Under the volcano
Pompeii show at the ROM gets in the way of its own greatness by larding on information
Pompeii: In the Shadow of the Volcano, the Royal Ontario Museum’s marquee summer offering of treasures salvaged from beneath the ash of the infamously ruined city, brims with remarkable things: jewels and finery, everyday cookware, household talismans, frescoes and a small sampling of naughty bits, in most cases perfectly preserved by centuries away from the light.
It is also, however, an overworked display that trips over itself to inform, acting as a buffer between the viewer and those remarkable things themselves. Here’s what I mean: about two-thirds of the way through your Pompeian journey, perhaps the finest object in the show, a bronze statue of a young woman with haunting glass eyes, looms over a dark space like a sentinel. This speaks volumes all on its own: about craft, culture, loss, humanity and fragility. But in case you missed all that, directly behind her is a rumbling, threemetre-tall video of Mount Vesuvius vomiting ash down its slopes, driving the point home with all the nuance of a sledgehammer.
Oh, and did I mention the helpful graphic on the adjacent wall, complete with stick figures running from the accumulating ash piles? She shares her space with that, too.
In an era where museums are desperate to reconfigure their relationship with viewers, this show is distinctly short on experience and long on information, and that’s the problem.
It does a sturdy job of unpacking Pompeii’s archeological significance: that its swift burial in the days after the eruption of Vesuvius made it a kind of vacuum-packed time capsule of everyday Roman life in the first century AD, and that its preservation is one of the keys to understanding what that life might have been like.
The show begins with an array of spectacular busts, most in marble, one in bronze, that underscore the level of expertise and craft present in even the most inconsequential of mid-sized Roman towns, which Pompeii certainly was before the disaster. (The ROM’s managing director of culture centres, Sascha Priewe, described it as “completely ordinary,” which in part explains its significance as a portrait of very normal life outside the seat of power. It’s as though London, Ont., was suddenly flash-frozen and kept on the shelf for millennia.)
But it travels through an exhaustive, and exhausting, array of subsections, most of them cloyingly titled — “out on the town”; “open for business”; “better homes and villas” — that lard on information both useful and not. (The latter: an Onionesque panel that assures you, “Romans used tables for the same things as we do.”)
It all adds up to an experience that feels very far away from the objects themselves, which, in their everyday utility, are revelatory and instructive all on their own.
Finally, we know how this movie ends and the ROM delivers the money shot: in the final room, plaster casts of Vesuvius’s ash-entombed victims lie on plinths, each with a description of his or her speculated end. A mother and daughter appear locked in a prone embrace, their final moment enshrined forever in ash.
This should be a reverential place, near holy in its respect for the dead. In Pompeii itself, the site is very much that. Here, in clear earshot of the invasive rumbling of the threemetre-tall video loop of Vesuvius reenacting its deadly deed, over and over, it’s mildly offensive disaster porn.
Not intentionally, surely, but lesson learned: to move forward, the ROM should step back. Pompeii: In the Shadow of the Volcano opens Saturday and runs to Jan. 3 at the Royal Ontario Museum. Tickets and info at rom.on.ca.