Pompeii and the Roman Villa. An Exhibition of Greek Culture?

“Pompeii and the Roman Villa” is, despite the title, a celebration of Hellenic more than Roman culture. Guest curator Carol C. Mattusch was an ASCSA student in the 1970s and has been the long-term ASCSA Managing Committee representative of George Mason University, where she is Mathy Professor of Art History. She is also general editor of Ancient Art and Architecture in Context, a series of books published by the ASCSA Publications Office with the support of The Getty Foundation.

“Even though the objects on display come from Italy,” she explains, “the exhibition is all about Greece. There are portraits of Romans but even the portraits of Augustus are totally classicizing. What wealthy Romans collected was traditional ‘classical’ art, old and new.  By the 1st century A.D. all the Greek artisans had left Greece to follow the jobs. The works are often signed by the artists who made them, and the names are Greek.”

The influence of classical Athens and Corinth on later cultures has been an abiding interest of Carol Mattusch’s since she started studying the art of bronze -making as a student. At the ASCSA , Director Jim McCredie introduced Carol to the leading Greek and foreign bronze experts, often through strategic seating at his famous dinner parties (“I have never experienced an intellectual atmosphere like it,” she says). It was in Athens that she also met her partner, archaeologist Richard Mason, also a School alum.

A successful dissertation led to a distinguished academic career, with publications including Classical Bronzes: The Art and Craft of Greek and Roman Statuary (Cornell University Press, 1996) winner of the Wiseman Book Award of the Archaeological Institute of America.  In 1996, Carol curated a major exhibition of classical bronzes held in North American collections at Harvard University and there she worked with Henry Lie, Director of the Straus Center for Conservation. Together Lie and Mattusch tried using trace element analyses to identify relationships between the pieces on display but finding links between sculptures removed from their archaeological contexts proved elusive.

It was then, on a visit to Italy, that Nancy Winter, the ex-Head of the Blegen Library introduced Carol to the Director of the Naples Museum, curator of an extraordinary collection of 90 bronzes trapped together in the Villa dei Papiri in Pompeii as the eruption of Vesuvius buried the city in A.D. 79. Permission for scientific testing was given and the results were fascinating. “By studying a large group of bronzes from the same context we were able to draw some exciting conclusions. The same trace elements in one casting suggested not only the same workshop but also the same casting. Sometimes we were probably looking at the same order for a single patron.”

Who were these patrons, bulk-buying large bronze sculptures for their Pompeian villas?  That they were Philhellenes is clear from the other finds in the Villa dei Papiri, notably the hundreds of papyri themselves, most of which featured the work of an Epicurean philosopher called Philodemus.  Wall-paintings, marble busts, mosaics . . . all kinds of art held in this cluttered house drew inspiration from classical Greece. As a portrait of elite culture frozen in time, the Villa dei Papiri fascinated Carol Mattusch and her studies culminated in the beautifully illustrated The Villa dei Papiri at Herculaneum. Life and Afterlife of a Sculpture Collection (Getty Publications, 2005), winner of the Charles Rufus Morey Award of the College Art Association.

From studying one villa, it was only a small step to looking at the wider context of elite life and to “Pompeii and the Roman Villa: Art and Culture around the Bay of Naples” at the National Gallery. The exhibition, which opens on October 19, 2008, includes finds from more than 20 villas and fine Roman homes, and from sites that include Pompeii, Herculaneum, Misenum, Pozzuoli, Stabiae, and Oplontis. Frequent visitors to Washington will find the galleries that previously housed the Edward Hopper retrospective dramatically transformed to mirror the arrangements of a Roman house. After meeting the owners, through portraits and busts, the visitor will enter a gallery furnished with the lavish adornments of these porticoed seaside villas. From the interior, we emerge into the garden and the wilder Dionysiac figures appropriate to the fresh air. Thematic galleries explore the “legacy of Greece” and the traditions of “art collecting” described in Cicero’s correspondence with his art dealer. Tension is in the air, however, and the dramatic interruption of Vesuvius is sure to be a gallery designer’s dream.

The final gallery is devoted to the rediscovery of Pompeii in the 18th century. During the 1700s Vesuvius erupted frequently and this spectacular sight attracted the Bourbon royals and their court to redevelop the Roman seaside resorts. Well-diggers soon started to unearth some startling finds and, whereas at the start of the century only about 70 famous ancient statues were known from the whole of Italy, by the end of the first decade of Charles VII’s excavations, over 90 sculptures had been found in the Villa dei Papiri alone. “The Pompeian artifacts that were found in the 18th century literally initiated the study of ancient art and made their way quickly into the first scholarly books about art history,” explains Carol Mattusch, “so these finds really played a formative role in the study of antiquity.”

Just back from another trip to Naples with a catalogue to finish and a lead on a possible high-profile loan from the Louvre, Carol Mattusch is immersed in the world of the Roman elite. Will she ever come back to Greece? “Oh yes,” she says, “because that’s where all this began.”

Pompeii and the Roman Villa: Art and Culture around the Bay of Naples runs from October 19, 2008-March 22, 2009 at the National Gallery of Art in Washington D.C. before moving to the Los Angeles County Museum of Art from May 3-October 4, 2009.