In their final terrifying hours on August 24 and 25, A.D. 79, residents of Pompeii and the nearby coastal resort towns of Herculaneum, Oplontis, and Terzigno in southern Italy gathered objects precious to them and tried to escape the fury of Mount Vesuvius.
The erupting volcano eventually buried Pompeii under 10 feet of ash and pumice, then waves of superheated gases and boiling mud traveling down Vesuvius´s slopes at speeds of nearly 100 miles an hour brought instant death to all still remaining in Pompeii and the other cities. The thriving, prosperous communities lay buried—silenced and forgotten for 1,700 years before being rediscovered through excavations which revealed that this horrific tragedy had preserved a wealth of information about the people, their belongings, and how they lived.
While work continues at Pompeii today, the city´s archaeological superintendent, Pietro Giovanni Guzzo, has organized an exhibition of nearly 500 objects excavated largely in the last 15 years. These new finds, supported by well-documented research, greatly expand what is known about the people of Pompeii and their neighbors, and what happened just before their deaths. The exhibition, Pompeii: Tales from an Eruption, closes its international tour at the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, where it will be on view from March 2 to June 22, 2008 in the Caroline Wiess Law Building, 1001 Bissonnet Street. The show´s bronze and marble sculptures, large-scale frescoes, jewelry, tools, table silver, armor, coins, skeletons, and plaster casts of the bodies of the victims now tell the stories of life at the Bay of Naples in the days of the early Roman Empire.
"Houston is fortunate to be one of the few venues in the world to show this heartrending and yet uplifting exhibition," said Peter C. Marzio, MFAH director. "It speaks at once to man´s creativity and achievement—in the first century and in the years of ongoing excavations—and to our fears. This exhibition offers visitors the rare opportunity to see a number of objects being shown for the first time outside of Italy and to contemplate the lives and the world of the people who owned them."
At the MFAH, the exhibition will be installed in the expansive Upper Brown Pavilion of the Law Building. Current photographs of Pompeii, including a panorama of one of the city´s main streets stretching nearly the length of the 300-foot gallery, will provide an overall sense of place and identify specific locations where victims, artworks, and other objects have been found. The exhibition includes about 240 objects from Pompeii, more than 100 each from Herculaneum and Oplontis, and about 20 from Terzigno. Notable works from Pompeii include an exquisite full-length statue of Apollo, god of music, found at the House of Menander, a wealthy in-law of Emperor Nero; a floor mosaic with a central image of Medusa found at the House of the Centenary; and a wall from the Building of the Triclinia with a deep red fresco depicting Nero as Apollo playing the lyre. From Herculaneum there are a marble head of an Amazon, a full-length statue of the goddess Hera, and a cast of 32 skeletons found in a boat shelter near the sea shore. The sculptures, both traveling for the first time, were found at the Villa of the Papyri, which may have been the home of Julius Caesar´s father-in-law, Lucius Calpurnius Piso Cesonius. From all four sites there are numerous examples of ancient coins and gold jewelry—necklaces, armbands, rings, earrings, and pendants.
"With about two-thirds of Pompeii now excavated, the citizens´ appreciation of fine art and craft continues to reveal itself," said Frances Marzio, MFAH curator in charge of the exhibition in Houston. "Coupling recent discoveries with information about the places they were found and what people tried to take with them as they fled deepens our understanding of what these ancient people considered important." -- www.mfah.org
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