A clash of sources: hypotheses on the digital unification of the ekkleasiasterion

[Part one]

Fragment 1.62: Landscape with ceremony in honor
of Osiris. Archaeological Museum of Naples

Italian scholar Olga Elia already highlighted in 1941 that the visual documentation of the ekklesiasterion and the frescoes in the museum collection are not completely consistent. It may be due to the habit of drawing the documentation after the frescoes had already been removed (which makes the documentation of the time sound certainly not less precious but… well… a tiny bit less reliable). So Elia, and more recently current director of the Archaeological Museum of Naples Valeria Sanpaolo (1992), suggest that a better source, if we want to try an unification, are paradoxically, the verbal accounts compiled during the excavation.

This is the reason why both scholars agree that fragment 1.62 [Landscape with ceremony in honor of Osiris] should be placed in the left side of the south wall (as the Pompeianarum antiquitatum historia records) and not at the right side of the west wall as the engravings show. They supported this assumption mainly with the presence of a framing column on the right edge of the fragment. Well, if we assume that the pattern is correct, having a dividing fake column on the right of the scene wouldn’t be much useful if the image was already on the right side, would it? So, I definitely agree with Elia and Sanpaolo. 

Fragment 1.67: Landscape with sacred door 

and velum.Archaeological Museum of Naples

Moreover, if fragment 1.62 were on the right side of the west wall, it would be asymmetrical with fragment 1.66 [Sacred fence with temples, statues, and square with trees, seen through an architectural scene.], that, all sources agree, was located on the left side of the west wall. And Romans tended to be pretty fond of symmetry.

In addition, Elia suggested that the right side of the west wall was actually occupied by fragment 1.67 [Landscape with sacred door and velum.]. The Landscape with sacred door and velum. does not even appear in the engravings but the piece had been explicitly recorded as “from the Temple of Isis” when it was catalogued. Homogeneity of style, colour and dimensions support this theory and fragment 1.67 is officially exhibited in the museum as part of the ekklesiasterion in the museum collection. 

This, by the way, means that what Chiantarelli drew in the right side of the west wall might be pretty much completely made up (yeah, welcome to Pompeii…). 

Documentation of the west wall by Chiantarelli

superimposition of pictures of the extant fragments of frescoes on Chiantarelli's documentation,
according to Elia (1941) and Sanpaolo's (1992) reading.

We are not done yet! Elia also claims that the south and north walls could have been accidentally inverted in the visual documentation. She based her theory on the position of the mythological scenes. According to modern western conventions, stories are read from left to right. This would make the frescoes representing the myth of Io awkwardly positioned as the story ends on the left (south wall) and begins on the right (north wall). However, Sanpaolo (1992) disagrees, and remarks that there is no evidence in Pompeian frescoes to support such a constraining convention. In fact, scenes depicted on Pompeian walls (especially in a series composed by separated scenes) appear to follow a more symbolic than realistic or linear logic. 

These are the pieces of the puzzle: three walls, a visual record, a written one, the work of two scholars, many frescoes fragments, different theories and some disagreement. How to express that in linked data? And how to do it in the Generic Viewer?

[One part more to come...]

Where are you from?: fragments of frescoes and their spatial context

Archaeological Museum of Naples,
Fragments from the porticus of the Iseum.
The display has no relationships with the
original position in the building.

My idea to experiment with the Generic Viewer comes from two main things that caught my attention. The first one is that, according to its presentation, the Generic Viewer was meant to support projects like IBR in which inscriptions are considered not just as text, but as artefacts, and, more specifically, artefacts thought to be experienced in a particular space, interacting with other features and with the human behaviour in that space. 

The second one, is the potential use of the Generic Viewer not only as a digital model of the real space, but also as a virtual environment where is possible to test different hypotheses about the original position of some decorative features based on geometry, scholarly expertise, and visibility analysis.

Both things, for different reasons that I’m going to explain, reminded me of some of the issues I had encountered studying the artefacts found at the Iseum, and made me wonder if the Generic Viewer was really generic enough that its functions, although developed for epigraphists, could be extended to the study of ancient Pompeian frescoes. 

Moreover, the semantic annotations allowed by the Generic Viewer give me the opportunity to model the relationship between the artefacts, the architectural environment and their documentation all in RDF linked data (using, among others, a few elements of my ontology).

Of course, it would be too ambitious to show the results for the entire Iseum, so I had to pick a specific area. The most interesting one, in this respect, seems to be the ekklesiasterion (and that is the reason why it's the space we have prepared and textured in the Generic Viewer). Although there are other spaces of the Iseum that are rich in surviving artefacts and related documentation (e.g. the porticus), the ekklesiasterion is especially complex. Actually, sometimes 'complex' gets very close to 'pretty bizarre', even for Pompeian standards, bet let me introduce this story of artists, archaeologists, kings, engineers and scholars.

The Palace of Portici in 1745
From wikipedia

The frescoes on the walls of the ekkleasiasterion, as for many other Pompeian buildings, were almost intact when uncovered. Being the Iseum one of the first buildings dug up (1764), it was still very common, at the time, to remove the most eye catching bits of the frescoes (usually the figurative ones) and move them to the Palace of Portici. Everything else was just left in place, if not explicitly destroyed, to enhance the value of the king’s collection or because believed not worthy. Another issue was that the pieces of frescoes stripped off were transported via narrow tunnels dug into the excavation site, so there was no practical means, at the time, to transport anything too big.

Considering what happened (and what is still happening) to the frescoes that have been left in place, we should be happy that some of them have been removed and can now be seen and studied in in the Museum of Naples (or elsewhere). However, we now have only fragments, singularly framed as independent pieces of art and exhibited outside their spatial context (the building) and regardless the relationship with the other parts of the decorative pattern. 

Something that sounded quite close to what the IBR project complained about when discussing inscriptions.

In a 3D model (or in a point cloud generated by a 3D model and imported into the Generic Viewer, to be precise) it is possible to attempt one or more virtual unifications, placing the fragments (visually or just on an informative level) were they might have used to be.

But, first of all: how can we place the fragments in their original position reliably? They are no more in situ, but they have been documented at the time. 

documentation of the north wall of the ekklesiasterion
by Giovanni Morghen

documentation of the south wall of the ekklesiasterion
by Giuseppe Chiantarelli 

documentation of the west wall of the ekklesiasterion
by Giuseppe Chiantarelli

After being harshly criticised by classicists at the time for destroying one of the most valuable source of knowledge about the past, the king of Naples decided to hire someone from the academia of fine arts to document the state of the frescoes before removing parts of them. The documentation of the ekklesiasterion was carried out by Giovanni Morghen (north wall) and Giuseppe Chiantarelli (west and south walls). 

At the beginning of my work on Pompeii, some years ago, I thought that documentation was a very good starting point for digital visualisation; that having a professional documentation was very close to know how things were at the time. Which is true, to a certain extent. But, besides knowing of course that every human representation is intrinsically subjective, I didn't take into account that Pompeii has always an extra layer of complication (if not sheer surrealism…).

Morghen and Chiantarelli's documentation is extremely precious. It tells us about the decorative pattern around the fragments that survived. Shows us the beautiful fake architectural features that Esher would have loved so much. Reveals fascinating illusory doors leading to even more secret rooms.

But…

[part two]              

Routine can kill passion (and mess up your data)

Documenting what you do, step by step, sounds easy. But it is not. Think, for example, of describing your morning routine. Would you be able to? And how accurately? Let’s give it a try: you wake up, get out of bed, prepare your coffee or tea... Wait. We forgot to say that you put your slippers on. Oh, and before that, that you probably turned off your alarm. You see? The things that we do automatically can be among the most complicated to document. So, when I started documenting my work, I realised how many small (and not so small) transformations and adjustments I apply to my data, without even thinking. Then I wondered if these actions should be documented as well.

The problem is, as always, where to draw a line and when “more information” becomes “too much information”. I have tried to keep the ontology slim, so that its complexity is not off putting for other researchers. However, the ontology is theoretically always open to further specification, that the user can decide to use or not. 

Just to give an example, I want to mention some of the operations that virtual archaeologists, in my experience, perform so often that they might go unnoticed. 

Elements of a series: isDerivedFrom

In the real world, of course, things are all unique. If measured, all the columns in the colonnade of the Iseum would have similar but different values. I have decided that the level of granularity of my representation doesn’t require that precision. Therefore, as in many other models of ancient buildings, all my columns have been artificially assumed to be identical (and perfectly aligned). Only one has been measured on site (the one that looked better preserved), and the others duplicated. To express this process, the subelement column that has been actually measured is documented as based on hard measurements (taken by me and available online at a certain url), while all the others are recorded as derived from other elements, i.e. derived from the value of the only measured one. 

My measurements of the ekklesiasterion of the Iseum.

Elements of a series: isConformedTo

Another possibility, is that a series of elements, such as the arches on the east wall of the ekklesiasterion, have actually been singularly measured but, for various reasons, it is not considered relevant to represent these differences visually in the model. In the case of the ekklesiasterion, my assumption is that the differences between the arches are mainly due to weathering and other accidents. And, although they were never perfectly identical in the past, my reckon is that they were meant to look so (a part from the central one which is wider), so I think it made sense to just model one arch and clone it four times. It is actually a more economical approach from a modelling point of view. 

How to represent this process in the documentation? In this case, all the arches had been measured, however they have been «conformed» (the word is a work in progress label. Any better ideas? «regularised»? «normalised»? ) to an average value. In the documentation, they have an attribute that has as value the range between the lowest and the highest values measured, and the percentage that this range is against the whole measured value. That sounds confusing… So, the four arches of the east wall of the ekklesiasterion (I have left out the wider central one) have a width between 159 and 164 cm. So, all the four of them have, as value of hasWidth an average 162 cm. However, the arches (transitions) also have two attributes which are “isConformedTo: average of four (159/164)”, and “hasVariation (again, the label is a work in progress): 3%”; i.e. the percentage of the variation against the whole average value: 5 cm on 162 cm.

If stating that the columns of a colonnade have not been singularly measured can sound unnecessary and pedantic (and, maybe, it actually is…), conforming the value of elements that had been measured might sound like a loss of information. However, in the documentation of the 3D element, there is always a link to the original measurements in case they are needed at a different stage of the research or by other scholars. 

Embrace your inner dr. Frankenstein: documenting heterogeneous sources

There are a few things I have noticed writing the documentation of my 3D model in RDF, that I had not realised before starting thinking about it.

When I started my research on the ontology, I assumed that assigning one source to each element of the 3D model would have been more than enough to document sufficiently a 3D visualisation of cultural heritage.

But then I found out that a single source not always could provide all the information I was looking for. I (and possibly many others in this field) have to put together pieces of information that not only come from various archives but that have often different format, author and history. I know, it sounds like a terrible mess…

The ekklesiasterion of the Iseum in Pompeii, the north
wall visible between the arches of the east one.
Picture from pompeiiinpictures

For example, let’s look at the hypothetical restoration of the Iseum pre catastrophe. If we take the north wall of the ekklesiasterion, we can say that the width of the wall has actually been measured. So, the source for that specific information is the measurement taken on site and recorded by the researcher (in this case me) and available online at a certain url. The depth of the wall, however, cannot really be measured, definitely not with the equipment I had with me. So, the value I have assigned to the depth of the north wall of the ekklesiasterion in my model is simply based on the depth of the east wall of the same room, that can be measured because it has arches in it. The guess is supported by the fact that the depth of the walls appears to be quite consistent across the entire architectonic complex. So, the source for this other bit of information, is another element (the east wall) that has actually been measured. Last, it is not possible to know how tall the wall was before the eruptions.

For the more hypothetical elements, I have relied on Piranesi’s drawings as they have proven to be a thorough and, all in all, acceptably reliable visualisation. Thus, the height of the north wall has yet another source.

As you can see, the problem here is that not just each element, but even each dimension of the element can have a different source (it’s not always the case, but it has happened). 

For this reason, I have decided to enter, for each feature, transition or constrain, the attributes hasHight, hasWidth, hasDepth, and use them not only to express the numeric value, but also (or mainly) to connect them to the related source.

Is this level of documentation, although expressed synthetically through RDF triples, sustainable? I’m not sure yet…

Boris Karloff(*) as the Creature of Dr. Frankenstein
Image from giphy

To achieve a higher consistency, I could have tried to derive all information from the richest source, which is probably Piranesi. This would have been a perfectly acceptable choice, and the outcome would have been “an hypothetical restoration of the Iseum in Pompeii according to Francesco Piranesi”.

Nonetheless, I followed a different approach. Although I don’t want to state any degree of preferability among the different sources, I have chosen to use hard measurements each time they were available. Also, information derived geometrically from the actual remains has been considered preferable to the one derived from drawings or other secondary sources. Piranesi’s data, in the end, have been mostly used for the things that cannot be measured, that I didn’t measured (for various reasons) and that do not exist anymore.

I know that this choice makes my model a little frankenstein of information, but, in the first place, even the most detailed elevation or cross section cannot show all the information needed to produce a 3D model that is actually visible 360° in space. 

Second, my aim is not to produce a new groundbreaking hypothesis on the restoration of the Iseum but to provide a way to connect the 3D model to its sources. From this perspective, it is actually interesting to me to see how much I can stretch the potentiality of my system, and to give an idea of the richness and diversity of data virtual archaeologists deal with.

(*) trivia: glorious actor Boris Karloff is one of the King's College London illustrious alumni.

The Mysterious Story of the Disappeared Colonnade

As we mentioned realism and realistic style, it is probably the right time to tell one of my favourite Iseum stories: the Disappeared Colonnade (and Wall).

DEPREZ, Louis Jean, Temple of Isis with Protective Covering
at Pompeii, undated, black ink, grey wash and watercolour,
National Museum, Stockholm.

If you’re an artist grew up professionally with the myth of Ancient Rome as Neoclassicism disseminated it, then the Iseum is something particularly disconcerting to you. Too much colour, no marble, no symmetry. But, probably, the worse thing is that there is not enough room. All the elements are a bit too close. Again, not very “Roman”.

I cannot possibly say if it was due to disappointment or to the conscious attempt to support the cultural agenda that wanted Pompeii promoted as a “proper” Roman town, but what happens in the first representations of the temple is rather mysterious.

In this image by Desprez (which is also, by the way, the only one showing temporary structures to protect the temple and the purgatorium) the buildings are drawn in a way that makes them look bigger and wider. Maybe to accommodate better the majestic procession of Isis cultists that were very popular in the virtual reconstructions of the time (Piranesi and Saint-non, in particular, were clearly very fond of Egyptian priests).

PIRANESI, View of the Temple of Isis,
which today exists among the remains of the ancient city of Pompeii

The fact is that, to represent such a view (and make possible crowded and scenographic nocturnal celebrations), Desprez had to operate a little surgery on reality: he removed an entire row of big, doric columns. They are just gone. Vanished. And, with them, the massive east wall of the Iseum. In other words, he has changed the Iseum into a cinematographic set with only three sides (the fourth one left for the camera). 

The same magic event can be seen in Piranesi drawings, as well (unsurprisingly, as Desprez was a big fan of Piranesi family’s work). Again, in spite of the realism of the scene that is, under other respect, quite faithful to the truth, the east side of the colonnade is gone. The lovely detail of the people congregating next to the Purgatorium, is geometrically impossible (there is barely room for a single person between the Purgatorium and the colonnade). So, this very realistic view is basically fake, it never existed. But of course, that didn’t stop people from copying and reproducing it.

Photographic illustration for The Last Days of Pompeii
from victorianweb

And just to remember that it is not a matter of technology, the advent of photography didn’t really bring more “objectivity”: it seems that photographer were trying to reproduce the same sort of views that had been already popularised through drawings, engravings, and postcards.

Probably, because that is what the public was expecting to see in guidebooks and other publications about Pompeii. Thus, photographers tried to replicate the familiar view, forcing perspective a little bit to make the space look wider and, again, eliminating the columns from the frame. 

Who said that a photograph never lies?

Raphael and the leg of Venus: the role of expectations in representation

Raffaello Sanzio, The Triumph of Galatea
from wikipedia

As we said, one of the most common feeling expressed by the first visitors of Pompeii was, generally, disappointment. 

The common idea of a Roman town was probably based on literary rather than archaeological evidence. And because, usually, the texts that are transmitted are the official ones, Roman cities were expected to be large, monumental and majestic. 

Unfortunately, Pompeii is quite far from that model. Buildings are cramped and often brightly coloured. But, probably, the most disappointing bit for the first (and contemporary?) visitors were the frescoes.

One (only apparently unrelated) premise: it is interesting to notice the difference between what those visitors said about Pompeii when they were there and what they said about it years later, when they were relying on their memories more than their experience.

Years after his first unexcited comments, Goethe writes that Pompeian frescoes are so excellent that they could stand next to Raphael’s ones.

First, I don’t think it makes a lot of sense to assess archaeological evidence on its aesthetic or artistic relevance. This approach has caused the destruction of many Pompeian artefacts that were jus considered “not pretty enough”.

Second, if we really want to assess the aesthetic value of Pompeian frescoes (from an art history point of view or as simple observers), it doesn’t make a lot of sense to me to compare two artefacts that are so distant from each other like first century AD Roman frescoes and Italian Renaissance oil paintings.

However, if we do compare them, and assume that Raphael’s canons are a sort of archetype all figurative arts should conform to... then... well... Let’s put together the triumph of Galatea by Raphael and the fresco in the House of the Venus in the Shell. 

Fresco in the House of Venus in the Shell
Pompeii (Reg II, Ins 3, 3)
image credit

The subject is vaguely similar, but the images are very different. And I’m not saying that one is better than the other, just that they are very different and that it seems to me that the artists had very different concerns and goals.

The point is that if you’re an enthusiastic Neoclassic (or proto-neoclassic) artist that goes to Pompeii, eager to see and reproduce images that you imagine to be Raphael-like (following the syllogism: Roman art is perfect, Raphael’s art is perfect, Roman art must look like Raphael’s art) and you see our lovely Venus in the Shell... there is going to be quite a clash between your expectation and reality.

This could explain why some of the drawings of the excavation time are, again, slightly dissimilar from the original.  And we can definitely say it, as in some cases the original artefact survived and we can compare it to its documentation. 

So, let’s add some items to the list of things that affect the representation process. We don’t really know for sure what went through the mind of the first artists copying Pompeian frescoes, but we can speculate about it, especially if we focus on what, in my experience, is the element more often “touched up”: the human body (well, divine and semi-divine as well :-))

Drawing by J-C. Bellicard, 1754

We can imagine the artist spending hours and hours learning how to reproduce human bodies in the «right» way (i. e. as more realistic as they can). So, maybe, they just couldn’t help drawing in the way they have learnt and inadvertently “corrected“ the anatomy in the copy. Another hypothesis is that they are drawing not what they are actually seeing but what they were expecting (and wanting) to see.

We could even hypothesise that the artists didn’t want the public to suspect that they were not good enough at drawing. Maybe they didn’t want anyone to think “what a lousy copy! The artist is so useless that cannot even draw the leg of the Venus properly!”.

Here is an example from Herculaneum. The drawing (from the book Antiquity Recovered ) is a copy of one of the Herculaneum frescoes that are now exhibited in the Naples Museum.  All the body proportions (especially in the case of the Minotaur) look much more “harmonic” than the original. 

Fresco from the Basilica in Herculaneum
Image from the Hermitage website

Actually, in the case of Pompeii and Herculaneum there is at least another major, and slightly bizarre, reason that explains why representations are precious sources of information but have also to be treated with a certain care. For the first years it was not allowed to make copies of the exhibits in the Museum of Portici. But the temptation was too strong and some artists (like,  Bellicard, author of this one), took quick sketches that, probably, refined out of the museum, without the original in front of their eyes. According to Lyons and Reed, this would also explain why there are no bootleg copies of the artefacts positioned close to the entrance: there were always too many guards nearby.

A mix of “cosmetic documentation”, the gap between expectation and reality, and memory-based drawing could also explain why there is so much discrepancy between the documentation of the frescoes of the Ekklesiasterium in the Iseum and the actual fragments exhibited in the Museum of Naples. In spite of the very realistic style (always beware of the realistic style!), and the fact that they were commissioned to top class professionals of the time, the drawings not always match the evidence, sometimes quite dramatically. But that story probably deserves a post on its own.

Orpheus' lost twins

The fresco in the House of Orpheus' garden
Photo from pompeiiinpictures

The House of Orpheus in Pompeii owns its (second) name to a big fresco depicting Orpheus surrounded by animals. The image is now mostly faded, especially the left and bottom areas. 

But with Pompeian artefacts there is always a chance that the object we are interested in has been somehow recorded or documented at the time of the excavations, when many features that are now lost were still visible. They might have been described in verbal accounts, photographed, or copied by an artist.

So, if we look into into libraries and archives, we do find that Orpheus’ fresco has been reproduced by Niccolini in 1854. 

It seems that, luckily, we have found the missing information we were looking for: the left side of the fresco shows a charming illusional garden, probably meant to interact, visually, with the actual one. 

If we were about to produce a digital restoration of our fresco, that would look like a precious source of information. And, it definitely is.

However, if we have a better look at our sources, we find another reproduction of the same painting, this time by Emil Presuhn, in 1878.

The two drawings are supposed to be copies of the same original. But, when you put them next to each other, something doesn’t add up...

Left: Niccolini's reproduction of the Orpheus fresco. Right: Presuhn's one

Although the general structure and theme of the composition is definitely very similar, there are countless differences in small and not-so-small details.

Some animals look completely different: the lion in Niccolini’s drawing become an elephant in Presuhn’s one, the big feline in Niccolini’s is an hippo for Presuhn and so on... The colours are also very different: Niccolini shows a green landscape, while in Presuhn we see a quite dry one, with no water streams. We might hypothesise that Presuhn was reproducing an original that was already further degraded, although there are only about 20 years between the two publications. 

But that wouldn’t explain why, on the contrary, the left part of the fresco, looks much more detailed in Presuhn’s version than in Niccolini’s one. The bottom bit, again, is only apparently similar but very different at a second look.

Which one is the right one? Well, sadly we don’t have the original anymore to say which copy is the most accurate. Possibly, they are both equidistant from the model. Or, may be, each of them has more accurate bits than the other. For sure, they are both subjective representations of the same artefact and both influenced by a long list of variables.

I’m using these two drawings to start my little list of some of the most common factors that impact on representations of cultural heritage. 

First bullet point: skills and tools.

Not everyone is equally good at the technique they are using to represent an artefact. Not all the artist are equally skilled (if we consider «skill» as the ability to reproduce the original as close as possible) as well as not all the 3D modellers have the same familiarity with the software.

Then there is training. Although the two drawings are almost contemporary, a different style is clearly detectable, possibly due to the artists different nationality (i.e. different art schools) or just to idiosyncratic differences. I am particularly fond of the lion face in both the drawings. They look very dissimilar from each other and neither of them very much Roman.

Last, the constrains that derive from the tool. For example, in this case, the very bright colours in Niccolini’s drawing and a certain flatness in both of them are probably due (I reckon) to the printing techniques at the time that didn’t allow much sophistication in colour. Likewise, our representation are influenced by the software and hardware that are available. Or, to be more precise, by the ones we can afford.

PS: I was familiar with Presuhn drawing, and I had seen Niccolini’s one before. But I have realised how different they are only when Drew, one of my supervisors, showed me the page of Gardens of Pompeii, vol 2 where they are published together. Funnily, Jashemski uses both the drawings as a source of information about birds and plants in Pompeii, without a word on their striking dissimilarities.

Robespierre's tears and other stories about the truth of images

W.J. Stillman, Picture of the Parthenon
 Athens, 1870. From Antiquity and Photography
Getty Digital Collection

I have spent the last weeks reading about representation of cultural heritage. I went a little bit into reception studies, touched art and photography history and took some dust off my semiotic background. As you can expect, the issues are many, complex and diverse. Especially when we talk about ancient cultural heritage. But there are a couple of points I want to highlight. 

The first one is that every representation (in any medium) is an interpretation. There is always something of the person that is producing it, the culture they belong to, and the tools that are using. This probably sounds redundant and definitely not new. Unless you are attending a 3D imaging conference. Then, you will probably hear concepts like «perfect copy» and «objective recording» more times that you are comfortable with. 

I thought academics had already agreed many years ago on the fact that photographies do lie, or, better, represent the author’s personal view of reality. Inexplicably, the concept doesn’t seem to apply to new imaging techniques such as photogrammetry or laser scanning. 

The second point is that cultural objects (well, probably all objects but let’s talk about cultural heritage) are not fixed in time. They change and evolve, like living things. It becomes even more apparent when we talk about buildings. They are planned, built, damaged, restored, altered, repurposed, abandoned.

So, actually, when we produce a visualisation of something we should always clarify which moment of the «life» of the object we are actually representing.

To deal with the chronological dimension, some 3D visualisation projects have introduced a timeline. For example, UCLA's Digital Roman Forum and Digital Karnak show how buildings have changed, as singles and in relationship with each other. In Digital Karnak, more specifically, it’s possible to pick a period and see which buildings have been built, modified or destroyed at the time.

I found this approach very informative. However, it kind of assumes that the only segment of the life of an object (or place) we’re interested in is from when it is produced to when it is abandoned or destroyed.

Fragonard, J., 1775 Travellers viewing a skeleton at
Pompeii. (Such "discoveries" were often staged
to please prestigious guests)

I think that what happens to cultural heritage when it is discovered, recorded, exhibited and disseminated is still an interesting matter. Objects keep changing, even after their uncovering. Even when they are closed in a glass cabinet. And I am not only talking about material changes, but also about how changes the way we look at them.

Let’s consider Pompeii. The circumstances of its destruction often make people think that it came out from the earth exactly as we see it now. That it emerged perfectly intact, as, to use Lazer's words, a sort of Sleeping Beauty castle. Which is rather far from the truth. A quick look at pictures of the excavations shows how much the place has been changing in the last 250 years: how much of it has been restored, adjusted, twitched, when not completely staged for the tourist’s gaze.

So, my point is, mainly, that all representations are partial and biased. And using cutting edge techniques doesn’t change it. They can be more or less accurate, but are always subjective. Which is not a bad thing per se, as long as there is a general awareness of the limits of the representation process, and, even more important, when we can compare different interpretations that enrich and complement each other. 

And I’m afraid we, somehow, ended up with multivocality and multi-authorship. Again.

To make up for this, I’m going to tell some (possibly funny) stories connected to representations and interpretations. Many, but not all of them, involving Pompeii. Starting with one of my favorite anecdote about the “truth of images” by father of cinema Sergej Eisenstein:

I cannot resist the pleasure of citing here one montage tour de force of this sort, executed by Boitler. One film bought from Germany was Danton, with Emil Jannings. As released on our screens, this scene was shown: Camille Desmoulins is condemned to the guillotine. Greatly agitated, Danton rushes to Robespierre, who turns aside and slowly wipes away a tear. The sub-title said, approximately, 'In the name of freedom, I had to sacrifice a friend...' Fine. 

But who could have guessed that in the German original, Danton, represented as an idler, a petticoat chaser, a splendid chap and the only positive figure in the midst of evil characters, that this Danton ran to the evil Robespierre and... spat in his face? And that it was his spit that Robespierre wiped from his face with a handkerchief? And that the title indicated Robespierre's hatred of Danton, a hate that in the end of the film motivates the condemnation of Jannings-Danton to the guillotine! 

Two tiny cuts had reversed the entire significance of the scene!

(Eisenstein, S. 1949. Film form: Essays in Film Theory)

What is essential is visible to the eye (if you're in my model)

I hope the ghost of Antoine de Saint-exupery won't haunt me for having played with the wise words of his Fox characters, inverting their meaning. I wasn't suggesting a triumph of shallowness and prejudice, but just introducing a brief premise about my 3D modelling process. 

F. Piranesi's hypothetical restoration of the Iseum (detail)
showing the roof's supporting structure.
From builtindex

I have said that the first phase of my modelling will focus on the present archaeological evidence in situ. I might have called it “what is still there”. The expression is not entirely correct because what I am going to model is actually what we can see of what is there (assuming that we were free to  explore the whole Iseum as much as we like). 

In practice, this means that, for example, I am going to model the Purgatorium's underground space, even though it is not immediately visible and it is not accessible to modern tourists without a permit, but is potentially both visible and accessible.

On the other hand, I won't model what is not visible. To explain ti better, I can use an hypothetical example: let’s imagine that the roof of the Temple had survived. In that case, I would model only the ceiling (which is what an observer could see from inside the Temple) and the external elements such as the tiles or the architrave (which is what an observer could see from the outside of the Temple). But I wouldn’t model the (invisible) supporting structure. 

I am sure that modelling what actually allows a roof to stand (for many centuries!) is of massive interest in the study of architecture and ancient building techniques. 

As I am more interested in how a building was seen and experienced by people (either at as a Roman Temple or as a modern Touristic Attraction), I have decided  to include in my 3D model only what is accessible to the eyes of a human being that is allowed everywhere in the modelled space. 

The matter would be different if the hypothetical roof would be damaged. Then, the internal structure would be visible to visitors and part of their experience (and, therefore, object of my representation).

If you love someone, let them go: the House of Orpheus and its dataset

Old undated photograph courtesy of the
Society of Antiquaries, Fox Collection
from Pompeiiinpictures

I was initially planning to work on two examples of Pompeian buildings: the Iseum and the House of Orpheus. I find them both very interesting for different reasons, and I have for them that emotional attachment that 3D modellers develop for the buildings they have been working on.

I have seen them in Pompeii, I have taken measurements and pictures, drawn maps. However, after a more practical approach to my timetable (i.e. looking at an actual calendar), I have suddenly realised that the modelling of the Iseum alone is going to take the entire 2014. There is no really room left for a second model. It wasn’t easy to give up part of my research, but it wasn’t even a choice. Although I am not modelling the House of Orpheus, I think that the amount of data I collected so far on that building (and the related artefacts) can still play a role in my PhD.

I have recently started the very hard task of drafting my ontology for cultural heritage,  having as a main reference my own model of the Iseum. I have quickly discovered how easy it is, in such circumstances, to think of something that turns out to be very much ad hoc for one single case study. Orpheus’ dataset is a good way to double check if my categories work not just for the Iseum, but can be reasonably applied to at least one other Pompeian building (that belongs to a complete different category).

On the one hand the House of Orpheus is a fairly typical Pompeian middle sized household. On the other hand, there is quite a lot of information missing. Only the ground floor survived (while the existence of at least a second floor is strongly suggested by the remains of stairs), and, for a few spaces, there is still no agreement on their use in Roman times. 

Being a more ambiguous context than the Iseum, it points out much more clearly what is the weight of the assumptions in our way to describe (or even look at) an ancient building, and it reminds me that I should try to keep descriptions and interpretations as much separate as possible. 

Lured by the sistrum: the choice of the Iseum

Francesco Piranesi, The Temple of Isis at Pompeii

If you have ever met me in person, it is very likely that I have mentioned the Temple of Isis in Pompeii, at a certain point. Even if you didn’t ask about it. Even if, to be honest, there was little (or no) connection with the conversation topic.
To be precise, the area I’m working on, experimenting with the potentiality of RDF applied to 3D environments, is the Pompeian Iseum. The sacred complex includes, besides the proper temple, other public spaces for the cult, and the private spaces where (probably) the isiac priest(s) used to live.

There are many reasons behind my choice.
First, the digital unification of one of the Iseum’s rooms (the Ekklesiaterium) was the case study for my MA dissertation in Digital Humanities at King’s College London. The Iseum, in fact, has one of the richest and best preserved collections of artefacts and decorations that are exhibited in the Archaeological Museum of Naples. The corpus is so relevant that it has a dedicated space within the Museum itself.

Besides the conclusions of my dissertation, the Iseum is certainly the groups of buildings in Pompeii I am most familiar with. Moreover, I have already collected a personal archive of digital resources, partly produced by myself (such as digital pictures and measurements) partly found in online repository, partly digitised from printed sources. While researching for my MA dissertation, I obtained access to areas of the Iseum that are usually interdict to the public (such as the interior of the temple, the interior of the ekklesiasterium and the purgatorium) as well as to documents that are relatively rare (such as the original drawings by John Soane, at the Soane Museum and the 1941’s illustrated publication by Elia and the Warbourg Institute). I thought it was a good idea to capitalise the information that I gathered and to produce a 3D visualisation able (among other things) to show and make virtually explorable, parts of the Iseum that are usually unaccessible to the average visitor.

Another reason is that the Iseum was one of the first excavated complex, so it is featured in many accounts, records, watercolours and guide books.

Imaginary interior of the Temple of Isis in the Italian movie
Gli ultimi giorni di Pompeii.
From http://ithankyouarthur.blogspot.co.uk/

In addition, when the place was dug up, the site was still personal property of the Bourbon King and he hired very skilled professional from the Neapolitan Academy of Fine Arts to produce a visual documentation of various features of the building(s) as they were when they had been unearthed. Some of these engravings (now exhibited at the Museum of Naples) are the best information we have about some elements that do not exist anymore.
The fact that the Temple of Isis and the Iseum appear so often in official and unofficial literature about Pompeii, is not merely a matter of “age”.
The temple captured the attention and the imagination of many visitors. Its Egyptianising flavor made it look mysterious, if not slightly sinister. It became quickly an iconic building in Pompeii, and it is featured in many novels (such as the hugely popular Bulwer Lytton’s one) and even peplum movies.

As interpretations and narratives connected to ancient heritage, are part of what I want to represent, the Iseum seemed to  confirm its relevance under this respect too.

The Pompeian Iseum has been very often reproduced. Francesco Piranesi, for example, has studied the place and its architecture in depth. However, it is very seldom shown in its completeness, most of the visual interpretations focusing on the Temple and the Purgatorium alone. My model aims to represent all the different components of the Iseum, (potentially) allowing the investigation of their visual and functional interactions.

On top of these very sensible reasons, there is a more irrational one: the Iseum, in its charming funkiness and lack of symmetry, simply rocks (but I can’t write that in my PhD).

Let's get practical: a digital research journal

After a year spent reading a lot, meeting people, finding out that all my good ideas had already been much better explored by someone else, and, last, after passing the upgrade, I though it was time to start thinking of the practical side of what I am going to do with my 3D visualisation and the RDF ontology.

To prevent the terrifying feeling that hits you at the end of the third year when you are supposed to retire into a cave and spend 6 month writing no-stop (basically degrading all primary needs to a secondary ones), I have decided to take some notes during the process. Hopefully, it will make the process easier and more transparent. They are preliminary thoughts and they are very likely to be a bit green and even clumsy. All going well, they will be refined during the next two years, also thanks to the feedback I receive. So, all comments are very welcome (and actually useful).

"Strange and half-disagreeable"

Goethe in the Roman Campagna, J. Tischbein
from wikipedia

I want to start my hypothetical Guest Book with a very popular visitor: Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

Goethe visited Pompeii and Herculaneum quite at an early stage of the excavations, in March 1787. 

It is not easy to tell if he enjoyed the experience. If we look at the words Goethe used (and, being a poet, he probably picked them carefully and precisely) to describe Pompeii, we’ll find many terms with quite explicit negative connotations: «narrow», «cramped», «small». In the end, he and his companions received a “strange and half-disagreeable impression of this mummified town”. 

What disturbed Goethe so deeply? We cannot possibly say. Maybe just the mismatch between the «actual» Pompeii and the image of it that he had in his mind. In other words, Pompeii was not “Classical” or, even better, “Neoclassical” enough compared to Goethe expectations. It is also true that, as Leppmann remembers, when Goethe visited Pompeii many of the most iconic buildings, especially the big villas and temples, where still to be uncovered. The only major temple visible was, probably, the temple of Isis. I bet that its asymmetry and the slightly chaotic ensemble of architectonic features are among the things that quite bothered Goethe.

However, after a couple of years, Goethe writes in his journals that “he really does not know of anything more interesting” of Pompeii. What is particularly remarkable (and maybe slightly amusing) is that, as Fitzon says, the second entry in Goethe’s Journal is not connected to any new visit to Pompeii. It is more Goethe editing (not just aesthetically but also conceptually) his journal for the large audience. 

Goethe and his friends,
F. Bury

Did he see, after his visit, something new that made him reconsider his position? Or did he just feel that it was his duty as a member of the cultural intelighenzia to show enthusiasm for such an archaeological treasure, even though he didn’t actually enjoy the visit. In other words, was Goethe experiencing the same sort of schizophrenic reaction that is still quite common among contemporary tourists: a mix of disappointment, wonder and guilt?

Again, we do not know. 

According to his journal, the visit to the museum of Portici might have changed quite considerably his perception of the whole experience. After the visit to Portici, Goethe says he could finally populate, at least in his imagination, the empty houses and temples with objects. And I believe that putting eventually together buildings and artefacts could actually be an enormous added value. Much before his contemporaries, Goethe seems to be very impressed by everyday items such as lamps and candelabra. If I compare his words with the answers to the questionnaires my respondents gave me about the British Museum exhibition, it seems that Goethe understood much earlier than others how much Pompeii was going to change the way the public thinks of the Past, shifting the interest from the exceptional piece of art to the everyday lives of our ancestors.

Goethe enthusiasm for Pompeii was refreshed, many years later, by his encounter with the young painter Wilhelm Zahn. His account of the first meeting with Goethe is quite entertaining. But that’s another story...

A Pompeian Guestbook

One of the reasons I have chosen Pompeii as a case study is because of its popularity. In the past 250 years, many people have visited the excavations (and the Museum) and more than someone has decided to leave a record of their impressions. So, I have access to an interesting, heterogeneous and multimedia corpus of interpretations of Pompeii and its artefacts, from 1748 to present day.
I want to compare how the reception of Pompeii has been changing through time and try to point out what are the variables that influenced these changes.
I have decided to start with the interpretations of Pompeii that come from writers, intellectuals and historical personalities. I am aware that the experience of these particular witnesses is likely to have been very different from the regular visitor's one. Not only they were probably treated as honorable guests, but they also had a cultural background that cannot be representative of their average contemporaries.

On the other hand, the travel notes of persons like Goethe or Dickens, are certainly easier to find and access than the private journals of non-famous people. I would also say that they tend to be quite well written. What I mean is that writers and artists have the habit of describing things in detail and to record their feelings quite precisely. Furthermore, these people seldom were really writing for their private journals. They knew they were actually targeting a large public, and they were aware that their view of Pompeii would have shaped the expectations (and even the opinions) of the their connationals.

I am starting from the assumption that popular artists were kind of opinion leaders, and that they were certainly influenced by their own background culture but, at the same time, they were actively influencing it.
The list of members of the intelligentsia who went to Pompeii and wrote (or painted or drew) about it is very long: Madame de Staël, Mozart, Stendhal, Keats, Byron, Gautier and many others

Is this process still ongoing? Who are today the people we (implicitly) entrust to shape our interpretations of Ancient Cultural Heritage?