Ancient Calamity Is a Model for Contemporary Disasters
Bettina Bergmann has long focused her academic research on ancient Roman art and archaeology, and is fascinated by many elements in the excavated sites around the Bay of Naples, which were buried in 79 A.D. by the eruption of Mount Vesuvius. These days, her area of interest also has become part of an unexpected confluence of the ancient and modern worlds.
“Just as new work on Vesuvius asks us to connect with the plight of the ancient victims, the eruption” has become a paradigm for contemporary disasters like 9/11, the Indonesian tsunami, and Hurricane Katrina, says Bergmann, Helene Phillips Herzig ’49 Professor of Art History.
For example, a prominent Vesuvius volcanologist shared his excavation skills at the 9/11 craters in lower Manhattan, and a call went out afterwards for classical archaeologists interested in working on the continuing recovery of the victims’ remains and personal effects in a sifting facility in Brooklyn.
Long interested in the interiors of Roman houses, Bergmann is at work on an essay about the restored Roman frescoes salvaged from a villa outside Pompeii that are on display at the new Greek and Roman galleries at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. (These galleries were funded, in part, by Shelby Baier White ’59 and her late husband, Leon Levy.)
In the spring, Bergmann will teach her course on art and cultural politics. When she first introduced the course nearly a decade ago, she had to search for contemporary problems analogous to ancient ones. Now, the issue of patrimony and provenance of objects— essentially, the ownership of history—has heated up, and with a growing schism between archaeologists and museums, “there’s not enough time” to cover all the issues, she laments. Nevertheless, she aims to set the current debate within its long history, which dates back to the Romans themselves.
One of a few specialists of the Roman world trained as an art historian, Bergmann revels in the recent upswing of interest in her favored time period. “It is always interesting to me to see how we engage with the past … and now seems a particularly powerful moment.”— M.H.B.
Photo by Ben Barnhart
