Authors: Duncan Fallowell
How to Disappear (15 page)
Herculaneum was rediscovered before Pompeii. The official date for the former is 1738. Horace Walpole, on the Grand Tour, was relatively quick off the mark and wrote to his friend Richard West from Naples on June 14th 1740:
One hates writing descriptions that are to be found in every book of travels; but we have seen something to-day that I am sure you never read of, and perhaps never heard of. Have you ever heard of a subterranean town? a whole Roman town, with all its edifices, remaining under ground? Don't fancy the inhabitants buried it there to save it from the Goths: they were buried with it themselves; which is a caution we are not told they ever took. You remember in Titus's time there were several cities destroyed by an eruption of Vesuvius, attended with an earthquake. Well, this was one of them, not very considerable, and then called Hercula-neum. Above it has since been built Portici, about three miles from Naples, where the King has a villa. This under-ground city is perhaps one of the noblest curiosities that ever has been discovered. It was found out by chance, about a year and a half ago. They began digging, they found statues; they dug further, they found more. Since that they have made a very considerable progress, and find continually. You may walk the compass of a mile; but by the misfortune of the modern town being overhead, they are obliged to proceed with great caution, lest they destroy both one and t'other. By this occasion the path is very narrow, just wide enough and high enough for one man to walk upright. They have hollowed, as they found it easiest to work, and have carried their streets not exactly where were the ancient ones, but sometimes before houses, sometimes through them. You would imagine that all the fabrics were crushed together; on the contrary, except some columns, they have found all the edifices standing upright in their proper situation. There is one inside of a temple quite perfect, with the middle arch, two columns, and two pilasters. It is built of brick plastered over, and painted with architecture: almost all the insides of the house are in the same manner; and, what is very particular, the general ground of all the painting is red. Besides this temple, they make out very plainly an amphitheatre: the stairs, of white marble, and the seats are very perfect; the inside was painted in the same colour with the private houses, and great part cased with white marble. They have found among other things some fine statues, some human bones, some rice, medals, and a few paintings extremely fine. These latter are preferred to all the ancient paintings that have ever been discovered. We have not seen them yet â as they are kept in the King's apartment, whither all these curiosities are transplanted; and âtis difficult to see them â but we shall.
There might certainly be collected great light from this reservoir of antiquities, if a man of learning had the inspection of it; if he directed the working, and would make a journal of the discoveries. But I believe there is no judicious choice made of directors. There is nothing of the kind in the known world; a Roman city entire of that age, and that has not been corrupted with modern repairs. Besides scrutinising this very carefully, I should be inclined to search for the remains of the other towns that were partners with this in the general ruin. âTis certainly an advantage to the learned world, that this has been laid up so long. Most of the discoveries in Rome were made in a barbarous age, where they only ransacked the ruins in quest of treasure, and had no regard to the form and being of the building; or to any circumstances that might give light into its use and history.
Walpole's inclination was shared by others in the civilised world and Pompeii came to be discovered ten years after Herculaneum, though he never saw it. Venice is the victim of time, but Pompeii and Herculaneum escaped time for nearly two thousand years. History began again for them in the eighteenth century when these discoveries gave impetus to the Age of Enlightenment and to Neoclassicism in the arts. In the second half of the eighteenth-century Pompeiian decoration became all the rage, with its flat imagery and striking colours â black, green, purple, yellow, blue, vermilion â and numerous Pompeiian rooms appeared right across Europe from the Escorial to St Petersburg, more elegant but less mysterious than the originals. This decorative style, mixing architectural elements, grotesqueries and free-standing images set in large panels of coloured wash, injected a quasi-rococo gaiety into Neoclassicism and was fashionable for a long time (the Pompeiian Room at Ickworth was finished in 1879). These simulations have their own integrity; their function was aesthetic rather than antiquarian, and the gaucheness, for example, of Roman painting (so unlike the exquisite realism of Greek and Roman sculpture) was not reproduced.
My second encounter with Pompeii was on a breezy afternoon five years after my actual visit to the site, and it was indoors: the London exhibition to which I've already made reference. I love museums and therefore one of the regrettable cock-ups on my
To Noto
escapade was that I hadn't realised in advance that Pompeii was actually the ghost of a ghost and all its artefacts had been transferred to Naples, to the National Archaeological Museum set up in the old Bourbon cavalry barracks. On my southwards plunge I was not going to make a U turn and go back to the objects in Naples. But now some of the objects came to me, two hundred of them, in an exhibition called âRediscovering Pompeii' which had stopped off at the Accademia Italiana in Rutland Gate, Knightsbridge, on its journey round the world. These days not only people go travelling; treasures do too, cushioned and boxed and insured, curated and chaperoned, heralded by politicians, diplomats and princes. At one time the circus came to town to astound us with its marvels; now it is the travelling art show. This one comprised green glass jugs, bronze lamps, gold bracelets and earrings, cameo brooches, shapely clay pottery, sublime statuary, bowls and flasks, kitchen and medical implements, etc. There was even a pair of dice on display, most magical of objects (and invented by the Hindus incidentally). Why most magical? Because dice liquefy destiny and break the grip of the inevitable; when you gamble you sunder cause and effect.
Objects are vulnerable and require protection. In return they glorify the possessor and are physical evidence of his custodial power. Do the Elgin Marbles look less in the British Museum than they would back on the Parthenon frieze? In fact they look more. More like sculpture, less like adornment, because we have done the Duchamp trick of taking them out of context and putting them in a gallery. Something similar had happened to the objects at the Pompeii exhibition in London, which were mostly not ornaments but functional objects which had been ornamented. When the objects were in context, they probably attained a sort of inertia, edited out of the attention by quotidian familiarity. Did the Dancing Lar (up on toes, bronze, olive-green patina, about twelve inches high) dance better in the old days back in Pompeii? I think not. Objects as beautifully preserved as this appear to exist outside time. Their whole purpose was to triumph over the ephemeral, the circumstantial.
The eruption began on August 24th 79 AD (how do they work out these dates?) and took only two days to bury Pompeii-Herculaneum under fifteen feet of rubble. Talk about fire energy. The suddenness of the event means that for most of their existence these objects have not participated in life. They were instead transported through a conceptual hyperspace of collapsed time directly to us. They are young in the world. They are the flowers of catastrophe. Time has not been able to work its grinding, daily dose upon them.
To view such things after a journey on the London Underground sitting opposite someone who unnerves you, or after a motorway traffic jam which had you juggling radio stations in desperation, is to mediate further their meaning or, let us say, their relevance. Even the most abstract painting or building can reach us only by passing through filters of the personal. A lamp which is used for light, be it ever so beautiful, will â seen day after day at home â be valued in the first place as a light source, while a lamp in a glass case will never be a light source even for a second. It can only be an object of contemplation. And so, because this lamp is also a beautiful object which once had a function, we fall into a mood of nostalgia, the poignant reverie on a way of life which has gone. This is the second method of giving context to an object: through dreaming. The first is through the study of its history.
History is nostalgia with teeth. Nostalgia is one of the most powerful emotions of the civilised man, not so much in its reductive meaning of nostalgia for a golden age which has passed, but nostalgia as an enriching function of the soul, an activation of Platonic ideal states, a spreading of consciousness beyond the present moment. Many otherwise intelligent men forget that consciousness exists in time as well as space. Since material from the future is limited, this activation tends to employ past material which is plentiful, and so the more intensely one lives in the present, the more susceptible one is to nostalgia. This is what we receive from the object as relic. But the object also receives something from us. As a show-business star is rendered more charismatic by the adoration of audiences, so is an object in a museum or exhibition. The more it is venerated the more venerable it becomes.
Objects, like show-business stars, can acquire such a powerful presence in the imagination that an actual physical encounter may be disappointing. As we have remarked, Venice may well have achieved this on a metropolitan scale. A more modest example would be the case of amplified music on a CD which can be played so cleanly and loudly that to hear the same, say, symphony in a concert hall involves a reduction in stimulus. One must adjust, one must retune, to the acoustic performance. Use of the imperative âmust' is intentional because the live encounter is always superior to the simulated one. Why? Because machines are dead and people are alive. The CD performance is exactly repeatable. The live performance is always unique.
Are museum exhibits âlive' or âsimulated'? The marble table on show at the Accademia exhibition, on griffon supports with outspread wings, is decidedly the
ding an sich,
but not the
ding in situ.
It has been singularised and immobilised, like the symphony on the CD. We are sometimes told these days that objectification is morally wrong. I can't remember why. Something to do with alienation probably. But it can be extremely exciting and rewarding â not only in a museum but also in sex for example. Individuation is the empowerment of the self and this has to be predicated on a degree of reification of the other, as â to reverse the powerflow â an excess of consideration for the other will inevitably require self-abasement. Some might say that this marble table, like the sex object, degenerates into a component of private fantasy, becomes fodder for a predatory will. Who cares when the result is a revelation and brings forth new life?
The exhibition was sponsored by IBM. Which reminds us that objectification can lead to a pulverisation of experience into sense-data so extensive that only another computer can deal with it. A desiccated world, reconstituted mechanically, is a remarkable achievement in itself but when the external world becomes merely fuel for a contrived world, the facts of life by which we live and die may become increasingly unbearable to us. E.M. Forster wrote a disquieting story on this theme,
The Machine Stops,
a long time ago. This becomes the contemporary equivalent of the great nineteenth-century debate: rural Wordsworthian âlet it be natural' versus urban Baudelairean âlet it be artificial'. The former is Darwinian but spiritual; the latter is religious but atheistic. Do you want the epic, pantheistic experience stumbling round Pompeii? Or the lyric, intellectual experience sniffing round glass cases? Let us have both. Our understanding will operate through reciprocity, a concept we cited in the first chapter.
In the human sphere the most obvious reciprocity between the natural and the artificial is in the realm of sex. Pompeii is a very sexy place â gay, straight, everything between and beyond. Its citizens doubtless went through the emotional tangles we all go through and the ancient world has much to say on romantic love as well as on recreational sex. But they did not veil sexuality and are at home with it in a way that the Christian world never is, nor the Muslim or Jewish worlds. Sex in Pompeii was simply everywhere, openly displayed in pictures, household objects, public statues, graffiti, brothels and books, surviving testimony to the ruthlessness of sexual repression by the religions which came after. Though most of the explicit imagery has, for protection and not from censoriousness, been removed to the Naples museum, Pompeian sexuality still hits you with enormous force when you are there, those divine gifts of pleasure and beauty, anguish and excitement in human life which are sex. Something goaty and awe-inspiring trembles in the air and one cannot help feeling that in the arts of congress the Pompeian would find modern man a curiously worried child. Modern European psychology and art has largely been devoted to repairing this rupture from the elemental which was master-minded in private life by the Church and in public life by the industrial revolution.
Sex, so crucial to the experience of Pompeii, was almost completely absent from this London exhibition, as though sex could have no place in the software of information technology. Sex is far too human â the programmer cringes, turns aside to measure the height of a vase in exact centimetres. Among the many oil lamps on display there was none of Pompeii's most popular kind, the phallic type. Indeed there was only one phallus (i.e. the erect penis) to be seen here at all, an elegant stone abstraction which would have been wedged into the wall of a house to discourage malign influences. Of the countless decorative phalli found all over Pompeii and Herculaneum not one made it to Rutland Gate.
The exhibition refused to be sexy. What it wanted to be was pretty â and it succeeded. Though the space was cramped and the objects bundled in, one was arrested by the grace of objects from the ancient world. The head of an athlete, for example, reminded one that such skill collapsed in the Dark Ages and modelling as unsubmissive and fine as this would not resurface until Donatello. So it was an enthralling prettiness, a
Midsummer Night's Dream,
with nothing of the cute about it, more of the macabre, and I employ the word âpretty' because of the smallness of scale. One is so accustomed in our cities to a setting all out of scale to ourselves that to find oneself in a world where man is the measure is like finding a world in miniature: human scale has come to mean small scale. But our artificial creation, the City, in outgrowing us, has taken on some attributes of Nature. Phrases like âthe asphalt jungle' (W. R. Burnett, 1949) or âthe concrete jungle' (Desmond Morris, 1969) remind us that the dichotomy between the two sensibilities, artificial and natural, has here been resolved in a way that is close to despair. The general view is that modern cityscapes are at their most appealing at night when they appear to melt into the starry cosmos.