Okay, this photo has nothing to do with the exhibit at LACMA "Pompeii and the Roman Villa" but it is from my aerial photo shoot and I like it. So - on to thoughts about the exhibit.
We caught the tail end of the exhibit, it's closing soon and I was kinda interested but not really interested. It's not a period of art that I know that much about and most of my Roman history has been gleaned from reading Colleen McCullough novels (if I am even remembering the author's name right) and watching I, Claudius from the BBC. However I found the exhibit to be really interesting. In part because it takes art from a small selection of rich people's houses who were all competing to have the most lavish spread (Bernie Madoff anyone?) and they spent wads o' cash on decoration that we now call "Art." There is a disconnect between what we call "art" which we think of as a rarefied pursuit that is expensive and only for those in the know and what in ancient times was thought of as decoration and craft. Opera used to be the tele-novelas of the day - the sculptures and frescoes of the exhibit were things that people bought to live with - children played on the sculptures, people leaned against the painted walls. People create stories and narratives and pictures to entertain and amuse themselves and when we stick things in museums and put huge price tags on them and call them rare we take them out of the ordinary practice of meaning with in the culture and to a certain extent ossify them into non-meaning. Look at the hissy fits about the Met's new Tosca and LA Opera's Sigfried. Outside of the fact that they might be good or bad productions - the new stagings creates a new context for an old story and so brings these old texts somewhere into our contemporary life.
Anyway, the relatives of Julius Caesar and his cohorts were rich and lived with some really nice art. (They also lived with slaves but that's another topic) And it all got nicely saved when Vesuvius blew up in 79 AD. One of the things that I forgot was that the Romans had three point perspective. Certainly the ancient Egyptians didn't have it. But the Romans had it, the frescoes had perfect vanishing points and this absolutely breathtaking three panel fresco of Apollo and the Muses was incredible (The Moregine Triclinium: Apollo and the Muses). Apollo and the Muses are painted (with such tenderness) wandering among a colonnaded and trellised space with perfect perspective for the architecture they are pictured in. Simply gorgeous. And perspective becomes lost so soon after this. As the idea of art becomes entwined with Christianity perspective fractures and flattens. When you look at the ancient devotive icons from St. Sophia's space falls away as if insignificant - leaving you to worship only the sad eyes of the saint. Or if you look at some of the Madonna's from the 12 or 13 Century the landscape and the people collapse and circle around the holy pair.
Another landscape fresco was straight out of some surrealist nightmare. It depicted a garden with statuary and frescoes and heads flying around. What were those heads? Why are they just hanging out in the air? Who knows? It's creepy and beautiful at the same time. The birds are painted so specifically (This one's a swallow, this one a thrush) and these heads are flying around with the birds. Really odd, what were they thinking?
The beloved C. pointed out that there were also portraits of people who were recognizably different - people we would consider to be retarded, hermaphrodites. And that - in those days of Polytheism - that you had multiple models for the holy so that on one level everyone could partake of grace. With the advent of monotheism there becomes only one model of being - male becomes normal, there is no grace for difference. And the landscape changes to flat.
