Is
Pompeii an ancient or a modern wonder? Its ruins have been rebuilt and
the bodies of the volcano's victims are plaster casts, says classical
historian Mary Beard.
Last weekend I spent a couple of hours with the remains of one of the human victims of the eruption of Vesuvius in AD79. The corpse is apparently well preserved: a young woman, lying face down, shielding her face with her hands at the moment of death. Her dress has risen up and is tangled around her waist, her bare legs exposed beneath.
She is currently on display at the J Paul Getty Museum in Malibu, as the first exhibit in a show that explores the ways that modern artists - from Francesco Piranesi to Anthony Gormley - have responded to history's most famous volcanic eruption. "Welcome to Pompeii," she is meant to say. "The city of the dead".
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Volcanic material covered the bodies, setting hard and solid around them, and as the flesh, internal organs and clothing gradually decomposed, a void was left”
I was curious to find out what visitors to the exhibition made of her. So I lurked and listened.
The kids were the most forthcoming. Many of them rushed up to
her, then uttered some variant of "Oooh, uggh! Is that a real Roman?"
Their mums and dads tended to improvise one of two fairly predictable
responses:- "Yes dear, it is, but don't worry - she died a very long time ago"
- or "No, don't be silly, it's just a model"
Ghoulish as they are, for most of us (me included), these bodies are always one of the highlights of any display of the discoveries from Pompeii (and a group of them will be starring in an upcoming exhibition at the British Museum). They number in the hundreds altogether, each one a casualty of the eruption.
And they are not just human
victims either. One of the most famous is the remains of a dog, still
tied up, straining at its leash, in a futile attempt to make a run for
it.
The truth is, though, that they are not actually bodies at
all. They are the product of a clever bit of archaeological ingenuity,
going back to the 1860s. The early excavators had noticed, as they dug through the volcanic debris that covered Pompeii, a series of distinctive cavities in the lava, sometimes containing human bones.
The reason for that soon became clear. The material from the volcano had covered the bodies of the dead, setting hard and solid around them. As the flesh, internal organs and clothing gradually decomposed, a void was left - which was an exact negative imprint of the shape of the corpse at the point of death.
It wasn't long before one bright spark saw that if you poured plaster of Paris into that void, you got a plaster cast that was an exact replica of the body, but only a replica - more an "anti-body" than a real body.
And not just that - once the cast had been made, it could be used in turn to make more and more copies of the same person, rather like post-mortem cloning.
A 19th Century cast of a dog killed in the eruption
Bodies or anti-bodies, the re-creation of these ancient Romans in plaster caused a tremendous stir when it was first done in the mid-19th Century.
Family groups seemed to be brought back almost to life. Only the hardest of hearts remained unmoved at the sight of these doomed plaster people clinging to each other as catastrophe approached, mothers cradling their children, husbands embracing wives.
The clothes they were wearing also came as a shock. It was still generally believed in the 1860s that ancient Roman dress had been a skimpy affair, not merely suitable for warm Mediterranean climes, but flirtatiously flimsy and revealing too.
Concrete casts of the volcano's victims in Pompeii Museum, 1866
But there are much wider issues at play than ancient Roman dress sense.
For a start, these strangely ambivalent objects bring us face
to face with our own voyeurism. Why does it seem OK for us to gawp at
these disaster victims, when it would be decidedly not OK to gawp at the
death agonies of victims of a modern train crash or terror attack? Is it because, as some parents at the Getty suggested to their kids, they are just so ancient that they don't matter to us in the same way? As if in becoming archaeological specimens they lost their right to human privacy? Or is it the simple fact that these are not Roman bodies that gives us licence to peer?
Surely, we don't imagine that a lump of 19th Century plaster poured into a void in the lava has any "right to privacy" - still less (as in the Getty example) a 20th Century copy of a 19th Century lump of plaster. As the other parents had it, they're "just models".
For me, though, these plaster victims prompt other thoughts too - about the city of Pompeii as a whole, and what it stands for. Partly that's because they are so eloquently trapped in that no man's land between the living and the dead, captured at the very moment when they lost their struggle against the fumes and lava.
Which is a bit like the city too. Is it really a vast tomb? Or is Pompeii a place where we can go to step back in time into the lives of the ancient Romans?
It was the novelist Sir Walter Scott, visiting the site shortly before his death, who first described Pompeii as the "city of the dead" - words he muttered constantly as he was carried round the excavations in a sedan chair.
But more than anything, it's the combination of the ancient and the modern - the 19th Century plaster combined with the fleeting traces of those real dead Romans - that stands so well for Pompeii itself.
Of course, there's no question that it is the best-preserved ancient town anywhere in the world, one of the very few places in the world where you can actually walk the Roman streets. But an awful lot of what you see there was built - or rebuilt - in the 20th Century.
Keen as they were to reflect on
the transience of human existence, early visitors to the site were often
decidedly disappointed with the place. It was, frankly, a wreck.
It looked, as one disgruntled tourist observed, as if it had
been destroyed in enemy action. Well, of course it looked like that. It
had been devastated by a violent volcanic eruption.It wasn't until the houses began to be rebuilt and reroofed around 1900 that Pompeii became something like the ancient city we now visit - until, that is, the site was heavily bombarded by the Allies in World War II (in what really was enemy action, with more than 160 bombs dropped on the place). Parts of what we now see are a rebuild of a rebuild.
I'm not accusing anyone of "faking it". My point is that our Pompeii - like most classical sites, in fact - is the product of collaboration between modern rebuilders and conservators, and the original Roman builders themselves, with the lion's share of the work on our side.
And it's no less impressive or moving for that - as the body casts help to show.
One of the video clips played in the exhibition at the Getty Museum comes from Roberto Rossellini's film, Voyage in Italy, in which the lead couple, played by Ingrid Bergman and George Sanders, tour the country as their marriage disintegrates.
On their visit to Pompeii they watch the plaster being poured into a cavity left by two of the victims. In the movie's most haunting scene, these victims emerge as a couple tenderly embracing in their final moments - and a silent indictment of the hollowness of the relationship between Bergman and Sanders.
It might only be modern plaster poured into an ancient hole, but it still has emotional power, as the kids and their parents were finding, in their own ways, last weekend.
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My recollection of the casts is that bones are often visible (e.g. where plaster has partially come away at the extremities), so I don't think it in necessarily the case that visitors are merely seeing an "anti-body" of the original victim.
The plaster cast is rather like a photograph - which can be copied over and over, and consists of ink and paper rather than human remains. Yet looking at it may still be felt to affect the dignity of the person whose image is captured in it.
I too felt like a voyeur, photographing the dead, as I examined the encased victims in Pompeii during a visit in October '12. I remain conflicted with the photos I possess. No one else among my party seemed to have the same feelings when I acknowledged my doubts.
The delicate balance between preservation and presentation is quite a common one. If anyone has visited the city of Knossossus in Crete then they will have seen the brightly painted concrete that was put in place a century ago. This covers the actual remains so you can't see much of the original site. I would personally like more of the original to be preserved for display but the Pompeii statues are an exception in that what we see has been created from air pockets - we wouldn't be able to see anything without the casts being made. What we have learned and seen we would have lost without them.
Wouldn't it be better that the people putting the exhibition up, start by telling people that the figures are not the real bodies but casts of the voids left after natural decomposition? I'd rather be told what it is and have it explained. It makes it easier for parents to come up with an answer to a difficult question.
A terrible and fantastic call for the human race to address our mortality and vunerability not only in relationship to the past but the present. This is not voyerism if visitors to the exhibitions take the images away and think about death in the current political and natural environment. Twenty First Century customs, morays and taboos stripped away to reveal death so powerfully.
Right to knowledge vs. respect for privacy is a modern debate - we do know though that to be remembered affectionately after death was a desire the Romans of that era generally held very dear, so I doubt they'd be unduly bothered by the casts because their place in posterity is assured: in fact, we hold them in more generous regard than we do many of their leaders, who history has unfairly maligned.
They are just like trace fossils and just because they are plaster of paris moulds of the voids left by the bodies make them no less interesting. They are fascinating
Of course we all know the bodies are plasters, we all know the city has been rebuild. And so what, this is the same with all archaeological sites in the world and with all historical cities. The only clear thing in the report is the ignorance of the visitors that usually go to these kind of exhibition!
I was reminded of Pompeii when visiting the Murambi Genocide Memorial in Rwanda. The white mummified remains of genocide victims are on display there, exhumed from mass graves. Hundreds of them, many children and infants, threads of cloth still sticking to them. The difference with Pompeii is that this was recent, and these are real. Being guided around the rooms that hold the remains is a very emotional, but also a very disconcerting experience.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-20407286
These are the potraits of real Roman that looks like current italians.
