What remains of humans: Casts in Pompeii

On 10 June 1864, Eleanor Severn wrote in her journal that she, her older sister Mary Newton and Mary’s husband Charles Thomas Newton arrived in Naples on train from Rome. The next 10 days were spent mainly in the museum, presumably what had been the Royal Bourbon Museum until Italian unification in 1860 and what is now the National Archaeological Museum of Naples. The new Director from 1863 was the groundbreaking Italian archaeologist and revolutionary Giuseppe Fiorelli. On Sunday 12 June they went to Pompeii where Eleanor was 'quite delighted' and they went again with the Consul General, who was then Edward Walter Bonham, a few days later. Naples and the Amalfi region was only just under the control of the new Italian State. Pompeii had been semi excavated for over a century with bronzes, frescoes and sculptures taken by the Bourbon monarchy for the museum and their palaces as well as diplomatic gifts.

Fiorelli was literally groundbreaking by putting in a systematic form of excavation at Pompeii and putting the site into zones, which are still used today - see the map. In 1863, Fiorelli had worked out a method of using plaster to make casts of the voids left by the decomposed bodies of the people engulfed by the gas and rock that hit the town when Vesuvius erupted in August 79 CE. (August is the traditional date but people are now suggesting it was October). Whether the Newtons and Eleanor saw the casts is not known (at the moment), though it is highly likely that Charles Thomas Newton did. It would be hard to imagine such a discovery not being shown by Fiorelli to Newton, Keeper of the Greek and Roman Department at the British Museum.

When I visited in 2006 I took a photograph of a cast of a man crouching with visceral fear, though the features of his face are obscured, which was in the edge of a storehouse. It is the same cast pictured in Mary Beard's Pompeii. The Life of a City (2008), in which she talked about the 'ghoulish spectacle' of the 'Egyptian mummy effect' of the display of these hollows of people. I knew exactly what she meant, as I had been uncomfortable myself with this loan crouched figure, or the casts of lying people laid in racks that I saw then and had seen 10 years previously. This same crunching figure is on an interpretation panel that gives advice to visitors on the contents of the display of these casts in the Palestra Grande (Zone II). The figure himself is now within this display, which fully documents the process of making the casts and the evidence of who these people were that they give, beyond ‘ghoulish spectacle’. The advice to visitors fully reads:

In this exhibition space the original casts of the victims of the eruption in Pompeii are displayed.

If you think these may be upsetting for you to see then take a moment and decide whether to enter.

Once inside, we ask you to proceed with respect and in silence.

Although I knew of these casts and had seen some of them, I caught my breath at that of a young boy, who must have been 2-3, and could not bear to read the label. An excerpt from a letter by Fiorelli’s friend (and fellow revolutionary) Luigi Settembre, who wrote to Fiorelli in February 1863, is quoted in the exhibition:

It is not art, it is not imitation; but it is their bones, the relics of their flesh and their clothes mixed with plaster; it is the pain of death that regains body and form. You, my Fiorelli, have discovered human pain, and anyone who is human feels it.

Settembre captures the tormented humanity of these casts and the spectators looking at them perfectly. Like Fiorelli, he had been imprisoned and had also had a death sentence commuted to 8 years imprisonment by the Bourbon King Ferdinand II in 1851. Friends and other Liberals in England, including Newton’s boss and friend the Principal Librarian of the British Museum Antonio Panizzi, campaigned for his deportation. Settembre went to the safety of England but returned to rebuild Naples and its university shortly after. Although married, he also wrote an exploration of homosexuality The Neoplatonists, which was only published in 1977. I feel he - like all of us - knew and had his own share and understanding of human pain.

As my friend and fellow historian Lucia Patrizio Gunning and I have written for Museum International, reactions to displays of human remains (in this case voids) can never be predicted. The warning sign is welcome but a space to reflect - like that of the Garden of Idleness and Pleasure in Ercolano/Herculaneum - would also have empathetically helped with grieving that human pain.

Overall, though, the site of Pompeii feels better looked after than when I visited in 1996 and 2006, even with the crowds of visitors. It is taking a step away from being a spectacle to feeling human pain and history. There are many Pompeiis - the Roman past and the visitor present, as Beard has pointed out. And also the fictional in famous novels, from Bulwer Lytton to Robert Harris, in TV, from Up Pompeii to Doctor Who, and so many other depictions… as the objects, the desolated houses and the voids of people bring imagined life into being. My own first encounter with Pompeii was with The House of Caecilius in a Latin text book, so was very excited to visit his house and the dog Cerberus again.