This latest exhibition at the British Museum unashamedly describes itself as a blockbuster, with about 300,000 tickets expected to be sold.
The show is supported by a myriad of free lectures and, following the recent example of other cultural institutions, a specially commissioned film, Pompeii Live.
This will be screened on 18 June and will star British Museum director Neil MacGregor, the ubiquitous academic Mary Beard, the chef Giorgio Locatelli and the gardener Rachel de Thame. It will be shown in more than 250 cinemas across the UK.
Maximum impact
The museum has also developed an app to deliver cultural content to a wider audience. If, like me, you are wary of transitory virtual reality gizmos, invest in the elegantly written and beautifully illustrated catalogue, which will outlive all the above.
This marketing push has clearly worked as the media reviews, both high and low, have been glowing. Two BBC documentaries, Pompeii: The Mystery of the People Frozen in Time and The Other Pompeii: Life and Death in Herculaneum have further stimulated interest.
Far more worrying is the news that travel operators are reporting large increases in tourists expected at the actual sites in Italy. Given the scandalously low standards of security, administration and scholarship at Pompeii itself, this is not welcome.
I have viewed most of the major exhibitions at the British Museum over the past decade. How does this one stack up?
The first thing to say is that it is very different from the grandeur of those devoted to the First Emperor Hadrian, Shah ‘Abbas or Moctezuma.
The curator Paul Roberts has stressed that his subject is not emperors nor priestesses, neither senators nor gladiators, but the humbler populace of two small towns – the rarely recorded ordinariness of Roman life. The sequence of the words in his chosen title – life and death – is important.
In the Royal Academy Pompeii exhibition in the 1970s, the plaster casts of the victims were centre stage. We were shown Pompeii, as Sir Walter Scott had described it, as the City of the Dead.
Ideal home show, AD79
In this exhibition we move from a lively film of current daily life in Italy – restaurants, markets and family gatherings – spliced with the same activities of AD79. The moral of this curatorial sermon is clear. They and we are the same. The approach works well.
I was confused by the introductory timeline of the volcanic eruption and its consequences. This, for some strange whim, runs chronologically from right to left.
In the main body of the exhibition we are invited to walk through a hypothetical provincial townhouse from the atrium via the cubiculum to the hortus.
It takes time to understand the context. I needed to traverse the exhibition twice before I understood the narrative. Each room contains some of the original inhabitants’ stuff. At our feet as we enter is the mosaic of a guard dog – cave canem – says the message.
The early rooms are clearly showcases emphasising the wealth, status and religious observances of the extended family and their slaves. A bronze strong box has a theatrical mask with silver inlay.
On the top crouch two hunting dogs and an alert goose – the epitome of classical one-upmanship. Ironically, in another room a fresco of a benign vine-covered Vesuvius is flanked by an image of Bacchus covered in grapes.
Rooms are dressed with things both beautiful and prosaic. I stood for a long time admiring the elaborate floor mosaic of sea creatures centred on a battle between a lobster and an octopus.
I coveted the most sublime bronze food mould shaped like a supine hare. But these things are essentially practical. What we see are possessions, accessories for living, not valuable artefacts.
Divine filth
Beneath that elegance, however, lurks filth. Not everything in the Roman household mirrored our modern tastes. For us a coveted kitchen may prove the most expensively fitted room. In Pompeii the lavatory and the kitchen shared a single, often squalid, space.
No wonder they so often ate out. Hygiene seems to have been unknown. Pompeii had cesspits rather than sewers and constant afflictions – diarrhoea, dysentery and halitosis – were not blamed on their own actions but on rather the visitation of the gods, only appeased by offerings.
Circumnavigating the exhibition I became increasingly aware of people. The dominant image of the exhibition, used in all the advertising, is the portrait of a young baker, Terentius Neo, and his wife. This is positioned so that visitors to the house and the slaves working in the bakery could see it.
Perhaps it is a reminder that the owners were ever vigilant. But, more romantically, a small image of an embracing Cupid and Psyche reveals that they are lovers as well as business partners.
The form of the fresco with the wife in the foreground has led to curatorial speculation of her role. She carries a scroll and a stylus.
Is she perhaps the administrator/financier of this partnership, leaving her husband to pursue his political aspirations? But to put the speculation in context, however sophisticated, she has no vote nor can she stand for office.
There are some unexpected visual delights. The Romans loved their gardens and, like our modern obsessions with conservatories, enjoyed decorated garden rooms.
One glorious example includes lilies, roses, poppies, oleander, arbutus and palm trees. The plants are alive with pigeons, jays, swallows, orioles, doves and nightingales.
Grim climax
In reality the plants and birds would never be seasonally together. This is an idealised paradise. But it is a paradise sliced with violence and coarse humour.
In one serene garden a pair of marble stags is being torn to death by dogs, a naked Hercules urinates while in a tree a bronzed wind-chime of a flying phallus with bells on, tinkles away.
At the very end of the show comes a grim climax. In the basement of the house with the splendid garden we confront the tableau of the dead. An entire family – husband, wife and two children – lie twisted by the agonies of the extreme heat that killed them and their neighbours.
It is an eloquent testimony to horror, a glimpse of a world that is past, but remains the same.
Peter Lewis is a writer and a past director of Beamish
The show is supported by a myriad of free lectures and, following the recent example of other cultural institutions, a specially commissioned film, Pompeii Live.
This will be screened on 18 June and will star British Museum director Neil MacGregor, the ubiquitous academic Mary Beard, the chef Giorgio Locatelli and the gardener Rachel de Thame. It will be shown in more than 250 cinemas across the UK.
Maximum impact
The museum has also developed an app to deliver cultural content to a wider audience. If, like me, you are wary of transitory virtual reality gizmos, invest in the elegantly written and beautifully illustrated catalogue, which will outlive all the above.
This marketing push has clearly worked as the media reviews, both high and low, have been glowing. Two BBC documentaries, Pompeii: The Mystery of the People Frozen in Time and The Other Pompeii: Life and Death in Herculaneum have further stimulated interest.
Far more worrying is the news that travel operators are reporting large increases in tourists expected at the actual sites in Italy. Given the scandalously low standards of security, administration and scholarship at Pompeii itself, this is not welcome.
I have viewed most of the major exhibitions at the British Museum over the past decade. How does this one stack up?
The first thing to say is that it is very different from the grandeur of those devoted to the First Emperor Hadrian, Shah ‘Abbas or Moctezuma.
The curator Paul Roberts has stressed that his subject is not emperors nor priestesses, neither senators nor gladiators, but the humbler populace of two small towns – the rarely recorded ordinariness of Roman life. The sequence of the words in his chosen title – life and death – is important.
In the Royal Academy Pompeii exhibition in the 1970s, the plaster casts of the victims were centre stage. We were shown Pompeii, as Sir Walter Scott had described it, as the City of the Dead.
Ideal home show, AD79
In this exhibition we move from a lively film of current daily life in Italy – restaurants, markets and family gatherings – spliced with the same activities of AD79. The moral of this curatorial sermon is clear. They and we are the same. The approach works well.
I was confused by the introductory timeline of the volcanic eruption and its consequences. This, for some strange whim, runs chronologically from right to left.
In the main body of the exhibition we are invited to walk through a hypothetical provincial townhouse from the atrium via the cubiculum to the hortus.
It takes time to understand the context. I needed to traverse the exhibition twice before I understood the narrative. Each room contains some of the original inhabitants’ stuff. At our feet as we enter is the mosaic of a guard dog – cave canem – says the message.
The early rooms are clearly showcases emphasising the wealth, status and religious observances of the extended family and their slaves. A bronze strong box has a theatrical mask with silver inlay.
On the top crouch two hunting dogs and an alert goose – the epitome of classical one-upmanship. Ironically, in another room a fresco of a benign vine-covered Vesuvius is flanked by an image of Bacchus covered in grapes.
Rooms are dressed with things both beautiful and prosaic. I stood for a long time admiring the elaborate floor mosaic of sea creatures centred on a battle between a lobster and an octopus.
I coveted the most sublime bronze food mould shaped like a supine hare. But these things are essentially practical. What we see are possessions, accessories for living, not valuable artefacts.
Divine filth
Beneath that elegance, however, lurks filth. Not everything in the Roman household mirrored our modern tastes. For us a coveted kitchen may prove the most expensively fitted room. In Pompeii the lavatory and the kitchen shared a single, often squalid, space.
No wonder they so often ate out. Hygiene seems to have been unknown. Pompeii had cesspits rather than sewers and constant afflictions – diarrhoea, dysentery and halitosis – were not blamed on their own actions but on rather the visitation of the gods, only appeased by offerings.
Circumnavigating the exhibition I became increasingly aware of people. The dominant image of the exhibition, used in all the advertising, is the portrait of a young baker, Terentius Neo, and his wife. This is positioned so that visitors to the house and the slaves working in the bakery could see it.
Perhaps it is a reminder that the owners were ever vigilant. But, more romantically, a small image of an embracing Cupid and Psyche reveals that they are lovers as well as business partners.
The form of the fresco with the wife in the foreground has led to curatorial speculation of her role. She carries a scroll and a stylus.
Is she perhaps the administrator/financier of this partnership, leaving her husband to pursue his political aspirations? But to put the speculation in context, however sophisticated, she has no vote nor can she stand for office.
There are some unexpected visual delights. The Romans loved their gardens and, like our modern obsessions with conservatories, enjoyed decorated garden rooms.
One glorious example includes lilies, roses, poppies, oleander, arbutus and palm trees. The plants are alive with pigeons, jays, swallows, orioles, doves and nightingales.
Grim climax
In reality the plants and birds would never be seasonally together. This is an idealised paradise. But it is a paradise sliced with violence and coarse humour.
In one serene garden a pair of marble stags is being torn to death by dogs, a naked Hercules urinates while in a tree a bronzed wind-chime of a flying phallus with bells on, tinkles away.
At the very end of the show comes a grim climax. In the basement of the house with the splendid garden we confront the tableau of the dead. An entire family – husband, wife and two children – lie twisted by the agonies of the extreme heat that killed them and their neighbours.
It is an eloquent testimony to horror, a glimpse of a world that is past, but remains the same.
Peter Lewis is a writer and a past director of Beamish
Project data
- Cost £500,00 (exhibition build)
- Partner Soprintendenza Speciale per i Beni Archeologici di Napoli e Pompei
- Curator Paul Roberts
- Sponsor Goldman Sachs Group
- Exhibition design Land Design Studio
- Construction MER Services
- Construction design management Peter Harris
- Display cases Glasbau Hahn
- Digital media design Elbow Productions
- Digital media visual hardware Sysco; British Museum
- Fine art transport Momart; Arteria
- Graphic design Surface 3
- Mounts Richard Rogers Conservation, British Museum
- Lighting design DHA Design
- Project management British Museum
- Showcase construction Moylan Displays
- Exhibition ends 29 September
