The Museo Archeologico Nazionale is nearby: it stands amid a great swirl of roads and ruined buildings and whole devastated tenements showing their foundations like toothless gums. Some of the ruins have classical shapes. From certain angles the scene looks like photographs of Berlin after the blitzkrieg, and from others like the mystical background of a Leonardo Madonna. The museum itself is a grand sixteenth-century edifice, as well kept as any Florentine art gallery, but a significant difference separates it from the usual haunts of the northern art lover: it is virtually empty of people. It is ten o’clock in the morning and as far as I can see we are the only ones here. The lady who takes our tickets in the beautiful modern glass entrance hall looks as delighted to see us as if it had been days since her last visitor; the people in the lavishly furbished cloakrooms want to know everything about our travels and future plans. The curator at the turnstile knows the children’s names before they are fully out of their mouths: she strokes their red hair, almost sobbing with pleasure, and admires the drawings in their sketchbooks. Where are the people with suitcases and long lenses, the people in baseball caps and khaki shorts, the scholars and the misfits, the bored teenagers, the tourists fat and thin, the freaks, the fashionable people, the crowds? Where is the cultural ennui? What can the explanation be? Is it possible that they’ve been scared away by stories of pickpockets on scooters? Do they have so much cash that their underwear can’t conceal it? Are they so wedded to their jewelry that they would rather stay at home than leave it behind? Is their aestheticism so shallow, in spite of the hours they spend queuing in its service, that they would rather not come? I find it a little eerie at first, their absence from the sculpture court, from the rooms of the Farnese collection. The Greco-Roman marbles from Pompeii and Herculaneum in the atrium seem to come forth in their strange reality without them there, chewing gum and looking at everything spastically through the lenses of their mobile phones, like earth tourists from outer space. How curious it is, to be here alone! Usually great artworks are so outnumbered by the mob that they seem fragile, almost victimized. But here in the silent, light-filled museum the correctness and cruelty and might of the ancient world is unsheathed.
We wander in the sculpture court, where giant marble limbs and heads and hands lie fallen to the ground and there is a white carved foot the size of a car. Put together, the pieces would make a figure fifty feet high. In 1980 the museum and its collection was badly damaged by the same earthquake that presumably gave its environs their appearance of blitzkrieg, though it was not then that the giant fell. Apparently his parts were found buried in the garden of the Villa Farnese. The life of an object is so long, its destruction so heterogeneous. It does not die a single death, like us. It lives on as a hand, a head, a foot. It is buried and reborn. What does it signify, this enormous foot? That man has always been the slave of ambition? It was the restoration work after the earthquake that gave the museum its lavish modern appearance. The earth shook it like a box of sweets, this building full of treasures that had already been drowned in the fire and mud of Vesuvius and resurrected. How murderously it pursued them; and yet the human faculty of love, of patience, that can look on the ruined spectacle of glass and marble and mosaic tiles, all broken and scattered and muddled up, and set about piecing them together again is as strong in its way as violence. This is one reason why the art lover enjoys looking at art. Each object represents another triumph for love, for survival, for care. Each object can be placed on the scales, against man’s violence and destructiveness. Which way the scale will tip at the end of it all, nobody knows.
In the atrium there are Aphrodite, Artemis, Athena. I would like to hear their life stories: I would like to know how the world that created them became the world in which they still stand. Their garments fall to their feet in milk-white marble folds; their tapered white fingertips caress the empty air. But their eyes are so blind, so blank: truly, there is death in their unseeing elliptical eyes. It is the death not of themselves but of everything they have looked upon. Their eyes are like mirrors that reflect the void of death. I think of Cimabue, of Giotto, of Duccio’s Maestà that we saw one day in Siena; of their gilded Madonnas stirring in their painted rigidity, struggling to be born and become mortal. They did not wish to look indifferently on the void of death. They strove to express the authenticity of emotion. Yet they are so unlifelike, compared with these pitiless maidens whose painted eyes time wore effortlessly away, to uncover the annihilating gaze beneath.
Upstairs there are several rooms devoted to the domestic life of Pompeii: everything has been reconstructed, the triclinium and the peristyle, the kitchen with its pots and pans, the dining table with its battered plates and spoons and ashen loaf of bread, as though its owners were about to sit down and eat; as though it were not a place but a moment in time that was captured and sealed in its carapace of volcanic dust. I am struck by the importance of innocence in our view of tragedy. For an incident to satisfy our tragic sense there must have been a predominance of hope over knowledge. There is innocence at the supper table: the loaf of bread, humble though it is, is quintessentially tragic. There are indentations in the risen crust, where the person who made it neatly scored the surface with a knife. The children look at the two-thousand-year-old loaf of bread. I do not think they are marveling at its preservation alone. It is the fact that the bread survived and the people did not that interests them. They would like to taste it. It is almost maddening to them, this triumph of the familiar object. Will the bread never be eaten? Will it just get away with it, for another two thousand years? I myself often make bread, and score the surface with a knife. It is not for this feat that I would like to be remembered, but there is a steadiness to the act that I have noticed many times. There is a feeling of centrality that is directly opposed to the marginal position of the writer of books. Most of all there is a feeling of something lasting, though the bread itself will be eaten soon enough. No, it is not the bread that is the durable object: it is myself, in the act of making it. I am no longer the artist — I am the subject. I am the person in the painting, not the painter. It is strange, that the feeling of immortality should disclose itself in this way, in the prosaic. Nietzsche said that art is what enables us to bear reality. Perhaps what he meant is that it distills the eternal from the everyday and puts it beyond the reach of tragedy.
In the Sale del Tempio d’Iside there are beautiful frescoes, of fruit and flowers and doves preening in a water bath, of men and women, of horses and battles, of gods and satyrs and maenads and scenes from mythology. There are paintings and poems, jewelry and glass vases, erotic cartoons and a beautiful egg poacher, whose beaten metal spheres seem to revolve like the planets of some far-off solar system. There is a whole museum within a museum, the contents of the Villa dei Papiri where Julius Caesar’s father-in-law housed his art collection. It is disconcertingly alive, this vanished world of Pompeii. The silent museum seems filled with noise, with faces and glancing eyes and conversation, clattering pots and barking dogs and birdsong. It is as though the volcano did not extinguish the day but took its cast exactly, its sound and smell and atmosphere, its structure, like the skeleton of a fern fossilized in a lump of rock. We go out into the shady courtyard, where a young man gives us glasses of lemon granita, diligently, as though he had waited all morning for us to be ready. We sit under a tree. There are one or two other people around, reading books in the shade. Nobody knows we are here. We sit quietly, letting the ice melt a little each time, before we take a sip.