LA: Pompeii and the Roman Villa at LACMA

My professional purpose in Los Angeles will be revealed in the fullness of time and the October issue, but I did manage—en route to the airport —to take in “Pompeii and the Roman Villa: Art and Culture Around the Bay of Naples” at LACMA. (I was in an Italian mood, having feasted at Mario Batali’s scrumptious Osteria, and Pizzeria Mozza on subsequent evenings.)

What a revelation of beauty this exhibition is! In their ravishing colonnaded villas and the gardens that embowered them, the Roman grandees vied with one another to commission ever more exquisite furnishings, paintings, and sculpture, that Etna and the sands of time helped preserve in their astonishing perfection.

The first-century bronze of Alexander the Great on horseback, the sensuous Pentelic marble draperies of an Aphrodite, a miraculous onyx cameo of Augustus in profile, a gilded silver bull for a household shrine, a perfect little spun-ribbon glass bowl, striped in gold, azure, and emerald. So many small miracles. No wonder, as the exhibition reveals, that these treasures, when unearthed in the eighteenth century, unleashed the imagination of artists from that day to our own.