(Originally posted: 6/5/2012)
It’s been a while since I visited a museum exhibit and wrote about it here. Last weekend, I was back in Cincinnati, and I visited the Cincinnati Museum Center again to see the exhibit “A Day in Pompeii.” Click through for my review.
The show runs in Cincinnati through August 12, with adult tickets coming in just shy of $20. After that, the exhibit moves to the Denver Museum of Nature and Science. It features a wide variety of artifacts from Pompeii, both Classical Roman and slightly earlier, though naturally most artifacts date from the first century A.D. (In case you’re a complete novice at classical history, Pompeii was a southern Italian city destroyed by the volcanic eruption of Mount Vesuvius in A.D. 79. It was only rediscovered about 200 years ago, and is by far the best-preserved Classical city.) It is a quite laudable exhibit, but not without a few problems.
The first pleasant surprise came when my companions and I were purchasing tickets. The ticketing agent informed us that photography in the exhibit was allowed, provided that no flashes were used. This is very rare for large travelling exhibits. The drawback of this pleasant surprise was that, not knowing beforehand, I had only my rather weak camera phone to take pictures with, and without a flash, the (quite typical) dim lighting in the exhibit made photography difficult.
The show was in the same lower-level space as last year’s Cleopatra exhibit, and followed a similar floorplan, weaving back and forth between several galleries. Whereas Cleopatra made extensive use of video monitors playing interpretive clips, however, this show had less video. One wall monitor showed interviews of University of Cincinnati faculty and crews at their Pompeii project. Other videos were large projections, with small theater-like benches for rather larger crowds. All were computer animated. At the entrance, one gave a brief introduction to the city and it’s story. Another, about halfway through the exhibit, showed a two or three minute tour of the city as it existed in the early first century. The last, near the very end, gave a three minute recreation of the volcanic eruption and destruction of the city. This was clearly intended to be shown in 3D (lots of debris flew straight at the camera), but it was projected as a normal 2D video. Nevertheless, the quality of the computer animation, surround sound, and size of the screen made it quite convincing.
When it comes to the artifacts themselves on display, the show had quite a good mix of the everyday and the luxurious. Pompeii’s great value to archaeology comes from the speed with which it was abandoned, and the mix of upper and lower classes that inhabited the city. Literally everything was left behind by people, rich and poor, fleeing the volcano, and that is not lost in the exhibit. Common ceramic ovens, coins of all values, gold jewelry, elaborate marble sculptures, even plumbing are all on exhibit, highlighting most dimensions of daily life at all levels of society. Unfortunately, there seems to be little overall structure to where and when particular artifacts are shown. A couple cases of foodstuffs (carbonized seeds, bread, etc.) are located close to one another, but far from the ovens in which those things would have been cooked. The bread loaf (preserved in much the same way as the famous body casts, which I will discuss below) came from a commercial oven, but it is also quite far away from other artifacts taken from commercial districts. A bit more obvious structure would have been nice.
Along those same lines, the text and interpretation was rather sparse throughout. This is probably my most common criticism of these kinds of exhibits. In this one, there were a few wall plaques with large blocks of text–which most people walked past–and small identifying plaques for most artifacts. If you didn’t know much about Classical Rome before entering the exhibit, you might have trouble integrating all the small bits of information about particular artifacts into a better understanding of the people and their community. The audio tour didn’t help much, either. Some audio snippets were dramatizations, others were interviews with experts, but none that I listened to added much of interest. One good thing about the audio tour, though was that there were actually two of them: one geared to adults, and one “family” tour obviously intended for children. This is a great idea, expecially for an exhibit like this one, which can easily touch on very weighty issues (death, the Pompeiian obsession with erotic art) that parents might want to steer kids away from.
Ultimately, the stars of this exhibit are the frescoes. Pompeiians loved to paint their walls, and frecoes preserved excellently in the volcanic ash that covered the city. There isn’t much to say about these other than that they are still beautiful, and many are as vibrant as if they’d been painted yesterday. They’re sprinkled throughout the exhibit, and they turn the normally dull color scheme of white sculpture, dull metal, and beige ceramic into a lively play of colors.
The final gallery of the exhibit features the most famous Pompeiian artifacts: the body casts. Pompeii was buried under volcanis ash and pumice, followed by rains–a recipe for cement, more or less. When individuals died in the disaster, their bodies were encased by ash that them hardened. Inside, the bodies decomposed to dust, leaving a void in the matrix. Excavators fill these voids with plaster, then remove the matrix to reveal lifelike–and generally horrifying–recreations of the individuals’ last moments. Thankfully, the exhibit did not show real plaster body casts (which would be very difficult to transport), but it would be incomplete without these very famous images. Resin replicas of the plaster casts were made and shown in the last gallery.
It was very dark in this room, with spot lighting on each cast. The casts were shown on simple black pedastals against featureless black walls. This took them completely out of context. Only the identifying plaques explained where each was discovered, and how each person died, and those were easily overlooked. Perhaps that was intentional, however, because the separation of the casts from their context only highlighted the humanity of the deceased and the tragedy they experienced. I’m generally against the exhibition of any authentic human remains, but these replicas-of-casts-of-voids-left-by-bodies probably made a stronger impact than real human remains would have.
After the body cast gallery, viers exit into a large hall with exhibits about volcanoes and geology, which is a nice touch, and connects the Pompeiian disaster with modern events like the Indonesian tsunami a few years back.
In the final analysis, this is a great exhibit for those already familiar with Roman culture. The opportunity to see the artifacts (and especially frescoes) is rare, and should be taken advantage of. If you’re more of a novice when it comes to classical civilization, you should probably do a bit of preparation prior to going–read a bit about the Roman Empire, the first century, etc., so that the artifacts have more of a cultural context. But, for anyone, the show is certainly worth the price of admission, and that might be the only comment that really matters.