Sons of Vesuvius blog

Figli del Vesuvio is a new blog that calls itself a "meeting spot for the community around the volcano, from the coast to the Vallo di Lauro, created to promote and record the activities of [cultural-historical] organizations." For visitors to Campania, especially Friends of Herculaneum who have an inclination toward archaeological and historical things, this website is likely to offer a selection of interesting activities at any time of the year. A searchable calendar accompanies the site.

Friends of Herculaneum who read Italian AND who want to keep the finger on the pulse of cultural activities around Vesuvius, will want to follow a recently created blog called "Figli Del Vesuvio." Sons of Vesuvius are that interesting population that preserves the traditions and culture of life on the slopes of an active and classically inclined volcano. Begun in October 2012, posts cover guided tours, musical, historical, archaeological, cultural events, and excursions of all types all over Campania, from Posillipo to Ottaviano and from the coast to the Parco Nazionale Vesuvio and from Santa Maria Capua Vetere to the Campi Flegrei.  Matilde Serao, Benedetto Croce, Pulcinella, and the nameless creators of Presepe nativities are equally at home on this site.


The blog's manifest, "A Paradise inhabited by Demons?" (16 October 2012), invites contributions from numerous quarters so as to "give a collective character with numerous authors." And since its opening, indeed, those contributors have given a rich overview of the many cultural activities that can help both visitors and inhabitants of Campania a sense of the historic vibrance of Italy's Southern Jewel.

Check out figlidelvesuvio.blogspot.com.

New Titles from Arbor Sapientiae Press

Friends of Herculaneum may be shopping for holiday gifts of a bibliographic nature. 
Perhaps some of these titles, newly released from Arbor Sapientiae Libri in Naples, has items to interest you or your friends.

             [Santa will soon see this post and take note: I hope for items by Garcia y Garcia and Fino!]

Under the section of Pompeian archaeology and History of Campania, Arbor Sapientiae lists:

L. Jacobelli, Alèm de Pompeia: riscoprendo il fascino di Stabiae, bilingual edition in Portuguese and Italian (Longobardi: Castellammare di Stabiae, 2012).  75 euro.

L. Garcia y Garcia, Nova Biblioteca Pompeiana - 1-o Supplemento (1999-2011) con CD-ROM dell bibliografia dal 1738 al 1998, Pompeianistica archeologia e storia della Campania romana (Arbor Sapientiae: Roma, 2012). 85 euro
   

L.A. Scatozza, L'instrumentum vitreum di Pompei Pompeianistica archeologia e storia della Campania romana (Aracne: Roma, 2012).30 euro

A.C.C. Giordano, Gli spazi verdi dell'antica Pompei (Aracne: Roma, nd). 32 euro

L. Fino, Il Vesuvio nel Grand Tour: vedute e scritti di tre secoli, Storia di Napoli (Grimaldi: Napoli, 2012). 115 euro

   AND IN ENGLISH:
L. Fino, Vesuvius and the Grand Tour: vedute and travel memoirs from the 17th to the 19th centuries, Storia di Napoli (Grimaldi: Napoli, 2012). 95 euro

L. Fino, Vedutisti e Viaggiatori a Pozzuoli, Baia, Cuma e dintorni dal XVI al XIX secolo, 2nd ed., Arte e Storia dell' Arte (Grimaldi: Napoli, 2012). 77 euro

L. Fino, Napoli e dintorni nella pittura nordica: vedute e ricordi di viaggio dell' Ottocento di artisti tedeschi, russi e scandinavi  Arte e Storia dell' Arte (Grimaldi: Napoli, 2012). 77 euro

R. D'Ambra, Napoli Antica, Storia di Napoli (Grimaldi: Napoli, 2012). 140 euro

C. Giovanni, Mappa Topografica della città di Napoli e dé suoi contorni 1775, Topografia antica e moderna (Grimaldi: Napoli, n.d.). 190 euro

Happy shopping.

Colloquium at the Seattle APA/AIA Meetings

AFOH members and colloquium at the APA/AIA Meetings

5 January 2013: Seattle Convention Center

"The Modern Reception of Vesuvian Cities"

The AFOH, through leadership of Kenneth Lapatin and Carol Mattusch, has organized a 2.5 hour colloquium (6E) on Saturday 5 January.
Time: 2:45 until 5:15 p.m.
Place: The rooms for the mid-day academic sessions are TBA. Schedules are to be posted at the Washington State Convention Center and the Sheraton Seattle Hotel, downtown Seattle, WA.

Papers:

"'In their dreams ...': the early finds from Herculaneum", Carol C. Mattusch

"Pompeii as Cultural Property: Political Asset and Liability", Eugene Dwyer

"Pompeii and Trauma in European Postwar Sculpture", John Seydl

"Slaves, Sluts and Saints: The Modern Fantasy Women of Pompeii",
               Victoria Coates

"The Last Days of Pompeii in Cinema", Adrian Staehli

The program has some overlap with a very successful symposium held 17 November 2012 at the Getty Villa, reported on this blog.

a Getty Villa symposium— Pompeii: fascination and fantasy

Kenneth Lapatin, AFOH Board Member, co-organized and hosted a day-long symposium on the reception of Pompeii, Herculaneum, and the other Vesuvian cities to accompany the Getty Villa’s current exhibition “The Last Days of Pompeii: Decadence, Apocalypse, Resurrection.” Co-organizing with Victoria C. Gardner Coates and Jon L. Seydl, Ken introduced the slate of papers presenting a wide range of analysis on the modern reception of Pompeii. The five-paper event took place at the J. Paul Getty Villa auditorium. Although the exhibition ranges from the 18th to the 21st century, the presenters focused on about two centuries of literary and artistic reception of Pompeii.

Victoria C. Gardner Coates spoke on “Slaves, Sluts, and Saints: the imaginary women of Pompeii,” and paid particular attention to three images of women associated with the destruction of the ancient city: “Nydia the Blind Flower Girl of Pompeii” (1854) sculpted by American Randolph Rogers, “Gradiva” (1939) by French surrealist painter André Masson, and Théodore Cassériau’s painting “Tepidarium: the room where the Women of Pompeii came to rest and dry themselves after bathing” (1853) which Dr. Coates connects to Théophile Gautier’s contemporary novel Arria Marcella. As with the last piece, her presentation also made connections to the fictional works by Bulwer-Lytton and Wilhelm Jensen from which the illustrated characters emerged.

Shelley Hales presented information about her Crystal Palace Project, an online virtual model of the Pompeian Court (a physically constructed portion of London’s legendary Crystal Palace), and also spoke about 19th-century French and British reception of Pompeian domestic spaces. Particular attention was paid to Prince Jerome Napoleon’s Maison Pompéienne (Paris 1856) and to the history of the Pompeian Court at the Crystal Palace (1854). Dr. Hales’ presentation, “Virtual Interiors: inhabiting ‘Pompeian’ Houses in nineteenth-century Europe” probed archives for photographs pertaining to these long-gone edifices.

“Pompeii and Trauma in European Postwar Sculpture” by Jon Seydl showed how visits to Pompeii affected postwar sculptors Germaine Richier, César, and Mario Marini, “the traumatized bodies at Pompeii stir[ring the sculptors] to dematerialize figures without recourse to formalism, abstraction, or historicism.” Fiorelli’s body casts played a particular role in the artists’ connection to the material of death at Pompeii. Since the exhibition presents new sculpture most students of Vesuvius will not have known, Dr. Seydl’s contribution in this segment of the symposium left respondents more silent. The catalog (see below) furthers one’s understanding beyond the grounding introduction offered so effectively at the symposium.

19th-century American “pyrodramatic” spectacles produced primarily at Coney Island then exported around the country by James Pain were the central topic of Nick Yablon’s contribution “The ‘Eruptive Sublime’: American visions of Pompeii, 1879 – 1914”. The talk examined American fascination with the Vesuvian cataclysm. Details pertaining to the establishment and dissemination of Pain’s extravaganza were brought to analysis. A 1903 photograph from the Library of Congress and a printed libretto from 1891 commemorate the spectacle in the exhibition and informed Dr. Yablon’s presentation. 

Adrian Stähli’s “The Last Days of Pompeii in Cinema” continued the theme treated by Yablon by examining how throughout the 20th Century filmmakers of many nationalities have focused their efforts on the destruction of Pompeii. The talk focused on several different productions, some of which are shared in clips throughout the current Getty exhibit.

The role of respondent was then played with admirable precision by Mary Beard, who drew the audience’s attention to various “undercurrents” she observed in the day’s papers. Among numerous salient comments offered, Professor Beard observed that the once laughable role in reception played by Bulwer-Lytton has come right round to the point that now we can talk seriously about the narrative gains proffered by the novel. Provocatively, she asked what aspects of the Vesuvian cultures are actually obscured by the facts of their reception? “What does the reception history keep us from seeing when we set foot on the sites at Pompeii and Herculaneum?”

A rewarding, free-ranging panel discussion capped the afternoon, with all speakers responding to questions from the audience. In all, the symposium offered much unusual, new, and informed, analysis for those who consider the destruction of the Vesuvian cities to be interesting and central.

A website explains details about the exhibition at the Getty. Some of the papers will be read again in a session of the APA/AIA meetings at Seattle in January. Look for information from the American Friends of Herculaneum on this website.

The Getty Villa is the consummate venue for presenting an exhibition on the reception of Vesuvian cataclysm. For it is built around a concept of reception; the Landsdowne Hercules serves as a fitting reminder on each visit.  The show this symposium accompanies, The Last Days of Pompeii, will continue at the Getty until 7 January 2013. It is very well appointed with an intriguing variety of paintings, sculptures, photographs, and cinematic clippings. A handful of rare books help also illustrate the story of the last three centuries of the Rezeptionsgeschichte of Pompeii. Students of Herculaneum will gain much from a visit. The Cleveland Museum of Art will host the exhibit from 24 Feburary. [website]

Those who cannot see the show in Cleveland, Ohio, either — but, indeed, all whom the study of Pompeii and Herculaneum interests — at least will find much to learn in the extraordinary exhibition catalog — V.C.G., Coates, K. Lapatin, and J.L. Sedyl, edd., The Last Days of Pompeii: decadence, apocalypse, resurrection (Los Angeles and Cleveland, 2012), ISBN: 978-1-60606-115-2; $39.95.  Seven essays are accompanied by half- and full-page color reproductions of the show’s 92 principal artifacts and dozens more color figures that make the analysis clear. The exhibition’s pieces come from as broad a field as the Getty can customarily draw, ranging from photographic evidence of allied bombing of Pompeii in WWII to Alma-Tadema’s “Exedra” (outside Pompeii’s Herculaneum Gate) to a Warhol Vesuvius (1985). No fewer than three of Rogers’s Nydias, in two sizes, are on comparative display; though only four of Allan McCollum’s plaster-cast dogs fit into the Getty showspace. (More are coming to Cleveland. Also more Warhols and more Rothkos.) A few ancient artifacts — a fresco, an extraordinary cabinet of smaller objects “excavated” at Pompeii and given by Ferdinand II to Pope Pius IX generously loaned by the Vatican— ground the exhibition in antiquity. Trying to list only a handful of representative works from this deep and provocative collection seems as futile as the prospect of excavating Herculaneum’s most valuable treasures in a lifetime. The catalog is informative, elegant, utterly worth owning.

— Roger Macfarlane