Culture and History at Pompey's Museum

Abstract

present but occurring in the past. The analogies between stars and works of art can profitably be pursued. However fragmentary its condition, any work of art is actually a portion of arrested happening, or an emanation of past time. It is a graph of an activity now stilled, but a graph made visible like an astronomical body, by a light that originated with the activity. When an important work of art has utterly disappeared by demolition and dispersal, we can still detect its perturbations upon other bodies in the field of influence.1 Since the age of eighteen, my own practice as an art historian has been perturbed by recurring contact with George Kubler's essay on making a history of things, or I should not find myself so often trying to see what was once important as well as what is left now. My graph of obscure art-events is made from those acts of attention constituted both by visual and textual reflection and representation, of destroyed things and plants, bodies and minds. Continually reverberating upon viewers since its opening in 55 B.C.E., Pompeius Magnus' Theater-Portico for Venus Victrix endured into late antiquity as one of that city of spectacle's largest, oddest and most beautiful precincts, containing almost every Roman art-architecture, landscape architecture, sculpture and painting, performance, and language arts and music. Now it survives physically in pitiful shreds-a contour in Rome's street grid, a