The Afterlife of Pompeii.
“I see the tall and bending of your streets but now they echo only leather tourist feet and waking, ashen, grey-blue blinding death your sudden winding-sheet.” Peter Hammill, (“Pompeii,” 1975).
Pompeii is now far more famous now than when it stood. Immortalised in painting, music, films, T.V, and even pop songs (as above), the fate of this “city of all cities” has fascinated both experts and the general public. The tragedy of Pompeii has provided inspiration for whole range of artists from French neo-classicists in the 18th century to photographers like Giorgio Sommer and onwards to modern artists like Robert Rauschenberg in the 1950s.[1] Pompeii has been irresistible to art humourists Lucy McKenzie whose Cheyney and Eileen disturb a Historian at Pompeii (showing a young American couple in the famed Villa of the Mysteries at Pompeii) nods to pop and graphic art.[2] There have even been forgeries made of Pompeian frescoes in the age of Enlightenment.[3] But all these are interpretations of Pompeian society and culture which is not the same as looking at Roman painting in its original setting (above). Though we cannot do this, we are fortunate that a significant number of Roman wall paintings have survived and been preserved in museum conditions that allow us to glean something of how art fitted into the social life of Pompeii and other cities in the Bay of Naples. But in order to appreciate the function of this art we must consider the domestic spaces which it occupied.
[1] See the excellent catalogue of an exhibition held at the Getty Museum: The Last Days of Pompeii (J.P. Getty Trust, 2012).
[2] The Last Days of Pompeii, no. 92.
[3] Ibid, nos 58-60.
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