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".
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"
In an odd way, both those answers turn out to be right.
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
In fact, at the very moment that one version of the
young woman is greeting visitors to the Getty Museum in Malibu, an
identical version has pride of place in another Pompeii exhibition in
Denver, Colorado - different casts and recasts of the same void made by
the same dead human being 2,000 years ago (and 5,000 miles away).
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
That idea faded almost instantly when the casts
revealed that the victims were heavily clad, wrapped in cloaks and thick
dresses, heads covered and some of them even in trousers. (Although I
have never quite understood why those 19th Century historians were so
certain that the garments people chose to wear in the middle of a
volcanic eruption were a good guide to their usual day-to-day attire.)
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?
When they're not in disaster-movie mode, modern
visitors like to think of its living side, with Roman bread still in the
Roman oven and the trundling Roman carts - or the seedy encounters in
the Roman brothel - only a glimpse away. Not so tourists 200 years ago,
who found it the ideal place to reflect on their own mortality.
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.
