The British Museum’s Pompeii exhibition has been a rollicking success. It’s been lauded by most critics and the public are evidently lapping it up. But it’s not perfect. As I mentioned in the comments on Anna’s review, I entirely agree with almost everything she says about it: shame about some of the presentation choices but the objects themselves are fantastic. The one note of disquiet Anna did raise about the items on display concerned the plaster casts of the dying Pompeians themselves. Here’s what she had to say about them:
In the final section, after a timeline of events and a case containing items found with some of the victims’ bodies, there are three sets of casts of victims: a woman from Oplontis, cast in resin; the seated man from Pompeii; and a family group, parents with their two children. Obviously you can’t talk about Pompeii and Herculaneum without talking about the human tragedy behind the preservation of all these wonderful things, and seeing the victims of the eruption brings it home in a way that no object or text panel can that these were real people – but that’s the problem: effectively, you’re watching real people’s death agonies, and displaying them spot-lit on a plinth just seems uncomfortably ghoulish. I’m not really sure what the alternative is – realistically, there was no way the casts were going to be left out, and indeed there are some pretty good arguments for including them. I just can’t think of a way of doing so that doesn’t still leave me feeling very uncomfortable about the whole thing.
I completely understand where Anna’s coming from with this, but I have to admit this was the one area where my response to the exhibition seemed to be largely at odds with that of my fellow Classicist visitors. I didn’t find the bodies particularly upsetting or uncomfortable. I found the anatomical details revealed by the resin cast interesting in a detached kind of way, but for the most part I didn’t really feel much about the ‘bodies’ at all.
This got me thinking. I’d like to believe I’m fairly well-adjusted and normal. I might tend a bit towards the traditional stereotype of the emotionally undemonstrative Englishman, but I don’t think I’m particularly lacking in empathy at any basic human level. Reflecting on my reaction – or lack of it – to witnessing the preserved death agonies of these poor Pompeians, I can only conclude that it’s my archaeological experiences that are responsible here; that working with ancient human remains on a fairly frequent basis has desensitised me somewhat to what they represent. Now this is important, and worth blogging about, not because of my own emotional state, but because of how it connects to two bigger questions: how do (and should) archaeologists relate to the fact that sometimes the objects they are working with also used to be people; and what are the rights and wrongs of using such material in museums and other public displays? Continue reading
Ancient Worlds 