A city smothered in ash

     Pompeii At the ROM, Toronto, Ontario. A thorough presentation of the life and times of the doomed city, destroyed by Vesuvius’s eruption in 79CE. The show leaves one with two dominant impressions: that the Romans were very like us, and that they were very different from us. Like us they wanted comfort and convenience, and liked to display their wealth and power. They had developed a material and civic culture that guaranteed a relatively safe and pleasant life for most citizens. That culture was sustained by slaves, who did much of the work that nowadays is done by or with the help of machines. Human and animal energy was cheap. The wealthier citizens even had laid-on indoor plumbing, via pipes from the nearest communal fountain. Their sewage systems weren’t quite as well done as ours, though. And because heating water was (and still is) energy-expensive, baths were a communal affair.
     The houses show that family life was very important. It’s not just the family shrines to ancestors and gods, it’s the layout of the rooms, organised around an atrium with a pool that collected rainwater, and backing on an enclosed private garden. The owners decorated the walls with murals, laid out mosaic pictures in their floors, and had statuettes and statues all over the place. There’s a lovely example of a multi-tiered oil lamp, each tier with four twin lamps, so that there were a dozen lights in all. It must have made quite a show. Of course, these are upper-middle class and upper class houses. The lower classes lived in flimsy wooden hovels, or rooms in flimsy wooden apartment blocks.
     The plaster casts of the hollows formed by the Pompeians who died and were covered with ash show that many of them tried to save each other. Nobody knows how many of the 12,000 inhabitants died. The eruption was a multi-stage affair; it was the last stage that blasted the top off Vesuvius and covered the city with ash and pumice. Some people escaped before the worst happened; those who stayed, I suppose believing that it was just another Vesuvian belly rumble, were caught.
     How were the Romans different from us? They were more matter-of-factly brutal, enjoying the spectacles of men and beasts fighting and killing each other. They were more practical about sex, painting erotic scenes in their bedrooms and in brothels. Religion was part of the fabric of everyday life. Public religion supported the civil society; private religion satisfied the longing for personal significance and meaning. Cults flourished. One of them was Christianity, a fact that is discreetly ignored in this show, even though Nero a few years later used Christians as scapegoats and foci of civil envy and unrest. Maybe there weren’t many Christians in Pompeii.
     Rank, and the client-culture it fostered and depended on, was stronger than today. Public works were undertaken by private citizens as signifiers of status or piety, and to curry political favour with the local electors or the powers in Rome. Politics was already violent: the Augustans came to power through wholesale murder of their opponents. There was no civil service, which would have stabilised Roman governance. The Empire devolved into a kleptocracy, a thug-state ruled by a small clique of infighting sociopaths. That’s what eventually destroyed it.
     But at the time of Pompeii’s destruction, life was still safe for most people, until the mountain blew up. I read almost all the explanations, something I rarely do, but had to skip them towards the end. I recommend a full day to see and absorb it. If you’re a ROM member, go more than once. ****

Pendon Museum

     Most railway modellers and many model railroaders know of Pendon, the vision of Roye England, an Australian who came to England in 1924 and was appalled at the rapid modernisation of the countryside.  He conceived of a museum that would show rural England of the 1930s in model form. He chose the Vale of the White Horse as his inspiration. The models would be of actual buildings, and the landscape would recreate typical views and villages, with scenes showing the daily lives of the inhabitants. The result is a wonderful layout on two levels, with just enough railway traffic to keep the railway modellers interested, and more than enough models of buildings, fields, road junctions, village greens, ponds, bridges and trees, as well as dozens of figures and vehicles, to please anyone who likes to see miniatures. For some reason, that includes almost all of humankind.
  

 

In other words, this is not simply a model railway. It’s a carefully imagined and constructed vision of England in the 1930s.  Th trains are authentic. The slate-layer repairing a roof, the hay wagon, the kitchen garden, the village pump, the bus stopping at a road junction, the oldsters sitting outside a pub, these and many other details tell the story of a time past. Many of the models (and the field notes about the prototypes) form a valuable historical record, an aspect of the layout that may not be fully appreciated by many visitors.
     England’s vision of accurate models of existing buildings and accurate impressions of typical landscapes necessitated new modelling techniques and materials. Many of the modellers who helped him build Pendon wrote articles which have influenced and improved modelling of all kinds. More importantly, Pendon raised expectations, so that commercial railway models these days are built to a far higher standard of accuracy and precision than 80 years ago.

     If anything, there is too much to see. Pendon requires several visits, the first two or three to get a good overall sense of the landscape, and subsequent ones to study the models and scenes. I’ve seen it three times now, and recall earlier versions when the upper vale scene consisted mostly of bare plywood with a few village scenes here and there. I hope I’ll get to see it again in a couple or three years. Highly recommended, especially for anyone who likes history. ****

Meissen Museum, Schloss Weyer, Upper Austria

Meissen Museum in Schloss Weyer

     We visited this on 27th August, 2014, after a hike along the Vorchdorfer Lokalbahn (Gmunden to Vorchdorf) and locations of the first railway in the Hapsburg Empire, a horse drawn railway from Budweis to Gmunden. Not that this anything to do with the Meissen Museum, but it helps to set the ambience. That, and the rain, which came down in torrents while we walked to Schloss Weyer.
     The Meissen Museum was certainly impressive. Apparently around 1700 August The Strong, King of Poland (among other things), kept a Johann Boettger locked up when Johann pretended he could make gold. Eventually, under the supervision of another chemist, Boettger figured out how to make hard paste porcelain, which turned out to be “white gold”, ie, very expensive, and a source of much cash. The famous Meissen porcelain works were founded on this trickster’s discoveries. The technology of porcelain is fascinating. As with  any ceramic, consistency of glazing, colouring, and strength is paramount, and over the centuries Meissen has solved these puzzles and mastered the processes. They have over 10,000 recipes or formulas for glazes and colours. These used to be called trade secrets; now they are intellectual property.

     Artistically, Meissen, like all ceramics factories or traditions I’ve ever seen, is a mix of inspired skill, artistic feeling, and a kind of showing off of craft that I find amusing at best. There’s no question that the figures take enormous skill and craft to produce, not only in the sculpting, but even more so in the firing and glazing. Fire is a fickle tool. I wonder how many of the complicated pieces blew to bits in the kiln before a successful firing resulted. Certainly the technical difficulties of firing large complex figure groups guaranteed there would not be very many of them.
     The best pieces were and are the utilitarian ones. Sets of dishes decorated and made for royalty and other aristocracy were often overdone, but there is persistent strain of elegant and simple decoration that is in my opinion the main reason Meissen crockery is still sought after. Many of the pure white, undecorated designs show a purity of line and shape that raises them to the level of art. Such a versatile medium as fired clay enables the artists to imagine any shape whatsoever, without having to worry whether, for example, the grain of the material will co-operate. This freedom is both a blessing and curse. The designers at Meissen have solved the problem of excessive freedom more often than most.
    I found the museum interesting, and well worth a visit. ***

1812 War (Canadian War Museum, Ottawa)

 1812 War (War Museum) Viewed 31st July 2012
     The war of 1812 is the strangest one I know of. Nobody won it. After three years of conflict and diplomacy, and some 35,000 dead, the result was pretty well the status quo ante, albeit accepted by all parties, and therefore strengthened. There were no major changes in territory. The general shape of North American political divisions was confirmed. The First Nations, who might have been able to forge the beginnings of a permanent and independent confederation of nations if the British had won, were no further ahead. The main players, the still young and weak USA, and the loosely collaborative Canadian colonies, acknowledged each other’s territorial claims, and made them a basis for future frontier drawing as both expanded westward to the pacific. Britain, which had already shifted its geo-political focus elsewhere, reestablished friendly terms with its erstwhile colonies.
     The show at the Canadian War Museum sets out the four participant’s perspectives on the war. It’s very well done, with enough detailed information mixed into the overview to individualise the participants’ experience of the war, and to suggest what it was like for ordinary people like ourselves. The arrangement was a bit confusing, as viewing all the exhibits required a partial retracing of steps in each room; but that’s my only complaint. That, and the usual limitations of the computer survey, which began by asking which of the four parties you identified with. I identified with all and none. I could understand and empathise with all four perspectives. I have a visceral antipathy towards war, this is no doubt a reason I can’t feel comfortable taking sides.
     Rating for the show: ***½ (2012)

Update 2023-06-29: In proportion to the populations of the warring parties, 35,000 dead was an enormous number, on the order of millions today. That may be one of the reasons the two sides simply topped fighting.

The War of 1812 (Museum Review)

 The War of 1812 (Canadian War Museum, Ottawa, 31st July 2012)
     The war of 1812 is the strangest one I know of. Nobody won it. After three years of conflict and diplomacy, and some 35,000 dead, the result was pretty well the status quo ante, albeit accepted by all parties, and therefore strengthened. There were no major changes in territory. The general shape of North American political divisions was confirmed. The First Nations, who might have been able to forge the beginnings of a permanent and independent confederation if the British had won, were no further ahead. The main players, the still young and weak USA, and the loosely collaborative Canadian colonies, acknowledged each other’s territorial claims, and made them a basis for future frontier drawing as both expanded westward to the Pacific. Britain, which had already shifted its geo-political focus elsewhere, reestablished friendly terms with its erstwhile colonies.
     The show at the Canadian War Museum sets out the four participants' perspectives on the war. It’s very well done, with enough detailed information mixed into the overview to individualise the participants’ experience of the war, and to suggest what it was like for ordinary people like ourselves. The arrangement was a bit confusing, as viewing all the exhibits required a partial retracing of steps in each room; but that’s my only complaint. That, and the usual limitations of the computer survey, which began by asking which of the four parties you identified with. I identified with all and none. I could understand and empathise with all four perspectives. I have a visceral antipathy towards war, this is no doubt a reason I can’t feel comfortable taking sides.
     Rating for the show: ***½