Antiquities Exhibits

The Painters of Pompeii: Roman Frescoes from the National Archaeological Museum, Naples will open June 26, 2021 at the Oklahoma City Museum of Art.  It will be on display until October 17, 2021. Tickets will be available on a timed entry basis with limited capacity to ensure adequate social distancing.  Although masks are encouraged, they are not required for fully vaccinated visitors.  Eighty artifacts and artworks from Pompeii and Herculaneum will be presented. During the exhibition, the museum plans to host a series of lectures in the Noble Theater with several of the most renowned scholars in the field of Ancient Roman Art and History.  Topics include the rediscovery of Pompeii, Food & Wine in Pompeii, Roman Painting, and Powerful Elite Women in Imperial Rome. The exhibit notice says its appearance at the Oklahoma City Museum of Art will be its only US presentation. Image: Polyphemus hears of the arrival of Galatea (or Hercules and Omphale), ancient Roman fre...

I belong to the Herculaneum Society and today received a news item from them that the archaeological site of Herculaneum reopened to the public January 18!  I had the wonderful opportunity to visit the site in 2007 and I hope I'll have a chance to revisit it whenever I can travel again.  So today's featured "Antiquities Alive" virtual exhibit is a collection of my images that I took at Herculaneum during about a three hour walkthrough (the site definitely deserves much more time than that) back in 2007.  I've also included some artifacts from Herculaneum I photographed at Pompeii: The Exhibit at the Pacific Science Center in Seattle Washington, the Getty Villa in Pacific Palisades, California, and The Louvre in Paris.  Unfortunately, the day I visited Herculaneum the Villa dei Papiri was closed to the public. A Roman mosaic in the House of Neptune and Amphitrite, Herculaneum, Italy Theater mask in a bath complex in Herculaneum Statue of Heracles or Dionysus with a...

More than 80 richly colored frescoes and artifacts from excavations in Pompeii and Herculaneum in the National Archaeological Museum, Naples will be on display in the United States only at the single venue of the Oklahoma City Museum of Art next June.  In addition to ancient paintings with  bold colors and designs ranging from mythology to landscapes to gardens to architecture, the exhibition will also explore the world of the ancient Roman painter and offer a glimpse into the process, materials and techniques that were used to create these frescoes.  The exhibit will be accompanied by classes presenting virtual visits to Naples and southern Italy and exploring archaeology, Roman deities and mythology, in a series of lectures by renowned classicists and art historians. Wikimedia Commons has a number of images of frescos from Pompeii: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Category:Ancient_Roman_frescos_from_Pompeii_in_the_Museo_Archeologico_(Naples) and elsewhere: https://com...

Bound for Disaster - Pompeii and Herculaneum through September 13, 2020 at the Moesgaard Museum in Højbjerg, Denmark.  This exhibition presents more than 250 objects on loan from seven Italian museums and cultural institutions. Visitors will be able to view reliefs and gravestones bearing inscriptions that provide vivid descriptions of and information about family relations, frescoes featuring maritime motifs, landscapes and everyday situations, military and maritime equipment and cargoes of commodities from distant destinations and the commercial harbour at Naples. There are also mosaics and marble statues, fountains and figures related to mythology and cult, together with jewellery and other luxury goods from the Romans’ high life before the cataclysm. The exhibition also includes exhibits demonstrating the terrible consequences of the volcanic eruption, including casts of corpses from Pompeii and skeletons of the dead from Herculaneum. This museum's permanent collections totalli...

Last year after attending the "Buried by Vesuvius" exhibit at the Getty Villa and meeting a group from the Herculaneum Society, I joined the organization. This morning in their newsletter, they included this interesting image of Herculaneum's main street, the Decumano in the 1st century CE alongside a modern photograph of the street today: For years I was under the misconception that Herculaneum was the working port and Pompeii was the resort town but then learned that, in fact, it was just the opposite. Although Herculaneum was discovered first, it was covered by almost 100 feet of volcanic debris so only the "young and nimble" as it was described in an early report I read, were able to descend the deep tunnels to root out the beautiful sculptures and artifacts in demand from the royalty of Europe for their private collections. Pompeii, on the other hand, was only covered by about 11 feet of debris making it much more accessible to excavators in the 1...

Yesterday and today I uploaded a group of my images of gladiator helmets and armor that I photographed at various Pompeii exhibits to Wikimedia Commons and added a gallery of those images to the gladiator Wikipedia page. The images are now freely available for teaching, writing, and research.  Most of the equipment was found at the gladiator barracks in Pompeii although one of the most ornate pieces with a relief depicting scenes from the Trojan war was found in Herculaneum. Roman gladiator helmet with relief depicting scenes from the Trojan War from Herculaneum 1st century CE Roman gladiator shin guard depicting Hercules 1st century CE Roman gladiator helmet with relief depicting scenes from the Trojan War from Herculaneum 1st century CE Roman gladiator helmet with relief depicting scenes from the Trojan War from Herculaneum 1st century CE Ornate Roman gladiator shin guards depicting Silenus and swans fighting serpents Ornate Roman gladiator shin guar...