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| A detail from a garden fresco originally found in the House of the Golden Bracelet in Pompeii. © Soprintendenza Speciale per i Beni Archeologici di Napoli e Pompei |
In a couple of days 'Life and Death: Pompeii and Herculaneum' is to be unveiled at the British Museum. Sponsored by Goldman Sachs, it seems they were able to move mountains in getting so many pieces exhibited outside of Italy for the first time. An incredible feat, it brings together a lot more than is available to the public at both Pompei and Herculaneum - I have been to both yet was constantly surprised by new things - and curates it in a novel way, illustrating the day to day existence of these wiped out communities.
The exhibition is fascinating and poignant, giving you the real sense of these people being frozen in time. We have a political inscription asking you to vote for 'Samellius, an outstanding young man' , running for election a few months before the eruption. There is a beautifully constructed wooden cradle, carbonised in the heat of the ash, found with the remains of a baby in it.
The exhibition is fascinating and poignant, giving you the real sense of these people being frozen in time. We have a political inscription asking you to vote for 'Samellius, an outstanding young man' , running for election a few months before the eruption. There is a beautifully constructed wooden cradle, carbonised in the heat of the ash, found with the remains of a baby in it.
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| Carbonised wooden cradle. From the House of M.P.P.Granianus, Herculaneum, 1st century AD. © Soprintendenza Speciale per i Beni Archeologici di Napoli e Pompei |
We can see the plaster casts of a whole family huddling together as they died, who had commissioned the most idyllic frescoed garden room just a few years earlier (also in the exhibition).
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| A garden fresco originally found in the House of the Golden Bracelet in Pompeii. © Soprintendenza Speciale per i Beni Archeologici di Napoli e Pompeii |
Despite these examples, the exhibition thankfully places more emphasis on everyday life: it is organised around the various rooms of the house or around certain individuals whose fragmented histories have been pieced together by archeologists. We have, for example, the kitchen with a terracotta implement for fattening up dormice and a specific dormouse frying pan; an initialed loaf of carbonised bread and a peculiar skinned hare jelly mold.
These rooms are shown alongside story-enhancing details, such as a recreation of a private bath that belonged to a commercially minded fish sauce merchant, adorned with mosaics of his signature sardine concoctions.
The whole experience, sound effects and all, is designed to give you a sense of the bustling city life that prefaced the disaster, the panic, horror and hope as many rushed to the shore with their house keys, money, good luck charms or whatever might be useful to them, and finally the end, the pathetic figure of a contorted dog, or fallen woman, the void of whose decomposed bodies have been filled with plaster or resin.
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| Plaster cast of a dog. From the House of Orpheus, Pompeii, AD 79. © Soprintendenza Speciale per i Beni Archeologici di Napoli e Pompeii |
It may be morbid, but you leave with a sense of how rich a culture theirs was, of how 'designed' even the most mundane of objects could be: a beautifully simple curtain holder that echoes the bough of a ship (made, no doubt, for a family with nautical connections); a food warming device with little hands warming themselves as handles; and a pestle and mortar in which the pestle is a big marble thumb! You get the feeling that a whole lot of care and ironic humour went into each trade - a sense that we have sadly lost today.
If, like me, you nonetheless leave feeling a bit forlorn, then go for a consolatory ice cream at Gelupo's (about a 12 minute walk away) which is exactly what I did!
Life and Death: Pompeii and Herculaneum runs from the 28th March to the 29th September.
Book tickets here
