— by Lisa Gastrell
Members of the AFoH board participated in a session at the 2014 annual meeting
of the Southeastern College Art Conference in Sarasota, Florida, Oct 8th-12th. The theme of the conference was NEXUS:
From Handmade to HighTech, and the AFoH session, not only provided an
update on current research at the site, but also proved to be an excellent
opportunity to promote new membership for AFoH.
The session
was chaired by Carol Mattusch of George Mason University, Chair of the AFoH board,
and Roger Macfarlane of Brigham Young University, AFoH board member. Mattusch opened
the session, entitled, “From Ancient Roman Herculaneum to the Ringling Museum:
Handmade or High-Tech?” with remarks about the history of the Bay of Naples and
the rediscovery of Herculaneum.
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| (left to right) Erika Zimmermann Damer, Carol Mattusch, David Sider, and Roger Macfarlane after the AFoH panel at the SECAC Sarasota, FL session in Oct 2014 |
Erika
Zimmermann Damer of the University of Richmond, read the second paper, “Herculaneum Graffiti for the (Twenty-) First Century.” Damer, together with Rebecca Benefiel of Washington
and Lee University and Holly Sypniewski of Millsaps College, have pioneered the
Herculaneum Graffiti Project, the only American epigraphical field school that
is open to undergraduates and one with a large component of digital humanities.
The ongoing project exemplifies the very
essence of this year’s conference theme –
From Handmade to High Tech. In her paper Damer outlined the process of carefully
recording and digitizing ancient inscriptions located on the exterior walls of
the buildings of Herculaneum. The summer of 2014 marked the inaugural season
for a team of undergraduates who traveled to the Bay of Naples to begin work on
this innovative project. The hands-on project
included finding, photographing and recording inscriptions that were then
reimaged, analyzed and placed in two databases for ancient graffiti, the
Epigraphic Database Roma- EAGLE Europeana, and Fasti Online . Damer emphasized the
urgency to document the ancient inscriptions
before they degrade any further.
She also compared the results of the initial finds to graffiti in the
neighboring city of Pompeii.
In “All Those Sculptures: How Herculaneum
Changed the History of Art,” Carol Mattusch considered the effects of J.J.
Winckelmann’s pioneering publications of the sculptures unearthed in the Villa
of the Papyri at Herculaneum. Winckelmann visited Naples four times to
investigate the celebrated archaeological finds that at that time were housed in
the king’s summer palace at Portici. In his History
of the Art of Antiquity (1763/64), he developed a new categorization, a
stylistic chronology, which, said Mattusch, “still resonates in teaching and
scholarship about Greek and Roman art”. Winckelmann observed that the bronzes from Herculaneum
were among the “most remarkable pieces,” and many art historians and archaeologists
still consider Greek bronzes to be unique works, designating Roman marbles as
copies. Mattusch believes that by discussing bronzes separately from marbles in his history of ancient art, Winckelmann set
up a chain reaction that is still present in the discourse today. She argued that this thinking all began with
the extraordinarily rich collection of bronzes found in one home at Herculaneum,
the Villa of the Papyri..
David Sider of New York University, Vice
President of the AFoH board, focused on the ancient papyri from Herculaneum in
a paper entitled “Papyri as Archaeological Objects.” When uncovered during the
Bourbon excavations of the 18th century, the vast library of more
than 1,000 book rolls from the Villa of the Papyri at Herculaneum were brittle and
carbonized, “steamed and charred.” Sider
described the difficulties encountered in trying to open the damaged scrolls
and noted that Padre Antonio Piaggio invented a device known as “Piaggio’s unrolling
machine” which slowly pulled the individual papyri apart. Most of the texts
were written in Greek, and some were in Latin. None of the procedures to open
the scrolls to date have been extremely successful but there are high
expectations with a new process being examined at the University of Kentucky
using Computerized Tomography (CT scan).
The final
lecture of the Herculaneum session, “E Tenebris Clarum Lumen: Illuminating the
Herculaneum Papyri” was presented by Roger Macfarlane. Over the past decade,
experimentation at Brigham Young University with multi-spectral imaging (MSI) has
provided enormous gains in the quest to elucidate the ancient scrolls from the
Villa of Papyri. Macfarlane reiterated the notoriously difficult task of
unraveling and deciphering the fragile scrolls which has challenged researchers
through the years. The work of the MSI
project at BYU has led to several important discoveries, bringing some of the
texts from the library at Herculaneum back to life. Digital imaging has played
a major role in helping to bring the pieces together in this collaborative
project. Macfarlane agreed with David
Sider that the future will rely on the new research that is currently being
conducted with phase-contrast x-ray tomography at the University of Kentucky.
[Both Sider and Macfarlane, of course, were anticipating the publication of the
paper on XPCT (Jan 20, 2015) by Vito Mocella et al.]
In closing,
an invitation to all present was extended to join the American Friends of
Herculaneum Society, and questions were taken from the large and appreciative audience.
