Pompeii and a deeper perspective

  This was not a physical trip back to the ruined cities of Pompeii and Herculaneum. We had mixed feelings about the first time around.

One thing we didn’t have mixed feelings about was our guide, Elisa Ingoni.

In spite of that first horrid tour - a too-short runabout with 20 other English-speaking tourists - our intrepid guide kept our interest and gave us plenty to see and think about. 

She was so good we asked her to give us a private tour of Herculaneum later in the month. I had wanted to visit Herculaneum since I was nine years old, having just visited Pompeii for the first time. Sixty-three years later, there we were, getting a more educated tour of Pompeii and being introduced very nicely to Herculaneum.

I’ve kept in touch with Elisa over the past 18 months, wanting to make sure she could make time for us in her busy guiding schedule to introduce us to more of Naples.

We ended up taking a very good look at the Archaeological Museum of Naples, which houses much of what was unearthed in Pompeii. (Not including the vast treasures lost from looters down the ages since the ruins Pompeii were rediscovered in the mid-18th century)

The museum visit with Elisa was an eye-opener. The Romans really rated Greek art. Roman artists copied the great Greek bronze statuary, only in marble and plaster. 

They liked to idealise the heads of the famous (statesmen, generals, emperors, philosophers). It was interesting to note one exception to the rule of idealisation: Seneca. That old stoic insisted that he be portrayed just as he looked. Elisa pointed out the long rows of heads, with Seneca’s being the only one with old, unkempt features.

We visited the Erotica room (I call it ‘The Naughty Room’ tee hee) and learned the difference between pornography and erotica. Porn was used to describe the male who acted as female in the frescoes and mosaics.  Erotica was heterosexual encounters. Neither had a negative connotation.  There were lots and lots of penises.  Large ones hanging over doors, small ones used as candleholders, miniature ones used as earrings (!) and other jewellery.  The point is: the penis was a sign of prosperity and not proscribed by puritan or indeed Christian religious taboos.

It was rather fun to see all this with Elisa who educated us away from today’s moral codes.

The mosaics (marble and glass) here are astonishing.  The older ones were made of marble and limited in colours; the later ones added coloured glass. Here's a Googled page of mosaics from the Museum. https://tinyurl.com/ykbc83b9

Some of the tiles are as small as two millimetres square.  The details are intricate and detailed.  The centrepiece of all the mosaics found in Pompeii is the Alexander Mosaic, originally a floor decoration, and an astounding nine feet tall and almost 16 feet wide using over four million tiles. It is being restored, so it’s not currently on exhibit. We hope to see it next time we’re in town.

Statuary from the House of the Faun (named for the statue originally found in the ruins of the villa) and many of the other considerable number of life-sized statuary are featured in their own room.  The boys look like ordinary, rather good looking young men with the exception of their little tails, little horns.  House of the Faun is considered one of the most luxurious aristocratic houses dating from before Julius Caesar, in the Roman Republic. Having read up ages ago about this place and not having been able to see it in person, it was especially gratifying to see the little Dancing Faun in the (bronze) flesh.

I wept.

The next thing Elisa taught us, and used the frescoes as examples, is that the Romans were using perspective and vanishing points over one thousand years before the Renaissance, when they were reintroduced into the arts. Some of these wall-sized frescoes even included bas-reliefs. Tools used to create dead-straight vertical and horizontal lines were found among the ruins: compasses and straight edges, L-squares. As a passionate but ignorant student of Renaissance art history, I was dumbstruck to learn vanishing points and perspectives were that old.

The last rooms we visited at the Museum housed small, everyday household items: silver dinnerware, goblets and flatware, cooking pots and pans.  There was even a bronze speculum on display. Major vuvva twinge.

The afternoon was exhausting but fulfilling and it was wonderful to spend time with Elisa again.  We’ve promised her one more visit in 2026. And this time she’s taking us back to Pompeii to see all the new stuff that’s been uncovered.