Pompeii Lives - In the Permanent Collection of The Field Museum
The Field Museum owes its fine Pompeii holdings to one of its founders and greatest benefactors, Edward Ayer. In the middle 1890s Ayer visited Italy and became convinced that the new Field Columbian Museum had to have a representative Roman collection. His first purchase toward that end was made in Naples: almost two hundred replicas of the bronzes that were then being excavated at Pompeii. Legend has it that the original bronzes were taken directly to the workshops of the noted bronze caster Sabatino De Angelis and Sons as soon they came out of the ground. Only after De Angelis had made a mold and a lost-wax copy were the originals taken to their final destination, the National Museum of Naples. The two hundred replicas first acquired by Ayer were soon joined by about a hundred and fifty more, giving The Field Museum what may be the largest extant collection of De Angelis’s magnificent copies.
During this same time Ayer was acquiring nearly fifty original objects from Pompeii itself, including some fine glass vases, bronze and iron objects with crusts of volcanic debris, and a representative sample of ceramics. These were outshone, however, by another set of originals: objects dug from the rich cluster of villas at Boscoreale, a mile north of Pompeii and destroyed by the same volcanic disaster. Ayer bought more than ten fine fresco paintings that had just been excavated at Boscoreale, including the two large ones currently exhibited at the Art Institute as a loan from The Field Museum. He also acquired not one but two splendid bronze bath tubs, four gigantic wine jars from the storeroom of an aristocratic vintner, and an assortment of iron objects and fine bronzes. With the Pompeii originals and replicas, the presence of the Boscoreale objects makes The Field Museum the leading repository on this side of the Atlantic for Roman-era artifacts from the Vesuvius region.
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