Pompeian bronze9/10/2023 ![]() ![]() Its narrow streets, made narrower by street vendors and shops with jutting cloth awnings, teemed with tavern goers, slaves, vacationers from the north and more than a few prostitutes. 79 was a thriving provincial center with a population of between 10,000 and 20,000 people a few miles from the Bay of Naples. It was as though an eyewitness from antiquity had stepped forward with photographs of the disaster. By filling the holes with plaster, he created disturbingly lifelike casts of this long-departed Pompeiian family in its final horrifying moments. In 1863, an ingenious Italian archaeologist named Giuseppe Fiorelli noticed four cavities in the hardened layer of once-powdery ash that covered Pompeii to a depth of ten feet. ![]() The doomed couple fleeing down an alley with their two daughters (if they were indeed a family some have suggested the man was a slave) were the first Vesuvius victims to be so revealed, although these early casts are not in the exhibition. In the Field Museum exhibition, some of those moments are brought eerily to life by plaster casts of Pompeii and Herculaneum’s residents at the moment the eruption overtook them. “It’s a paradox of archaeology: you read the past best in its moments of trauma.” “If an ancient city survives to become a modern city, like Naples, its readability in archaeological terms is enormously reduced,” says Andrew Wallace-Hadrill, director of the British School at Rome. Indeed, Pompeii’s very destruction is what has kept it so remarkably alive. ![]() “Many disasters have befallen the world, but few have brought posterity so much joy,” wrote the German poet Goethe after touring Pompeii’s ruins in the 1780s, some 40 years after its rediscovery. Moreover, the passage of time has softened the horror of Vesuvius’ human toll. 79-natural forces transforming bustling areas overnight into cities of the dead-has long seemed unimaginable (if less so in the wake of Hurricane Katrina and Southeast Asia’s 2004 tsunami). To most people today, the scope of the calamity in a.d. By contrast, “Pompeii: Stories from an Eruption” employs archaeological techniques to link artifacts to the lives of the people who once lived with them. Early excavators didn’t much care where a particular statue or mosaic fragment had been found and what stories might be coaxed from them. The ancient Roman cities were buried under layers of volcanic rock and ash-frozen in time-until their rediscovery and exploration in the 18th century. The destruction of Pompeii and the nearby coastal town of Herculaneum is undoubtedly history’s most storied natural disaster. Organized by the office of Pompeii’s archaeological superintendent, the exhibition includes nearly 500 objects (sculpture, jewelry, frescoes, household objects and plaster casts of the dead), many of which have never been seen outside Italy. The hellish demise of this vibrant Roman city is detailed in a new exhibition, “Pompeii: Stories from an Eruption,” at Chicago’s Field Museum through March 26. With his free hand, he pulls a corner of his cloak over his face, as though the thin cloth will save him. In the instant before he dies, the man strains to lift himself from the ground with one elbow. Like thousands of others this morning, the four are overtaken and killed by an incandescent cloud of scorching gases and ash from Mount Vesuvius. She clutches an amber statuette of a curly-haired boy, perhaps Cupid, and the family silver, including a medallion of Fortune, goddess of luck.īut neither amulets nor deities can protect them. Close behind is their mother, scrambling frantically through the rubble with her skirts hiked up. Racing to keep up are his two small daughters, the younger one with her hair in a braid. Leading the way is a middle-aged man carrying gold jewelry, a sack of coins and the keys to his house. Under a lurid and sulfurous sky, a family of four struggles down an alley filled with pumice stones, desperately trying to escape the beleaguered city of Pompeii. ![]()
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