Pompeii: an archeological fantasy | Ken Lapatin | TEDxSantaMonica

The legacy of Pompeii fascinates us. But is it because it's a reflection on the past or a mirror of the present?

Kenneth Lapatin is an antiquities curator at the J. Paul Getty Villa in Malibu. He holds graduate degrees from Oxford University and the University of California, Berkeley. A Fulbright Scholar at the American School of Classical Studies at Athens and a fellow of both the American Academy in Rome and the Center for Advanced Studies in the Visual Arts in Washington, D.C., he was a professor at Boston University before joining the Getty in 2002. He is the author of "Chryselephantine Statuary in the Ancient Mediterranean World" and "Mysteries of the Snake Goddess: Art, Desire, and the Forging of History," as well as the guide to the Getty Villa and other books, articles, and reviews.

This talk was given at a TEDx event using the TED conference format but independently organized by a local community. Learn more at http://ted.com/tedx.

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)