Caesar's Next Door: Pompeii's Artistic Culture

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ANY WAY YOU slice it, building a museum in Malibu in the style of a Pompeian villa has a touch of the Guccione about it. Yet oil tycoon J. Paul Getty managed to avoid the stigma associated with the mastermind behind Penthouse magazine and "Caligula."

Both men were looking to turn new money into old, and both hit upon Roman style as an aid in their quest for class — or more precisely, classiness. The thrust of "Pompeii and the Roman Villa: Art and Culture Around the Bay of Naples" at the National Gallery of Art is that this same story has played out time after time across millennia — even when the social climbers were Romans themselves.

In the first centuries B.C. and A.D., the environs of Naples were basically the Hamptons of Rome. But instead of Gothamites raising cachet from the raw dirt of potato farms, emperors and their more well-heeled subjects piggybacked on the Greek civilization that had once flourished in the shadow of Mount Vesuvius.

The National Gallery has become quite adept at making shows that offer the swanky loot expected by its middlebrow base (folks who are impressed by a Derek Jacobi voiceover or a set of Pompeii drink coasters) while delivering subtle historical narratives for catalog geeks.

The flash includes serpentine bracelets and vessels adorned with the labors of Hercules, but among the riches chipped out of the ash is a Roman bust in the archaic Greek style; it fooled scholars for centuries.

What the unearthing of their summer homes revealed was that the denizens of the Eternal City were just as caught up in status-seeking as we are today, and that the construction of their notions of taste, refinement and cultural display reverberates into our own.

» National Gallery of Art, 4th Street & Constitution Avenue NW; through March 22; 202-737-4215. (Archives-Navy Memorial)

Written by Express contributor Glenn Dixon
Photo courtesy National Gallery of Art