Life and Death in Pompeii and Herculaneum

The Reading Room is currently packed with Roman remains and with visitors attempting (or pretending) to look at them. The latest blockbuster at the BM (sponsored by Goldman Sachs) looks set to exceed all other oversubscribed sensationalist exhibitions, with more than 250 objects in a mazy but airy layout. When I first heard about this show, my main concern was how it could possibly compare or compete with the experience of visiting what’s actually left of the cities of Pompeii and Herculaneum in Italy. The principal attraction of this subject for those with some interest in the fine arts must be the famous wall-paintings, and how could these be transported to London? Yet, as is swiftly apparent on entering the display, there is enough here to make even the specialist excited.

The hopeful viewer is greeted by three dramatic objects at the exhibition’s entrance: a fresco fragment of lovers drinking, a carbonised table (very similar to the painted one in the fresco behind) and a cast of a dog that perished in the disaster, looking rather like a convoluted stone sculpture. If these are not enough to grab your attention, then settle down in front of a wide-screen film nearby about how like life now it was in AD 79 when Vesuvius was about to erupt and seal the two living cities in mausolea of ash and lava. The small seaside town of Herculaneum was destroyed by what has been described as a ‘fatal pyroclastic surge’ (a dense mass of very hot ash, lava fragments and gases), while the industrial city of Pompeii was buried in ash and pumice. A great deal was preserved and artefacts are still being excavated: this show combines recent discoveries with earlier finds and focuses on the Roman domestic set-up in order to provide a picture of ordinary daily life.

The lares et penates, the gods of hearth and home, will probably not be best pleased to find their precincts transported to London, and I don’t expect they will be satisfied by the filmed reconstructions or photographic displays, or even the twittery jingly soundtrack, interspersed by the watery burbling of a fountain.