with bodies carried a different kind of value. One victim found near the city´s outdoor gymnasium was holding a small wooden box to his chest. In the box were bronze scalpels and other medical instruments, indicating the man was a doctor who, perhaps, intended to help the injured. Many other victims found without any possessions are believed to have been slaves, who only left behind evidence of the area´s class system.
It was once thought that nearly all of the residents of Herculaneum escaped because only a few dozen bodies had been found until the 1980s, when further excavations uncovered about 300 bodies and some animals. The combination of gases that seared off muscle and tissue and the final pyroclastic surge that covered the town in up to 75 feet of volcanic mud created a seal that preserved bones and other organic matter. The skeletal remains, such as the cast of 32 in the exhibition, also were found with coins and jewelry they had gathered before fleeing their homes. Those objects, too, are part of the exhibition.
Among the survivors of the tragedy in Pompeii was Pliny the Younger, who was only 17 at the time. He later wrote a letter to the Roman historian Tacitus describing the eruption in detail, and the Vesuvius event and others like it are now known as Plinian eruptions. Since A.D. 79, Vesuvius has erupted 30 times, most recently in 1944, and its geologic activity is constantly monitored. Although Vesuvius remains one of the world´s most dangerous volcanoes, the population living in its shadow has grown to 3.5 million, and some 2 million people visit Pompeii each year.
Organizer and Sponsorship
The exhibition is organized by Ministero per i Beni e le Attività Culturali, Soprintendenza archeologica di Pompei together with the Soprintendenza per i Beni Archeologici delle province di Napoli e Caserta, Regione Campania. MFAH curator Frances Marzio is overseeing the exhibition in Houston.
Lead underwriting for this exhibition in Houston is provided by the Hamill Foundation. Additional generous support is provided by Linn Energy, Mr. Samuel F. Gorman, and Jeff Fort and Marion Barthelme.
The exhibition began its five-year tour at the National Archeological Museum in Naples, then traveled to the Musées royaux d´Art et d´Histoire, Brussels, Belgium; the Museo Storico del Castello di Miramare, Trieste, Italy; the Reiss-Engelhorn Museen, Mannheim, Germany; the Canadian Museum of Civilization, Gatineau, Quebec; the Field Museum of Natural History, Chicago; the Bunkamura Museum, Tokyo, the Sendai City Museum, Sendai, the Fukuoka Art Museum, Fukuoka, and the Kyoto National Museum, Kyoto, all in Japan; the Millennium Art Museum of the China Millennium Monument, Beijing; and the Birmingham Museum of Art, Birmingham, Alabama.
Catalogue
An illustrated catalogue, published by Electa of Italy, accompanies the exhibition. The book includes an introduction co-written by Peter C. Marzio, MFAH director. It is available in the MFAH Shop, 713-639-7360.
Related Programs
In a series of lectures in February that serve as a prelude to the exhibition, scholars and archaeological experts will discuss the architecture, technology, beliefs, and aspirations of ancient Pompeians, and why the world in which they lived still matters today. Topics for the lectures, at 1:30 p.m. each Friday of the month (and repeated at 4 p.m. on the following Saturdays), are:
• Pompeii—Bringing the Ancient City to Life, a re-creation of the life and times of the population around the Bay of Naples on August 24, A.D. 79 through eyewitness accounts, contemporary volcanology, and archaeological evidence
• Homes and Gardens of Pompeii—a discussion of the style of domestic architecture, interior design, and gardens in ancient Pompeii
• The People of Pompeii—life, love, death, and popular culture in ancient Pompeii as depicted in ancient graffiti
• Technology in Ancient Pompeii—an exploration of the magnificent feats of engineering, including the highly efficient aqueduct system, that made possible the urban amenities enjoyed in ancient Pompeii
• The Classical World and Why It Matters Today—a look at the turning points in Greek and Roman civilization and the responses they elicited, which in turn created the institutions that formed the Western world
Other programs planned include:
• Target Free First Sunday, March 2, art-making activities and performances, 1 to 5 p.m., free admission all day, 12:15 to 7 p.m.
• Rice University continuing studies course, February 21 to March 27, 2008
• Artful Thursday, 6 p.m., March 20, University of Houston drama department presents dramatic readings from Greek and Roman literature and Shakespeare that relate to the themes of the exhibition
For more information, see the education calendar at www.mfah.org.
The Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, Concludes International Tour;Exhibition on View March 2-June 22, 2008
Houston—In their final terrifying hours on August 24 and 25, A.D. 79, residents of Pompeii and the nearby coastal resort towns of Herculaneum, Oplontis, and Terzigno in southern Italy gathered objects precious to them and tried to escape the fury of Mount Vesuvius. The erupting volcano eventually buried Pompeii under 10 feet of ash and pumice, then waves of superheated gases and boiling mud traveling down Vesuvius´s slopes at speeds of nearly 100 miles an hour brought instant death to all still remaining in Pompeii and the other cities. The thriving, prosperous communities lay buried—silenced and forgotten for 1,700 years before being rediscovered through excavations which revealed that this horrific tragedy had preserved a wealth of information about the people, their belongings, and how they lived.
While work continues at Pompeii today, the city´s archaeological superintendent, Pietro Giovanni Guzzo, has organized an exhibition of nearly 500 objects excavated largely in the last 15 years. These new finds, supported by well-documented research, greatly expand what is known about the people of Pompeii and their neighbors, and what happened just before their deaths. The exhibition, Pompeii: Tales from an Eruption, closes its international tour at the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, where it will be on view from March 2 to June 22, 2008 in the Caroline Wiess Law Building, 1001 Bissonnet Street. The show´s bronze and marble sculptures, large-scale frescoes, jewelry, tools, table silver, armor, coins, skeletons, and plaster casts of the bodies of the victims now tell the stories of life at the Bay of Naples in the days of the early Roman Empire.
"Houston is fortunate to be one of the few venues in the world to show this heartrending and yet uplifting exhibition," said Peter C. Marzio, MFAH director. "It speaks at once to man´s creativity and achievement—in the first century and in the years of ongoing excavations—and to our fears. This exhibition offers visitors the rare opportunity to see a number of objects being shown for the first time outside of Italy and to contemplate the lives and the world of the people who owned them."
At the MFAH, the exhibition will be installed in the expansive Upper Brown Pavilion of the Law Building. Current photographs of Pompeii, including a panorama of one of the city´s main streets stretching nearly the length of the 300-foot gallery, will provide an overall sense of place and identify specific locations where victims, artworks, and other objects have been found. The exhibition includes about 240 objects from Pompeii, more than 100 each from Herculaneum and Oplontis, and about 20 from Terzigno. Notable works from Pompeii include an exquisite full-length statue of Apollo, god of music, found at the House of Menander, a wealthy in-law of Emperor Nero; a floor mosaic with a central image of Medusa found at the House of the Centenary; and a wall from the Building of the Triclinia with a deep red fresco depicting Nero as Apollo playing the lyre. From Herculaneum there are a marble head of an Amazon, a full-length statue of the goddess Hera, and a cast of 32 skeletons found in a boat shelter near the sea shore. The sculptures, both traveling for the first time, were found at the Villa of the Papyri, which may have been the home of Julius Caesar´s father-in-law, Lucius Calpurnius Piso Cesonius. From all four sites there are numerous examples of ancient coins and gold jewelry—necklaces, armbands, rings, earrings, and pendants.
"With about two-thirds of Pompeii now excavated, the citizens´ appreciation of fine art and craft continues to reveal itself," said Frances Marzio, MFAH curator in charge of the exhibition in Houston. "Coupling recent discoveries with information about the places they were found and what people tried to take with them as they fled deepens our understanding of what these ancient people considered important."
The City in A.D. 79
At the time of the eruption, Pompeii was a busy, sophisticated port city with a population of 10,000 to 20,000. The narrow stone streets were lined with shops and taverns. A new aqueduct system provided water to the city´s fountains and running water in most homes. Herculaneum, located about nine miles northwest of Pompeii, was a resort home to about 5,000 wealthy residents of Rome, including Roman senators. The country villages of Oplontis and Terzigno were situated in between. The prosperity of the area, ironically, stemmed from the vineyards and olive orchards planted in the rich volcanic soil.
The well-to-do decorated their mostly windowless homes with wall-size frescoes depicting scenes of Roman politics and Greek mythology and theater. Their floors were covered with intricate mosaics made from tiny pieces of stone and glass. Gardens and courtyards were adorned with bronze and marble statues of gods and goddesses. Residents wore fine jewelry made of gold and precious stones. They drank their wine from silver cups decorated with designs in high relief. They were entertained by gladiators wearing finely wrought armor at the 22,000-seat Pompeii amphitheater. And on August 24, A.D. 79, many of them failed to recognize the disaster about to befall them until it was too late.
The eruption began with a curious dark column rising from Mount Vesuvius´s summit into the daytime sky, eventually reaching a height of 20 miles, blocking out the sun and turning day into night. People weren´t alarmed initially because they didn´t know what it meant, and, in fact, had no word in their vocabulary for volcano. As the column rose, ash and stone began to rain down on the cities. Roofs collapsed on those who tried to take shelter in their homes and other buildings. Then, as the column itself collapsed, pyroclastic surges—waves of superheated gases and volcanic slurry—rolled over the region in minutes, burying and preserving everything. When the volcanic explosions subsided on the morning of August 25, an estimated 3,000 people had been killed, about 10 percent of the area population.
Discoveries at Pompeii
Although some ruins were discovered in 1594 and 1600, the site was not recognized as Pompeii until 1763. Excavations at that time were conducted with little regard for context. It would be another century before systematic excavations were organized under the direction of the Italian archaeologist Giuseppe Fiorelli, who also recognized cavities in the hardened layers of ash as places where bodies had been and developed the method of filling them with plaster to recreate casts of Pompeians in their final moments.
The casts, which continue to be made today, are amazingly detailed because fine volcanic ash is a remarkable preservative. Tales from an Eruption includes nine casts of people and one of a dog. Among the people is a child straddling a semi-reclining adult, both of whom are looking upward. They are part of a family found at the House of the Golden Bracelet, a three-story home decorated with brightly colored frescoes, and named by archaeologists for the thick gold armband worn by a woman found there. The family had tried to escape down a narrow staircase leading to their outside garden when the stairs collapsed on them. The 1.3-pound bracelet is in the form of a two-headed snake—snakes in ancient Italy represented good luck—connected by a portrait medallion each has in its mouth. The bracelet, other jewelry, and fragments of frescoes found at the house are included in the exhibition.
In many cases, objects found near the bodies indicate what they may have considered their most prized possessions. A woman found near the city´s Harbor Gate was holding a silver and gold statuette of Mercury, the god of safe passage. Among the jewelry she had with her were two gold rings set with emeralds. Some belongings found with bodies carried a different kind of value. One victim found near the city´s outdoor gymnasium was holding a small wooden box to his chest. In the box were bronze scalpels and other medical instruments, indicating the man was a doctor who, perhaps, intended to help the injured. Many other victims found without any possessions are believed to have been slaves, who only left behind evidence of the area´s class system.
It was once thought that nearly all of the residents of Herculaneum escaped because only a few dozen bodies had been found until the 1980s, when further excavations uncovered about 300 bodies and some animals. The combination of gases that seared off muscle and tissue and the final pyroclastic surge that covered the town in up to 75 feet of volcanic mud created a seal that preserved bones and other organic matter. The skeletal remains, such as the cast of 32 in the exhibition, also were found with coins and jewelry they had gathered before fleeing their homes. Those objects, too, are part of the exhibition.
Among the survivors of the tragedy in Pompeii was Pliny the Younger, who was only 17 at the time. He later wrote a letter to the Roman historian Tacitus describing the eruption in detail, and the Vesuvius event and others like it are now known as Plinian eruptions. Since A.D. 79, Vesuvius has erupted 30 times, most recently in 1944, and its geologic activity is constantly monitored. Although Vesuvius remains one of the world´s most dangerous volcanoes, the population living in its shadow has grown to 3.5 million, and some 2 million people visit Pompeii each year.
Organizer and Sponsorship
The exhibition is organized by Ministero per i Beni e le Attività Culturali, Soprintendenza archeologica di Pompei together with the Soprintendenza per i Beni Archeologici delle province di Napoli e Caserta, Regione Campania. MFAH curator Frances Marzio is overseeing the exhibition in Houston.
Lead underwriting for this exhibition in Houston is provided by the Hamill Foundation. Additional generous support is provided by Linn Energy, Mr. Samuel F. Gorman, and Jeff Fort and Marion Barthelme.
The exhibition began its five-year tour at the National Archeological Museum in Naples, then traveled to the Musées royaux d´Art et d´Histoire, Brussels, Belgium; the Museo Storico del Castello di Miramare, Trieste, Italy; the Reiss-Engelhorn Museen, Mannheim, Germany; the Canadian Museum of Civilization, Gatineau, Quebec; the Field Museum of Natural History, Chicago; the Bunkamura Museum, Tokyo, the Sendai City Museum, Sendai, the Fukuoka Art Museum, Fukuoka, and the Kyoto National Museum, Kyoto, all in Japan; the Millennium Art Museum of the China Millennium Monument, Beijing; and the Birmingham Museum of Art, Birmingham, Alabama.
Catalogue
An illustrated catalogue, published by Electa of Italy, accompanies the exhibition. The book includes an introduction co-written by Peter C. Marzio, MFAH director. It is available in the MFAH Shop, 713-639-7360.
Related Programs
In a series of lectures in February that serve as a prelude to the exhibition, scholars and archaeological experts will discuss the architecture, technology, beliefs, and aspirations of ancient Pompeians, and why the world in which they lived still matters today. Topics for the lectures, at 1:30 p.m. each Friday of the month (and repeated at 4 p.m. on the following Saturdays), are:
• Pompeii—Bringing the Ancient City to Life, a re-creation of the life and times of the population around the Bay of Naples on August 24, A.D. 79 through eyewitness accounts, contemporary volcanology, and archaeological evidence
• Homes and Gardens of Pompeii—a discussion of the style of domestic architecture, interior design, and gardens in ancient Pompeii
• The People of Pompeii—life, love, death, and popular culture in ancient Pompeii as depicted in ancient graffiti
• Technology in Ancient Pompeii—an exploration of the magnificent feats of engineering, including the highly efficient aqueduct system, that made possible the urban amenities enjoyed in ancient Pompeii
• The Classical World and Why It Matters Today—a look at the turning points in Greek and Roman civilization and the responses they elicited, which in turn created the institutions that formed the Western world
Other programs planned include:
• Target Free First Sunday, March 2, art-making activities and performances, 1 to 5 p.m., free admission all day, 12:15 to 7 p.m.
• Rice University continuing studies course, February 21 to March 27, 2008
• Artful Thursday, 6 p.m., March 20, University of Houston drama department presents dramatic readings from Greek and Roman literature and Shakespeare that relate to the themes of the exhibition
For more information, see the education calendar at www.mfah.org.