P O M P E I I

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The ideal measurements



The elite in Pompeii had architects to design their houses. Van Krimpen has demonstrated that these architects worked according to geometric figures and proportions, expressed in arithmetic approximations, a well-known tradition of classical mathematics. This resulted in a number of standard sets of ratios that were used by architects in the design of houses.

Despite the fact that the atrium houses in Pompeii show a high degree of homogeneity – all having been splendidly built around a so-called atrium, an inner courtyard with or without a roof – the architect’s skill and clients personal wishes ensured that each house retained an original character.

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Dress to impress



Van Krimpen used a metrological analysis to establish what the original design must have been before subsequently examining how the houses were adapted to the particular circumstances. The adaptations revealed how a client exerted his influence on a design and how each situation required a unique solution. The primary mansions were mainly intended to receive friends and other notable persons and so had to be designed accordingly.

The Pompeii elite tried to maintain the illusion of a perfect home. The central symmetry was not solely maintained by juggling with the dimensions of the rooms. Van Krimpen even demonstrated how two neighbours had cooperated to outdo a third neighbour, one of the richest men in the city. They let their two houses be built behind a single facade so that their property appeared to be as big as that of their neighbour.

Van Krimpen investigated 18 primary mansions from Pompeii. Her research formed part of the broader project RUSPA (Ricerche Urbanistiche Su Pompei Antica) and was funded by NWO.


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Adapted from materials provided by NWO (Netherlands Organization for Scientific Research).
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http://www.sciencedaily.com­ /releases/2009/03/090311085313.htm

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Roman jug.

(Credit:
Courtesy
Oxford Archaeology

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                                          Origins Of Pompeii-style Artifacts Examined






ScienceDaily
(Feb. 24, 2009)

— Roman artefacts which are nearly two thousand years old with similarities to ancient remains found at Pompeii in Italy have been examined at the Science and Technology Facilities Council's ISIS neutron source (21-22 February). Researchers are hoping to learn more about our heritage by discovering whether the items were imported from southern Italy, or manufactured using similar techniques in Britain.

The bronze artefacts, which include a wine-mixing vessel, jugs and ceremonial pan-shaped objects, were discovered in Kent in two high status Roman pit-burials that are among the best examples ever seen in Britain. Previous excavation in an area close to the A2 where the items were found - by construction group Skanska Civil Engineering during a Highways Agency road improvement scheme - had predicted archaeological discoveries, but they were bigger than expected, with settlements ranging from the Bronze Age to the late medieval period.

Archaeological scientists have been comparing the 1st Century AD artefacts from Kent with those from Pompeii in Italy. The neutron beams at the world-leading ISIS facility allow for detailed crystal structure analysis of intact delicate objects without cutting out a sample of the material.

Dana Goodburn-Brown, a conservator and ancient metals specialist commissioned by Oxford Archaeology, has been analysing the artefacts along with archaeological scientist Dr. Evelyne Godfrey at ISIS to see how they were made. It is hoped results from the experiments will answer many questions about how the items were made to give more insight into their origin: for example, the metals used in manufacturing, how they were cast and finished, and how metal pieces were joined together.

''Our experiments will hopefully aid us in characterising different Roman metalworking practices and perhaps recognising the distinction between imported south Italian goods and high standard copies produced by skilled local craftsman. These artefacts represent a time of great change in Britain - they appear shortly after the Romans arrived in this country, and may represent locals taking on cultural practices of these 'newcomers," Dana Goodburn-Brown said.

Dr Andrew Taylor, ISIS Director said: "For these rare and highly-valued objects, analysis with neutrons can give fantastic insight. Neutrons are a very powerful way to look at matter at the molecular level and they give unique results that you can't easily get with any other technique. The measurements are extremely delicate and non-destructive, so the objects are unharmed by the analysis and can be returned to the museums unscathed.

The neutron beams we have at ISIS are a very versatile research tool and we're always keen to help researchers answer a broad range of questions. Here we realised that we could take the same analysis methods we developed to look at parts of aircraft and power plants and use them to help archaeologists understand how ancient objects were traded and manufactured."


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Adapted from materials provided by Science and Technology Facilities Council.
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The fresco panel, which was the subject of an international search by INTERPOL, was located by the Art Loss Register of New York.









 
NEW YORK, NY.

- U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) today seized a Pompeii wall panel fresco from a Manhattan auction house that was reported stolen in Italy 12 years ago.

The fresco panel, which was the subject of an international search by INTERPOL, was located by the Art Loss Register of New York and brought to the attention of ICE and Italian Authorities. Italian authorities provided ICE agents via the ICE attaché in Rome with information and documents identifying the fresco panel as stolen and part of the cultural property of Italy.

The panel, rectangular with a white background depicting a female minister, white wash on plaster with a modern wooden frame, was previously located at the excavation office in Pompeii and was reported stolen with five other fresco panels on June 26, 1997.

The investigation revealed that, between 1903 and 1904, the Italian government authorized a farmer, Giuseppe De Martino, to restore his farmhouse, which was located on an archeological site in Boscoreale, province of Naples. During the restoration, six important frescos, originating from Pompeii were found.

On July 12, 1957, the Government of Italy purchased the frescos. On June 26, 1997, after the completion of work to the excavation site, the Italian government observed that the six frescos were missing and subsequently reported the theft.

The Carabinieri cultural patrimony unit previously recovered the other five of the six frescos.

"We are pleased to assist in the recovery of this fresco panel. It completes the collection of the six panels reported stolen from the Italian government close to 12 years ago." said Peter J. Smith, special agent in charge of the ICE Office of Investigations in New York. "ICE applauds the ALR for coming forward with information on the whereabouts of this precious cultural artifact, which will soon be returned to the Italian government.



http://www.artdaily.org/index.asp?int_sec=2&int_new=31209

Today's News
June 2, 2009

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Millions of trampling visitors each year,
combined with exposure to sunlight and rain,
are a menace to the ancient ruins of Pompeii,
one of the world's most famous archaeological
sites and Italy's top tourist attraction.






                                                       


                                                          Digging Deeper:



                                     Archaeologists Race To Show Pompeii Daily Life






By Dan Vergano,
USA TODAY
July 16, 2009

Mount Vesuvius still looms, quiet for now, over Pompeii. But for the lost Roman city, the drama never really ends.

Buried in A.D. 79 by the volcano's eruption, the storied victim of antiquity continues to surprise scholars with new discoveries, even as their hopes dim for the site's survival.

"There is a lot going on, and it's always in crisis," says classicist Kenneth Lapatin of the J. Paul Getty Museum in Los Angeles.

Pompeii lay silent under about 20 feet of volcanic ash and stone until it was discovered in 1748. Since then, it has never been out of the public eye.

• Historians are continually working to separate the myths about Pompeii from the reality of how its artists, athletes, leaders and citizens lived in the years before the volcanic blew. Continuing excavation — 30% of Pompeii is still buried — has produced a steady stream of discoveries.

For example, researchers at the United Kingdom's Warwick University are now working on a digital re-creation of the statue of a wounded Amazon warrior discovered in 2006. In recent years, scholars have focused on how the ancient Greeks and Romans painted their statues with colors that seem garish compared to the cool marble creations of the Renaissance.



• A major exhibit of artifacts titled Pompeii and the Roman Villa has gone from the National Gallery of

  Art in Washington, D.C., to the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, where it will stay until Oct. 4.



There is a companion exhibit at the J. Paul Getty Museum in Los Angeles. The Getty villa that houses this exhibit is a replica of the Villa of the Papyri, a library of Greek manuscripts unearthed at Pompeii's sister city of Herculaneum, also buried by Vesuvius.

• Scientists fear that Pompeii itself will ultimately be undone by exposure to the weather and the 2.5 million tourists who visit each year. The Italian government last year declared a state of emergency to speed preservation efforts at the 109-acre ruin.

"It is enormously expensive to keep in working condition. Just removing the weeds is a great deal of work," says Cambridge University's Mary Beard, author of The Fires of Vesuvius: Pompeii Lost and Found. "A ruin is always going to become ruined when you expose it."

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'Stage sets for power'



Pompeii was a small Italian city south of modern-day Naples, tucked in amid a region of sumptuous villas, "the Beverly Hills or Malibu of the Roman Empire," says Barbara Pflaumer at the Los Angeles museum.

The grand villas "were not just luxury resorts of the rich and famous. They were temporary abodes of some very, very powerful and very, very wealthy people, probably Roman senators," says architectural historian Thomas Howe of Southwestern University in Georgetown, Texas.

"They may indeed have hired brilliant artists to surround them with an aura of myth and eternal beauty — frescoes, sculpture, fountains, music, cuisine — but they were really stage sets for power," Howe says. "Every summer the capital virtually moved from Rome to these villas in the Bay of Naples."

Beard says scientific archaeology has made "enormous changes" in the efforts to unravel Pompeii's mysteries. Scholars now look at bones, seeds, roots, even curbstones, on the microscopic level to make findings about how the ancients lived.

Sixty-four hundred to 30,000 people lived in Pompeii in 79, Beard says. Only about 2,000 died in the eruption; the rest fled with the first tremors. "The ground trembled for weeks beforehand. Only the infirm, the stupid and the optimists stayed," Beard says.

Rather than a city frozen in time, as scholars have described Pompeii, it was an emptied disaster scene, goods removed and doors locked, when Vesuvius covered the town with ash.

Archaeologists are still making discoveries about the real lives of the lost inhabitants. The Blogging Pompeii website run by archaeologists lists 19 projects in the region, for example. There, scholars such as Rebecca Benefiel of Washington and Lee University continue to steadily document houses there.

"So far, more than 11,000 wall inscriptions have been recorded there," Benefiel says. She recently analyzed graffiti scrawled on the Basilica law courts of Pompeii that celebrated trigon, a Roman game. (Three players form a triangle and pass a ball. Each drop was a point for the other players.) "Pompeii is great for what it gives us. You can't get that level of detail anywhere else," she says.

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The Los Angeles County Museum of Art exhibit Pompeii and
the Roman Villa:

"Art and Culture Around the Bay of Naples
explores the sumptuous life of the famously doomed city."

Museum Associates,
LACMA










Other recent finds:



• University of Kentucky researchers this month announced their three-dimensional scan of an unopened papyrus scroll, collected with the aim of "virtually" unrolling the charred document.

• An ivory "throne" discovered in Herculaneum last year turns out to be an elaborate incense burner tripod, Maria Paola Guidobaldi of the Archaeological Office of Napoli and Pompeii reported at a June symposium at the Getty museum.



At the Los Angeles exhibits, curators hope to similarly show a different face of Pompeii.

"A lot of the past shows were about the dead, people caught in the eruption," says Jarrett Lobell of Archaeology magazine. Plaster casts of human remains that were preserved as hollow spaces in the volcanic ash are among famous artifacts of Herculaneum and Pompeii.

Instead, the exhibits at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art and the J. Paul Getty Museum focus on the good life among Rome's jet set, who re-created Greek art and Macedonian palaces to show off their status among their peers.

Scholars have turned from looking at Pompeii on the day of the eruption to how residents lived their lives in the centuries before the disaster, Lapatin says.

In June, the Getty hosted a two-day scholarly symposium on Pompeii and its environs. Lapatin says talks centered on the Etruscan and Greek interaction in Italy. The Etruscans were a dominant culture of city-states in central Italy that fought and traded with Greek colonists before the days of the Roman Empire.

The remains of villas allow scholars to reconstruct how Rome's plutocrats changed Greek art, taking a famous painting of Alexander the Great, for example, and making it into a mosaic. Statues of famed philosophers were imported or created as garden decorations.

One exhibit artifact, a deity's statue, held hors d'oeuvres, which might reflect cheeky Roman humor. But nobody knows for sure.

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What lies beneath



Meanwhile in Italy, the big drama comes with the possible retirement of longtime Pompeii superintendent, Pietro Giovanni Guzzo, who has been in charge of the historic site since 1995.

In recent years, Guzzo has focused on conservation rather than starting new excavations at Pompeii and nearby sites. Still buried under Vesuvius' cooled lava are parts of both Pompeii and Herculaneum; Oplontis, a villa that might have belonged to the emperor Nero's wife; and Stabiae, a site that Howe says is "the largest concentration of excellently preserved enormous Roman villas in the entire Mediterranean world."

Exposure, however, robs the bright colors of frescoes and paintings uncovered from villas and houses. Tourist's footsteps and hands chip away at the stones of Pompeii. Weather and weeds work away at the foundations of homes preserved for centuries by volcanic ash.

Looting still takes place. Six years ago, frescoes from an excavated dwelling called the "House of the Chaste Lovers" disappeared and turned up in an abandoned building days later.

Whoever succeeds Puzzo, "the pressure for conservation is so great that it will probably continue to be a focus," Archaeology's Lobell says.

But for classicists, historians and archaeologists, Pompeii is "a wonderful site," Beard says.

"It's terribly problematic, it's terribly hard to keep up. We'll never do as well with it as we want, but it is always helping us answer questions about the ancient world," she says. "It would be a sad day if all the questions were answered, wouldn't it?"

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               1st Century AD representation of Pompeii









                                                        POMPEII THROUGH TIME
 





600 B.C.: The circuit of the town walls of Pompeii exists, as do structures at the Temple of Apollo and Temple of Minerva and Hercules.

310 B.C.: After the eras of Etruscan, Greek and Southern Italian rulers, a Roman fleet lands at Pompeii and pillages the countryside. Pompeii later becomes a Roman ally.

91 B.C.: War breaks out between Rome and its allies, Pompeii among them.

89 B.C.: Pompeii is besieged by Rome's eventual dictator, Sulla, leaving holes shot in city walls and sling stones still found buried there. Sulla later settles his veteran soldiers at Pompeii. They build public baths and an amphitheatre as they take over.

A.D. 59: Gladiatorial games lead to murderous riots between Pompeiians and citizens of nearby Nuceria. Nero bans games there for a decade as punishment.

A.D. 62: Earthquakes shake Pompeii, damaging the town. Nero visits two years later.

A.D. 79: Mount Vesuvius erupts, covering Pompeii, Herculaneum and many of the villas to its south.

1748: Engineers led by Rocque Joaquin de Alcubierre, working for the King of Naples, dig into the ruins of Pompeii looking for Roman artifacts.

1943: Allied bombs damage the House of the Vestals, as well as the current restaurant site, at Pompeii. Conservators rebuild damaged sites.

1997: Pompeii and surroundings are declared a World Heritage site.

2008: Italy declares a "State of Emergency" regarding conservation at Pompeii.





Sources: UNESCO;
Soprintendenza Archeologica di Pompei;

The Fires of Vesuvius:
Pompeii Lost and Found
by Mary Beard

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                                       Ancient Theater Masks Rediscovered in Pompeii






Rossella Lorenzi
Discovery Channel News
July 21, 2009

-- A set of 15 mysterious life-size masks, reminiscent of ancient Roman drama, have been rediscovered in Pompeii after being forgotten for more than two centuries, according to Italian archaeologists who have shown them for the first time at an exhibition in Naples, Italy.

Made of plaster, the rather heavy masks were unearthed in 1749 in Pompeii during the excavations promoted by King Charles of Bourbon. They were deposited, along with many other artifacts, in the Royal Palace of Portici, a town on the Bay of Naples.

"They ended up being totally forgotten, and indeed we do not have much information about them. We do not even know where they were unearthed in Pompeii. The 18th century dig journals only vaguely record that 15 masks were excavated," Mariarosaria Borriello, the scholar who rediscovered the masks, told Discovery News.

According to Borriello, the fact that the large plaster masks were all dug up in the same place, might suggest they belonged to an artisan's workshop.

A closer look at the artifacts revealed that the plaster was carefully hand-worked.

Moreover, some of the masks have their mouth shut, a clear indication that they were used as models for a craftsman who then produced lighter masks for actors to wear.

"Two masks show letters in the space usually reserved to the mouth. While the meaning of one is incomprehensible, on the other we can clearly read the word 'Buco,'" Borriello said. The word refers to Buccus, a stock character from the earliest form of Italian farce, known as fabula Atellana.

Deriving its name from the town of Atella in the southern Campania region, the fabula Atellana was a form of entertainment widely popular from the second century B.C. to the fourth century A.D. Basically a form of improvised farce, it used masked actors, stock characters and conventional plots.

"Not all of the masks belong to the fabula Atellana, but finding at least one evidence linked to it is very important. Indeed, no fragment of early Atellan farces has survived," Borriello said.

Probably deriving its name from bucca (mouth), the mask of Buccus features very large cheeks. It represents one of the four Atellan characters that are known to belong to this rustic improvisational entertainment. The characters include Pappus, the old fool, Maccus, the clown, Dossenus, the trickster, and Buccus, the braggart.

"These masks are indeed a unique finding. Further study is needed to better understand them. The cryptic words on one of them adds to their mystery," said Valeria Sampaolo, director of Naples Archaeological Museum where the masks are on display until the end of August.