A cataclysmic natural disaster, death on a mass scale, an ancient city frozen in time, artefacts considered too lewd for display, biblical allusions to Sodom and Gomorrah; the story of Pompeii has engrossed, thrilled and titillated the world for two centuries.
For many, the opportunity to relive the terrifying eruption of Mount Vesuvius – every 15 minutes thanks to modern technology – will be too enticing to resist.
This is what the National Museum of Australia is banking on when it launches its blockbuster summer exhibition, Pompeii, this December in Canberra.
With all the bells and whistles audiences have come to expect from immersive and multimedia exhibitions, Pompeii, direct from the Grand Palais in Paris, is expected to be a must-see on the cultural calendar this summer.
To imbue the museum with a measure of scholarly endeavour, the moving soundscapes and floor-to-ceiling digital projections (360 degrees when Mt Vesuvius does its thing) will be accompanied by more than 90 objects from the Archaeological Park of Pompeii itself, including frescoes, mosaics, jewellery, sculpture and everyday household objects, all of them almost 2,000 years old.
Many of these, says National Museum curator Dr Lily Withycombe, have only been unearthed in the past few years, with archeologists at the Unesco world heritage site continuing excavations that began back in the middle of last century.
“Pompeii has captured the imagination of people internationally since the mid-19th century,” says Withycombe.
“The fact that you can go to this site and actually see how people lived in ancient Rome, to a degree that you cannot witness anywhere else in the world, gives the site its astounding integrity and authenticity.”
Synonymous with Pompeii are the disturbing images of human bodies, frozen almost instantly in time on an autumn afternoon in 79 CE as the pyroclastic flow from Vesuvius’s eruption hit, covering and preserving human flesh with calcified layers of ash.
Contrary to popular belief, the bodies on display are plaster casts of the remains, using a technique perfected by Giuseppe Fiorelli in the 1860s.
Now deemed by the Italian government too fragile to travel, the four bodies (and one dog) coming to Australia are resin replicas of the originals, which are housed in Naples’ National Archeological Museum.
“There is a great paradox that lies at the heart of Pompeii; that it’s both confronting and compelling,” says Withycombe. Copies of casts they may be, but the perfectly preserved expressions of horror and anguish on the victims’ faces, and the everyday objects strewn about them, are undeniably disturbing.
The issue of respect can be problematic, she says, particularly in an exhibition clearly tilted towards a younger audience.
For this reason, the National Museum has made the decision to include the representations of human remains in a dedicated area of the exhibition which visitors will have to make a conscious decision to enter and view.
A less delicate dilemma Pompeii exhibitions face these days is the display of the vast amount of erotic and pornographic paraphernalia that has been unearthed at the site over the past 200 years.
Housed in Naples’ Gabinetto Segreto (secret museum), the collection has been variously closed to the public, reopened and, at one point, sealed up entirely over the past century.
In the 1800s, the phalluses, pictorial brothel menus and graffiti found at Pompeii pointed to hard evidence of a decadent and immoral ancient Roman society visited upon by God with a punishment of hellfire and brimstone.
The 1834 novel The Last Days of Pompeii, by Edward Bulwer-Lytton (he who penned the original “It was a dark and stormy night” line) – in style an ancient bodice (or toga) ripping saga – fuelled Victorian suspicions the newly uncovered ruins of Pompeii, and its neighbour city Herculaneum, got what they deserved.
Withycombe says historical revisionism has removed much of the sensationalism associated with Pompeii’s supposed penchant for carnal pleasures.
“When you go to Pompeii, there will always be a long line outside the so-called brothel building and people are still fascinated by that,” she says.
But contrary to many reports compiled about the 12 square-km site over time, the city did not appear to have an overabundance of houses of ill-repute compared with any other port city in the Mediterranean at that time.
“In fact from my understanding, there’s still only one brothel confirmed within the entire city,” she says.
While the contents and frescoes from opulent villas and other remnants of the lives of the rich and powerful at the height of the Roman empire are an undeniable lure for visitors to Pompeii, Withycombe says she hopes visitors to the National Museum’s exhibition will be moved by the insights into the lives of everyday people 2,000 years ago.
“There’s this huge wealth of objects that show an ordinary, everyday lived experience, from people across the diverse strata of Roman society,” she says.
Travelling to Canberra will be pots, pans, wine-making utensils – even tiny tweezers used to pluck the ancient Roman eyebrow and minuscule dice for a pastime that has survived for thousands of years, gambling.
There will also be objects, including a grave headstone, acknowledging the central role enslaved people played in ancient Roman civilisation.
Pompeii the exhibition is not the first multimedia and immersive project the museum has staged, but it will be its largest to date.
While museum purists might dismiss the spectacle of Mount Vesuvius erupting on the quarter of every hour as a crowd-drawing gimmick, Withycombe, herself an archeologist, says there is a place in traditional museums for new technologies.
“They aid the experiential aspect of an exhibition, and I think they can make it really exciting and appealing to new audiences,” she says.
“In this case, it’s actually tapping into the fact that one of the reasons that we’ve been able to make such huge strides in archeology, not just in Pompeii, but throughout the world in archeology, is because of current technologies.
“So we’re not just thinking about how technology can assist our understanding of archeology, but how technology can amplify our sense of what an exhibition can be.”
Pompeii opens at the National Museum of Australia in Canberra on 13 December and continues until 5 May.
The secondary headline of this article was amended on 16 September 2024. A previous version incorrectly named the National Museum of Australia as the Australia Museum.
