Contents - Musée Maillol

posterity by Gustave Boulanger in a famous painting. And what about the Villa Kérylos, built
at Beaulieu-sur-Mer by Théodore Reinach, which mixed Greece and Pompeii, or even the
majestic villa built more recently for John Paul Getty at Malibu, directly modelled on the Villa
des Papyrus at Herculaneum?
This rediscovered world was quickly peopled with inhabitants. First, of course, were the
heroes of novels such as Arria Marcella, dreamed up by Théophile Gautier. Then came
plaster casts of the victims of the eruption, recreated by Fiorelli, using his own technique.
Finally it was Pompeii’s ghosts, such as the haunting Gradiva in a story by W. Jensen, the
subject of a famous psychoanalytical study by Sigmund Freud.
With time archeologists have learnt to carry out detailed excavations of the Pompeian house
– you could simply say the Roman house – distinguishing between the different types of
design, eras of construction and styles of decoration. They have learnt to differentiate found
objects increasingly accurately between those made locally and those that had been
imported. They have discovered how to distinguish between the different social classes of
the population, even though it is very difficult to do so: besides the citizens, they had to
count freemen, slaves, who left almost no traces even though there were many of them, and
women. This kind of knowledge makes a visit to Pompeii, to Herculaneum or to the Naples
Museum even more interesting because it takes us beyond the cliché too often promoted by
mass tourism, which all too easily portrays Pompeii as the town of pleasure and death.
At what is a difficult time for the conservation of these ancient cities, an exhibition at the
Musée Maillol on such an important subject as the Pompei house aims to remind Europe of
the debt of knowledge its culture owes to Herculaneum and Pompeii. As unique witnesses to
the ancient world, these towns are quite rightly classed as UNESCO world heritage sites.
The more so because they belong to our culture, thanks to the excavations that have been
carried out in these past centuries and which have made them part of the archeological
techniques and artistic taste that are now ours. The Pompeii house is therefore doubly
revealing: both of what we were 2,000 years ago and what we have been for the last two
and a half centuries.
6