All right, so more audience participation, but I'm not going to make you stand up:
How many of you have been to Pompeii?
Raise your hands.
So, maybe about a quarter of you, right?
But you all know the story, don't you?
1,933 years ago tomorrow,
(Laughter)
yeah,
August 24, AD 79,
Mount Vesuvius on the Bay of Naples in central Italy suddenly erupted
and buried not only the city of Pompeii
but Herculaneum, Stabiae and the whole region
under tons of ash, gas, mud and volcanic debris,
totally obliterating them.
Now, we know a lot about this disaster
that's really become part of our own civilization.
We know a lot about it because a young man named Pliny
was on the northern edge of the Bay of Naples
and witnessed the eruption,
and he wrote an account of that event.
And central to his story was the story of his uncle,
conveniently also named Pliny,
who was the admiral of the Roman fleet,
and he was really interested in natural history, the elder Pliny,
and he was setting out to observe, at closer range, the volcano,
when he got messages that people needed rescuing.
So what began as a scientific expedition ended up as a heroic rescue mission.
And Pliny the Elder sailed south into the volcanic cloud
and eventually died there.
And that's what we see in this painting by Jacob More -
now in the National Gallery of Scotland -
we see Vesuvius erupting,
the lava flowing down the hill,
and in the foreground,
the elder Pliny succumbing, falling,
collapsing in the arms of two of his slaves
while other refugees are moving off.
So we have this eyewitness account
that makes it really vivid exactly what happened there,
and, of course,
from the early 18th century, we have actual remains
because well diggers discovered Pompeii and the other Vesuvian cities.
And unlike other ancient sites, like Rome or Athens or Jerusalem,
that have been overbuilt for years and years and years, centuries, millennia,
Pompeii was buried, sealed by the volcano and all that ash,
like - we seem to think, we hear over and over again -
a time capsule, frozen.
And we find there not only cooking pots and houses and buildings -
things that we find in Rome and Athens and Jerusalem -
but actual perishable materials:
eggs, carbonized bread loaves, food stuffs, medical instruments -
the daily life of antiquity.
We can experience it directly when we go to Pompeii,
have this unmediated experience
of what life was like in the ancient world,
and we have the whole city here,
spread out before, now, the ruined, collapsed cone of the volcano
that was so much larger.
We have the city plan, we have paintings, we have houses, we have sculptures.
Now, I'm trained as a classical archaeologist,
which means I have to go to the Mediterranean to do my work
and go to the Greek islands,
and it's really tough and yeah, yeah -
(Laughter)
That's the way it is.
And like all of my colleagues, I've studied Pompeii,
but I never really worked on it until a few years ago
when I was asked to collaborate with LACMA
when they had their exhibition
"Pompeii and the Roman Villa:
Art and Culture [around] the Bay of Naples."
Did any of you see that show?
A few of you saw it.
And my job, really, was to translate this exhibition -
which opened at the National Gallery in Washington -
to LACMA's space,
and working with the designers there,
especially Victoria Behner, who is wonderful,
we made this show look really beautiful in LACMA's space.
And it was all about art and culture,
although most of this stuff wasn't about art.
As an archaeologist, I deal with old and broken stuff.
Some of it's very beautiful, but it wasn't created as art;
it was created to decorate houses or to commemorate important people.
But we did a nice job at LACMA, and I was very happy with it,
although I have to admit,
I wasn't responsible for its placement in the Art of the Americas building.
(Laughter)
That was LACMA's choice,
and I don't know what they did to a whole generation of schoolchildren
who now are going to think Pompeii's somewhere in South America.
I don't know.
(Laughter)
I was very happy with the exhibition, but it was in many ways traditional
because it perpetuated
what I've come to think of as the myth of Pompeii,
that we can go and recover the past,
and the ruins and the finds
give us insight directly into the lives of ancient people.
And, of course, as an archaeologist, that's what I live by,
that is to some degree true.
But at the end of the LACMA show, like so many exhibitions,
as a coda, as an add-on,
there was a little section on the afterlife of Pompeii,
and there were more of these volcano paintings.
This is another one, by Valenciennes,
from the museum in Toulouse, France,
and it's similar to the one by Jacob More:
the volcano is exploding, the sea is roiling,
and Pliny the Elder is collapsing in the foreground
as per the letter his nephew wrote to the historian Tacitus.
And you've got more architecture collapsing in front.
Now, what's important here
is that when Jacob More painted in the 1780s
and Valenciennes painted this 40 years later,
they weren't eyewitnesses like Pliny the Younger
to the ancient eruption,
but Vesuvius was erupting again;
it was continually erupting until about 1944,
which was the last eruption.
And what these painters did is they took contemporary eruptions,
which they witnessed and painted -
here's one by [Joseph Wright] -
and they superimposed the ancient past.
You'll notice it looks very much the same,
except the sea is calm because it's a smaller eruption
and there's a lot of lava.
There was more lava in the modern eruptions than the ancient one
because the ancient one was explosive,
and that's why all that ash came down and buried everything.
If there had been lava,
it would have burnt everything and we wouldn't have anything left.
But this is Volaire, which looks like Valenciennes.
This is by Joseph Wright,
and you see, it's painted about the same time as Jacob More -
here's Jacob More's painting.
He just added some guys in togas in the foreground
and some ancient ruins in the background,
and you get antiquity.
(Laughter)
And I came to realize that so much of what we think about Pompeii today,
where we think we're having this direct connection to the past
when we go and we can experience the past,
it's not as much a window to the past as it's a mirror of the present:
We're superimposing what we expect, what we know and what we see
onto the past.
Andy Warhol never saw Vesuvius erupt,
but he did a whole series of Vesuvius in 1985,
when the AIDS crisis was ravaging his community,
to symbolize the catastrophe, the apocalypse, that was happening.
And Pompeii has become a kind of ground zero for us,
the type site for any disaster,
whether it's the Lisbon earthquake of 1755,
the San Francisco earthquake of 1906,
whether it's Katrina or Haiti or the Fukushima earthquake,
all those natural disasters,
or man-made ones -
the Civil War, Hiroshima, Nagasaki, 9-11 -
Pompeii is always invoked,
and it's invoked
because it's become for us the foundational disaster of all time.
And that it was,
but again, the idea that we can really experience this
is what I think of as the myth of Pompeii.
And this has been promulgated most greatly after Valenciennes and after Jacob More
by Edward Bulwer-Lytton,
the guy who did "The Dark and Stormy Night" novel.
He did another novel that was much more famous,
"The Last Days of Pompeii."
Published first in 1834,
this was the bestseller of the 19th century.
It was The Da Vinci Code, the Twilight series, Harry Potter
all rolled into one, right?
And it came to inspire theatrical plays, operas,
pyrodrama re-creations
as well as, eventually, films.
It revolves around two interlocking love triangles,
people really intersecting with each other in intrigue
just before the eruption of Vesuvius,
which, of course, is the climax of the novel
when the poor, blind flower girl, Nydia, is able -
as you see on the right hand slide -
to lead her people out
because she alone can see or find her way in the dark
because she knows the city in its darkness.
And it's this title, "The Last Days of Pompeii,"
that we've taken as the title for an exhibition
that will open in two weeks in the Getty Villa,
but we've added the subtitle
"Decadence, Apocalypse and Resurrection."
(Laughter)
Not just because these are great words that are very exciting,
but they are -
we didn't focus group this, but we thought hard -
(Laughter)
because we bring these ideas to the ancient city.
Why was Pompeii destroyed?
Not just because a volcano happened to erupt
but because they were decadent and they deserved it.
Was that because they didn't accept early Christianity?
Pat Robertson would have you believe so:
he said that about Haiti,
he said that about Greenwich Village on 9-11.
Whether it's religious decadence, sexual decadence, gluttony,
the violence of the arena or something else,
Pompeii was destroyed because it deserved to be destroyed.
That's one of our ideas.
Apocalypse - we can't think of the city without thinking of its destruction.
The daily lives of its inhabitants that we reconstruct
we think we experience when we go there or go to an exhibit -
we know the ending: it's the eruption.
Well, they didn't know the ending.
And then resurrection has to do with the fantasy of archaeology,
the fantasy that we can somehow recover the past.
So quickly, I want to run through just a few objects in the exhibition
and talk a little bit more about these three themes.
Decadence - a painting like this,
by John William Godward in the Getty's own collection.
We see these women in very sheer garments -
I mean, we really see these women -
and they're in an archaeologically correct interior:
luscious, colored marble veneers, mosaic floors in the corner,
tiger skins, bear skins.
They're playing with each other, or one's teasing the other,
with little bone hairpins with carved figures on them.
These are all things taken from Pompeii and the Naples Archaeological Museum.
It's foundationally accurate;
there's the support system that's totally credible,
but the scene is a Victorian fantasy.
(Laughter)
It's the fantasy of a Victorian male
who's imagining what a pair of courtesans is doing all day,
waiting for their lovers to come in the evening.
This is, again, the past being used to mirror the present,
to see what's forbidden.
And, of course, Godward couldn't paint this in contemporary terms;
it wouldn't have been acceptable.
But he can dress it up in classical garb and make it Pompeian,
and it's okay for his audience.
We're very pleased to get this painting, The Gladiator at the Banquet,
from the Museo di Capodimonte in Naples,
the masterpiece of Francesco Netti,
which, again, I've researched this.
Archaeologically, it's perfect.
The building, the mosaics, the frescoes on the wall,
the helmet of the gladiators -
everything can be traced back to remains on site in Pompeii
or in the Naples museum where most of the finds went.
And Netti, we know, studied those finds,
and yet the overall scene is a fantastic invention.
Gladiators at a banquet?
Now, if you watch gladiator movies on TV or something,
you might just think this happened.
But gladiators were highly trained and very expensive.
They didn't perform at dinner parties.
They performed in the arena,
and they were rarely killed, because they were too expensive.
So this scene of drunken, murderous, dissolute Romans
falling over themselves, literally, into the dirt,
or swooning, the women offering wine to the victorious gladiator
as these emaciated slaves drag his victim out through the bloody sand.
This is not only an indictment of Ancient Rome;
we know that Netti was a social reformer.
He wrote copiously
about the terrible conditions of peasants in Southern Italy.
This is an attack on contemporary aristocrats and landowners
translated into the past.
Again, Pompeii as mirror, not window.
I've spoken a lot about apocalypse.
We have lots of volcano paintings in the show.
I just want to talk briefly about this one,
which is one of my favorites.
Sebastian Pether, a poor, British artist, never made it to Naples,
copied other people's paintings,
and that's why there's confusion about this architecture in the middle -
Roman architecture with cupolas - un huh.
(Laughter)
The sea is calm,
but what I really love are two things.
There are figures in the painting in 19th century dress,
collapsing the time between now and then.
They're spectators to this ancient disaster.
But what I really love is this frame,
the gilt frame with chunks of lava set in and gilt.
So we have here physical proof of the veracity of the scene, right?
Chunks of Vesuvian lava.
This really happened.
And this is what all the literature said.
But we went to the Boston Museum of Fine Arts to examine the painting,
and we got it down, and we started looking at it,
and one of my colleagues there is a woodworker.
He said, "This isn't lava; it's shaved wood burl."
So even the foundational testimony to the truth of the image is fake.
(Laughter)
And that's true of a lot of what we see at Pompeii.
Many, many people, many specialists, my colleagues,
don't know that Pompeii was very badly bombed
by the Allies in the Second World War,
collateral damage.
There were no smart bombs,
and Pompeii is located very near major supply routes,
roads, bridges, railway lines,
and after the invasions of Salerno in 1943,
the Allies needed to cut off German resupply.
Over 160 bomb strikes are recorded; I'm sure there are many, many others.
And many of these buildings that were so badly bombed out
were quickly restored in the late 1940s and '50s.
So what we see at Pompeii isn't what Vesuvius left;
it's part of an ongoing process.
Our experience there isn't a direct connection to ancient Rome;
it's one that's highly mediated.
And that's true of the most famous and familiar "artifacts" from Pompeii,
the bodies.
The bodies aren't petrified,
they're not calcified,
they're not ossified -
they're modern sculptures.
They were created first in 1863,
when archaeologists who had long found hollows in the ash -
where people who had died from suffocation had been buried by the falling debris
and then their bodies disintegrated, leaving hollows.
Archaeologists realized they could pour plaster into these hollows
and create forms
that were modern casts of the lost voids of the disappeared victims.
And that's what you see if you go to Pompeii
in cases around the site.
But if you go to exhibitions in Malibu or San Diego or New York
or Denver or Cincinnati or anywhere else in the world,
you don't see those plasters -
I always have to catch myself that I don't call them original plasters,
because they're not original, they're already one removed -
you see second-generation resin casts,
after those first-generation plaster casts,
after the empty voids of the disappeared victims.
So we're three or more times removed from those victims.
That doesn't mean these aren't powerful images
that affect us emotionally,
and that doesn't mean that they've inspired artists since then,
generations of artists.
Just as More and Valenciennes and Piranesi and others
were inspired in the 17th and 18th century,
in the 19th and 20th and 21st centuries,
artists have been inspired by Pompeii and the bodies
and the calamity that befell the inhabitants.
On the top, I show you a sculpture by Arturo Martini,
an Italian sculptor of between the wars,
who deliberately rejected
the beautiful neoclassicism of Mussolini's fascist era
to carve in this rough stone a figure he called "The Drinker,"
modeled on the Pompeian bodies.
And we'll have in the exhibition this figure on the bottom,
by our contemporary, Anthony Gormley,
who uses his own body to image, in this case,
what he calls "The End of the Human Project."
We also have a modern work, a contemporary work,
that reflects the most famous of the casts, the dog of Pompeii.
Allan McCollum,
to emphasize our distance from the original loss and sorrow
and yet how it's still with us, although in this very mitigated, mediated form,
has created a work based on multiples,
to remind us that we're not seeing the dog;
the dog is gone, and we're seeing a reflection of it.
Now, there's a lot more in the show, but I have to move on quickly.
Resurrection - the fantasy of archaeology.
This French painting by Sain, in the Orsay,
which is coming to the Villa in two weeks,
shows this happy scene
of peasant women carrying dirt and revealing finds.
That's not how it was.
The earliest excavations we know were done by convicts
in chains.
In the 19th century, they were done by poor peasants,
and notice in the front here,
the guard with a switch to make sure the work kept going.
I'm very pleased that from the Vatican we'll have this object.
How many of you have seen the Sistine Chapel?
I'd say most of you.
Then you've all walked past this and not seen it.
(Laughter)
I did several times.
It's in the room right after the Sistine Chapel,
and you walk by in a daze, and you don't see it.
This is a monumental, beautiful vetrine,
almost a reliquary,
with a Latin inscription in gilt lettering
saying these are objects that were excavated at Pompeii
in the presence of Pope Pius IX
in 1849
and given to him by the King of Naples.
Archaeology has always been
the sport of kings and the stuff of politics.
But think for a minute.
If you're running the excavations and the Pope is coming to visit
and you're going to put on an excavation for him,
are you going to leave it to chance what you might turn up?
No way.
The case is full of wonderful finds:
bronzes, terracotta, glass, marbles.
The marble relief on the bottom was thought to be Alexander the Great.
Spectacular things.
There's no doubt that these excavations were staged,
and scholars today debate the degree to which they're salted -
that the pieces were deliberately buried to be found
rather than prepared.
In fact, some people think
that relief of the horseman comes from a different site altogether.
So even what you excavate at Pompeii might not be Pompeian.
We'll have screens for film clips, in the show,
from the earliest silents through the great epics
because the moving picture has mightily shaped our view
and they follow this arc of decadence, apocalypse and resurrection
up to the present day,
where the Simpsons
(Laughter)
go to Pompeii, and they find themselves.
Right? It's the mirror.
And Doctor Who - I love this.
The eruption of the volcano and the destruction of thousands
isn't enough.
They have to add space aliens.
(Laughter)
How does that reflect upon us?
Now, a few months ago -
and I've been working on this show with colleagues for years -
in April, it was the anniversary of the sinking of the Titanic,
and I was struck to see this photo of half a Titanic, full-scale,
in Pigeon Forge, Tennessee.
It's bizarre.
But you'll remember
there were all these celebrations and parties and reenactments
of the sinking of the Titanic.
And I started to think,
How does it happen that a calamity on this scale
becomes the subject of entertainment and celebration?
It happened in Pompeii very early,
not only with paintings but with operas and stage productions.
In 1906, you could dance The Last Days of Pompeii twostep march
for an evening's entertainment.
Today, taking a little more risk,
you can go to Reno or Las Vegas and play the Pompeii slot machine,
and if you win, the volcano will erupt with gold coins.
(Laughter)
And if you have the occasion to travel to Williamsburg, Virginia,
and visit Busch gardens,
you can take the Escape from Pompeii water ride.
It's fun, especially on a hot day;
I did it once.
But I submit to you, we can't really escape from Pompeii,
because we've come to carry it around with us wherever we go.
But it escapes us, the real, the historical Pompeii
because the Pompeii we know
is the one that we're continually reinventing and recrafting
to suit our own preoccupations, needs and desires.
And that's what this exhibition is all about.
It opens in three weeks, September 12th,
runs through early January.
There's another show, more documentary, of photographs,
at the Italian Cultural Institute
in Westwood.
Please come visit it at the Getty Villa.
Thank you very much.
(Applause)