cave canem—Latin for “beware of the dog”—is the inscription on a mosaic at the entrance to “Pompeii and the Roman Villa: Art and Culture Around the Bay of Naples,” opening October 19 at the National Gallery of Art. The mosaic, which shows a dog on a chain, is a reconstruction of the vestibule floor of a villa in Pompeii, where it greeted visitors with a warning to enter at their own risk.
The only risk to visitors at the National Gallery’s exhibit is of being transported to another, extraordinary place and time. Or times—you’ll see Pompeii in the 1st and the 18th centuries.
In the first century bc, Pompeii was a city of maybe 20,000 people—many of them aristocrats, royalty, and politicians from Rome, 150 miles to the north, who built vacation villas in towns along the Bay of Naples. This populace attracted artists and artisans who created paintings, sculptures, and other works of art—many influenced by the Romans’ reverence for antiquities of classical Greece—for their houses.
The eruption of the nearby volcano Mount Vesuvius in 79 ad buried the city. According to Pliny the Younger, who watched from the opposite side of the Bay of Naples, the eruption took the shape of a pine tree that “shot up to a great height.” The flow of hot gas, ash, and rock that buried the city preserved many of its buildings, frescoes, mosaics, gardens, and even the bodies of humans and animals asphyxiated by the fumes.
Pompeii lay buried for the better part of two millennia. Finally, the kings who ruled Italy in the 18th century were persuaded that what lay beneath the surface was worth a look. They were right: Twenty feet down, excavators found villas with exquisite frescoes and mosaics that gave a sense of how life was led by the ancient Romans. These discoveries led Europeans to visit in droves; some built their own re-creations of Roman villas.
The newcomers, like their ancient forebears, “believed in luxus, meaning luxury,” says Carol Mattusch, a professor of art history at George Mason University who served as guest curator for the exhibit. “Pompeiana” went on to influence art, interior design, and culture all over Europe and America, too.
For its first exhibition of ancient Roman art, the National Gallery has gathered some 150 works of painting, mosaic, sculpture, jewelry, silver, glassware, and other arts. Portraits of notable residents, paintings of mythological subjects, frescoes of garden scenes filled with birds and flowers, sculptures of bronze and marble all evoke a life of luxury and beauty.
The setting for this good life is a theme of the exhibition. Entrance to a villa was via the atrium; next came the tablinum, where business was conducted. Mattuch describes the rest of the villa as the place where people “eat, drink, think, exercise, discuss their art collection, poetry, drama, and philosophical matters, sometimes with an in-house philosopher—and take naps.”
“Pompeii was hidden, frozen in time, for 2,000 years,” says NGA senior curator and design chief Mark Leithauser. “It is an extraordinary phenomenon, one of the most romantic in the history of mankind.” This grand window on Pompeii will be open until March 22.
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