The art of the ancient Romans is disturbingly familiar. The examples of Roman mummy paintings found in the Getty museum and in our history text books are extremely contemporary in appearance. At the Getty museum in Malibu which is a reproduction of a villa found intact under the ashes of Vesuvius in Herculaneum, is a marble bust of a Roman gladiator that is the spitting image of actor Chuck Conners from TV’s The Rifleman series. The fresco on the walls of the patio, the colors of which the tour guide said had been “toned down so as not to offend modern sensibilities”, could easily be described as being New Wave circa 1980. If they had been toned down the original art must have been painted in Day-Glo paint.
On a PBS documentary on Pompeii, a large painting that had hanged on the wall by a spiral staircase in a villa of a Roman patrician was in a style that looked straight out of Mad Magazine. It showed a man (it seems every painting depicts the owner of the home. In two thousand years historians are going to think that guy Jesus sure owned a lot of property), standing in his toga with his cartoonishly large, uncircumcised, (that thing that would be uncircumcised), hanging down for all to see and he smiling proudly at the viewer. There is very little that is “classic” about these people. Pornography is everywhere. Of course, what remains for us by which to know them are the property of the wealthy. In 2000 years perhaps all the future will know of us is the ruins preserved by the deserts of Nevada, Las Vegas. Won’t we be embarrassed.
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