The Pompeii exhibition at the Museum of Fine Arts Houston ends in a few days. It’s an enjoyable and often striking collection of materials of all kinds, with lots of visitors. The displays are supposed to help us…connect with the victims whose hopes and fears were not so unlike ours today – that what the Museum’s website says.After you complete the second-floor exhibit, there’s a short film with voiceover, demonstrating what happens when a volcano like Mt Vesuvius blows up – as it did in the Year 79. After the shots of booming pyroclastic flows and solidified tephra, the voiceover solemnly announces that because so many lives were lost centuries ago in Pompeii and Herculaneum, we (the exhibition’s viewing public) should be careful where we interact with nature.
This is crap. The mountain’s “green, wooded slopes” were home to farms, fields, animals and people for centuries. Until the storied eruption in 79 AD, Vesuvius hadn’t blown in 700 years.
MFAH did a fine job marketing this exhibition. But the victims’ “hopes and fears” are nothing like our own; the eruption caught the citizens of Pompeii completely by surprise.
Frankly, I wished MFAH would go startle somebody else with its witless pronouncements of ecological peril.
Painting: The Eruption of Mt. Vesuvius, 1777, Pierre-Jacques Volaire.
