For better or worse, Pompeii intermediates much of our perception of the Roman world. For two centuries, an endless stream of new discoveries has fixed Pompeii in the public and scholarly consciousness. For the public, the site's continual disinterment has produced a drumbeat of historical wonders: the delicate implements of daily life, the vibrant decoration of great houses, and the full, three-dimensional environments of hundreds of these homes. For scholars, the long duration of Pompeii's investigation has also proliferated a host of new mediating structures, intellectual devices meant to organize the archaeological evidence. Thus, conventional names for buildings were consolidated within a telescopic address system, frescoes were codified within a framework of four illusionistic styles, and many typologies of objects, features, and even space itself were created to contend with the complexity of Pompeii's urban experience. When the grand clearance excavations ended in the 1960s, scholars embarked upon enormous projects to catalog the wealth of information on art, imagery, and publications. Despite, or more accurately because of these efforts, the last decades have seen new digital attempts to overcome the sheer volume of information about Pompeii.Footnote 1 Yet these digital initiatives mean that we are now mediating our mediating structures, building frameworks for our frameworks. It is in this context that the Museo Archeologico Nazionale di Napoli (MANN) sought to create a digital, three-dimensional model of its physical model of Pompeii, commonly called the “Plastico,” a digital sister one step removed from her material mater.
La grandiosa imitazione: il grande Plastico di Pompei. Dal modello materico al modello digitale by Daniele Malfitana, Giulio Amara, and Antonino Mazzaglia provides essential documentation and discussion of this remarkable “double” artifact, including both the process and the purpose of its digitization. In my extended review of this book, I hope to amplify the work of the authors to situate the Plastico in its many contexts – as a souvenir, as a craft, as a technology, as a scientific instrument – as well as setting the new digital model within its own emerging world of similar electronic objects. I begin with an overview of the book, laying out its chapters and what readers can expect to find (and not) in each. Next, I delve into the history of the Plastico and cork models more generally before turning to this particular 3D model. I conclude with a discussion of how scholars might use the new digital Plastico.
The contents of La grandiosa imitazione
La grandiosa imitazione contains two prefatory statements, an introduction, six chapters and an atlas, totaling 313 pages, though the atlas takes up more than half of the text. A bibliography is present at the end, but there is no index. The prefaces by Paolo Giulierini, then current MANN director, and by Massimo Osanna, previous director of the Parco Archeologico di Pompei (PAP), poetically argue for the value of the Plastico, and its digitization, for both the museum and the archaeological site. In a deeply theoretical introduction, Malfitana, former Director of the Institute for Archaeological and Monumental Heritage (2011–2019), interrogates the idea of the city and what intellectual tools we possess to “read” cities, before turning to this specific document for ancient Pompeii. Indeed, those scholars who lived contemporaneously with the Plastico's production saw it not only as a remarkable work of art, but also as an act of preservation. Overbeck remarked that it was “the most commendable undertaking of the new era, as anyone who knows to what extent the ruins are exposed to decay will admit” (61). Malfitana connects this previous “new era,” brought about by Pompeii's most famous superintendent, Guiseppe Fiorelli, to the current moment, a time when so much documentary and organizational effort has been expended on Pompeii by the Grande Progetto di Pompei and subsequently by the Pompeii Sustainable Preservation Project, which Malfitana leads.
Chapter I, by Antonio Mazzaglia, continues the theoretical trajectory of the introduction, exploring the variety and purposes of models, both physical and intellectual. Learned critiques of semiology and the image evolve into deconstructions of virtual reality, placing the Plastico and its digital representation within a constellation of meaning-making processes. But Mazzaglia means this also as a warning, quoting Forte in asking us to not take the models at face value: “there is no methodology without an information theory, there is no absolute cognitive value of technology without an adequate epistemological reflection” (35).Footnote 2 It is from this lofty, if insecure, perch that the text shifts from models of reality in theory, to a history of models in cork.
At the heart of the volume are three chapters by Guilo Amara, who is thanked in Malfitana's introduction for completing so much of the work to digitize and study the Plastico while still only an undergraduate (2015–2016). Chapter II provides a brief history of cork models and the two iterations of the early Plastico, while the position of these models as media at the birth of photography is addressed in Chapter III (with Giovanni Fragalà). Chapter IV offers an overview of the model of Pompeii itself. I attempt a deeper exploration of these chapters below.
The discussions of digital technologies in this book are next, authored by Antonio Mazzaglia and Danilo Pavone, joined by Giovanni Fragalà (Chapter V) and by Fabiana Cerasa (Chapter VI). Chapter V details the digitization process, from mapping the information design, to rigging a custom scaffolding above the Plastico to complete the capture, to processing and post-processing procedures. The process, which essentially mimicked a drone flight over the real ancient city, resulted in a complete digital model of the Plastico, as well as individual models and orthophotos at different levels of quality (e.g., high, medium, low) covering different segments of the city (e.g., regions, insulae). Chapter VI argues for the potential of the digital Plastico to be not only an artifact and historical document in the real world, but also an instrument and even an information system in the digital realm. To this end, a detailed database of information about the model and its creation was developed in alignment with the larger Piano della Conoscenza of the Grande Progetto Pompei.Footnote 3 The authors provide a hypothetical example of a “virtual tour” by drilling down from the entire digital model to the eastern areas of region VII and insula 1 in particular before exploring individually annotated buildings illustrated from multiple angles.
Chapter VII, again by Guilio Amara, is undoubtedly the most interesting as it uses the new digital model to critically examine the fidelity of the original Plastico model and corrects the common claim that the model depicts Pompeii at the moment of its liberation from the lapilli. Finally, the book's second half is an atlas of the model, insula-by-insula, provided with the purpose of “guiding the reader through that game of references which lead from the model to the real context,” from the digital model, to the Plastico, to Pompeii itself. While this atlas is no substitute for access to the actual digital model, we should nonetheless marvel at the technical achievement and sympathize with the challenge of hosting and providing access to an object representing almost half of an entire ancient city.
The cork model and the “Plastico”
Like today's complex, digital 3D models, large-scale or intricate cork models were objects of both art and science, requiring considerable skill and expense to produce. Models, of course, have an extremely long history, beginning in the Neolithic, with famous examples known from the ancient Near East, Egypt, and Crete, and encompassing models that were made contemporaneously with Pompeii's existence in Roman times. Most famous are scale models of temples from Ostia (1:32) and Niha, Lebanon (1:24) that seem to have served as instructional devices.Footnote 4 In Chapter II, however, Amara traces the origins of the Plastico not to didactic architectural models, but instead to the Neapolitan folk art that produced primarily nativity scenes. With the disinterment of the Vesuvian cities in the middle of the 18th c., a new market opened, inviting a felloplastic industry to produce unique, high-end commercial products that catered to wealthy clients wishing to materialize the memories made on their grand tours of the classical world.
Such a commercial origin has implications for what modelmakers thought these objects were for and how they should be designed. In this light, the apparent accuracy of the models in representing their subjects was not driven directly by a scientific interest but was instead a byproduct of a “persuasive communication strategy: to convince and gain the trust of the client” (44–45). Complicating this were the interests of clients, which often were scientific, or at least didactic. The clients’ hoped-for models that were examples of ancient idealized architectural forms served also as a means of preservation. To the collector, models were thus potent intermediaries, halfway points between the lost wisdom of an ancient world and its potential revival in theirs. For the modelmaker to meet this demand required a precision of measurement, quality of execution, and at least the appearance of accuracy in rendering.
The history of the Plastico and its forerunners is relatively poorly documented, as Amara recounts largely based on Kockel's long engagement with the subject.Footnote 5 The evidence begins with the surviving model by Giovanni Altieri of the Temple of Isis (1:18) from as early as 1784, while another model of the Villa of Diomedes was also begun in the same year but was never finished.Footnote 6 Its components are now lost. A generation later, between 1821 and 1822, Pompeii superintendent Michele Arditi commissioned Domenico Padiglione to create a second model of the Villa of Diomedes (1:48). Although on display in the MANN through the 1850s, it too has now been lost.Footnote 7 In the preceding decade, Padiglione had already produced a number of models including the Odeon, part of the Amphitheater, and another Temple of Isis, as well as the entire theater district at Pompeii.Footnote 8 It is unclear if the Odeon and Isis Temple were incorporated into the theater-district model, but they are all present in a model (1:80) of the same area in Sir John Soane's Museum, attributed to Paglione. It was perhaps the experience of making these models, commissioned for archaeological purposes and region-wide in scope, that encouraged Padiglione to consider a model of the entire site then excavated. One wonders, however, if he understood that his ambition would extend beyond his lifetime, indeed for more than a century.
Our understanding of the collaborative, staccato, multi-generational endeavor to model all of Pompeii is rife with ambiguity, and the contributors to this volume can be forgiven for not covering all of it or tackling all of its enduring mysteries. Indeed, even the originator of the plan for a model at 1:48 scale is unknown. The idea first appears in a letter written in 1822, and although Amara assigned it to Domenico Padiglione (42), Kockel is convinced the handwriting cannot be his, despite the many discussions of scale and measurement. Ironically, in another letter from 1823, we do learn the origin of the 1:100 scale of the second city model that Fiorelli would commission in 1860.Footnote 9 What is clear is that the first steps toward a complete documentary model at 1:48 scale began in 1822 with a project to recreate the forum area and surrounding public buildings. Domenico's sons, Agostino and Felice Padiglione, extended his commission, notably with models of important residential buildings at this scale, including the House of Sallust (1833), the House of the Faun (1833–1835), and the House of the Tragic Poet (1837–1838). These appear to be the only pieces documented of the comprehensive model of the entire city as excavated, which begs the question if it ever actually existed. That the edges of the forum area – the first area modeled – were still described as unfinished in 1860, when the first model was decommissioned, seems to be evidence that a complete first model did not exist.Footnote 10 Only Kockel's conjecture that the rapid pace of the second model's creation between 1861 and 1864 was bolstered by the existence of a complete earlier and larger model offers circumstantial evidence.Footnote 11
The belief in a full, first, large-scale (1:48) model has helped to suppress another mystery: whether the surviving large models are copies of originals that supposedly remained at Pompeii or are in fact the original models themselves. The first of these is a model made by Agostino Padglione of the House of Sallust and the southern half of insula VI.2, preserved in the Pompejanum of Ludwig I of Bavaria. Kockel argues that this is a copy produced in 1839–1840 rather than the 1833 original, but it is unclear as to why this must be so.Footnote 12 The label for Ludwig I's model reports that its scale “largely correspond[s] to 1:50,” certainly close enough to the original 1:48 scale.Footnote 13 Additionally, in correspondence between Ludwig I and his agent, Martin von Wagner, the king is advised to receive the model as soon as possible because it is suffering from too-frequent touching and showings to strangers.Footnote 14 It would seem that if the model were only produced during the last year, and by commission to the King of Bavaria, it should be less likely to be endangered by such conditions. Similarly, Amara suggests that the Theater District model in Sir John Soane's Museum is a copy of the Domenico Padgilone original, possibly because there was a direct ban on sales of models without permission put in place in 1820. While clear in the text (42–43), Amara is vague in his footnote (n. 47) about the Theater District model's originality. Intriguingly, Kockel points out that there
must have been an event that provoked this letter. As far as we know, Padiglione sold a model of the Temple of Poseidon in Paestum to Crown Prince Ludwig of Bavaria (later King Ludwig). This was perhaps the same occasion that the model of the theatre quarter, now in Sir John Soane's Museum, was made.Footnote 15
More curious still is that Soane's model was purchased in 1826, soon after the original model's creation, and by auction rather than by commission.Footnote 16 Was the sale of the Theater District model a further reason for the government's prohibition? If a city-wide model was envisioned at 1:48 scale, then a Theater District model at 1:80 scale, like the one at Sir John Soane's Museum, would be expendable.Footnote 17
Whatever the originality of these individual models or the completeness of the whole to which they may have belonged, by 1860 they were destined to be replaced by a smaller model, initially at one-quarter the size (i.e., 1:200), swiftly corrected to one-half (i.e., 1:100). Such wide differences in scale would preclude direct recycling and reuse of the original models,Footnote 18 but their use as a reference might well have been a boon to modeler Felice Padiglione and painter Antonio Servillo. As a physical object of art, the Plastico model was made up of sheets of cork scored by pyrography, as seen in the representation of bare masonry. Frescoes, floors, and ceilings were recreated in tempera and stucco and given vibrant, contrasting colors to enhance the visibility of the miniature artworks. The core of the second model consisted of the areas surrounding the forum, as well as six additional insulae to the north and east, all of which were produced in only a few years between 1862 (when the 1:200 model plan was abandoned) and ca. 1864, when a lithograph of the model was made and published in 1866.Footnote 19
How the model grew from this original nucleus is, again, imperfectly known. Amara (56) suggests insulae VI.3 and VI.4 were added soon after the image was taken, based on the particular cross-hatching used to indicate bare (opus incertum style) masonry.Footnote 20 Between 1865 and 1908, however, little certainty exists about which parts of the model were made when, other than the banal certainty that they followed the date of excavation. In this period, the contract to continue the Plastico's expansion fell to another family dynasty. Vincenzo Bramante and his sons Alessandro and Emilio worked only slowly and sporadically for reasons of law, process, and health. Another image of the model, a photograph taken in 1897, shows it complete to the line of insulae east of via Stabiana and including six of Region VI's northern blocks. Van der Poel reports that the House of the Vettii model had been begun by the Bramantes and so at least part of (at least) insula VI.15 can be credited to them.Footnote 21 Although slow, the Bramantes’ work was masterful:
It is the exact planimetric and altimetric representation, at the ratio of 1/100, of what remains of the ancient city. The streets and the buildings appear there with the most minute particularities of the various methods of masonry, floors, stuccos and wall paintings. It shows Pompeii as seen from above through a lens capable of making the surface 10,000 times smaller and the volume 1,000,000 times smaller.Footnote 22
The final period of the model's development was between 1909, when insula XI.5 was completed by Nicola Roncicchi, and 1940, when insulae VI.16 and IX.8 were added to the model. Insula VI.16 was constructed by Antonio Carotenuto and Luigi Auriemma between 1926 and 1939. By contrast, insula IX.8, which contains the House of the Centenary, was completed much more rapidly, between 1937 and 1939.Footnote 23 In 1989, following restoration of the model, the awkward extension of the insula IX.8 model was removed and placed in museum storage, leaving the Plastico as the visitor to the model room, or now to the 3D model, will find it.
The Plastico as a digital model
At the moment, however, no one can make use of the digital model outside of the illustrations in the Atlas. No mention is made of when, where, or if the model(s) and underlying data might be made available. Undoubtedly, there are both technical issues and cultural resistance preventing dissemination. Experiments in photogrammetry at Pompeii were already underway in the mid-1990s,Footnote 24 though laser scanning would dominate over the next two decades, with major campaigns in the Forum (2004), on the fortifications (2007), in the Quadriporticus (2011), and in insula V.1 (2011–2012).Footnote 25 Between 2010 and 2020, many more projects began to integrate photogrammetric practices into their fieldwork as the cost to produce digital 3D models – both in processing power and expertise – was dramatically reduced.Footnote 26 Few projects, however, have shared the results of their 3D captures, in whole or even in part.Footnote 27 Most of those that did make their models available took advantage of the contemporary arrival of 3D hosting platforms, especially Sketchfab.com. In fact, for a time, this seems to have been the plan for disseminating the digital Plastico. In 2016, two accounts were set up: the LAIM IBAM CNR which currently hosts one model and the IBAM CNR Demo account, which hosts 17 models.Footnote 28 The last two models were posted on June 16, 2016. Unfortunately, the quality of these models is too low for serious research on their contents.
Why more models were never posted is unknown, but the Istituto per i Beni Archeologici e Monumentali del Consiglio Nazionale delle Ricerche (IBAM-CNR) no longer seems to exist. Restarting the Plastico project likely will require an impetus from outside of the original initiative. Perhaps the effort to publish this book is evidence of movement in that direction. Evidence of hurdles other than financial and technological, however, are found in the volume's opening pages. Indeed, the idea that it is “an ethical obligation to disseminate the results of research well beyond the restricted scientific community” was sufficiently foreign that it was described as “what in the United Kingdom is defined as Public Archeology” (7). It is not the case that Italy does not have an archeologia pubblica,Footnote 29 but it remains underappreciated. Work in the Vesuvian region, however, has been a bright spot in this area.Footnote 30 In fact, efforts to make the archaeological site of Pompeii more accessible,Footnote 31 make its operation more transparent,Footnote 32 and make its cultural impacts even broader, such as the Pompeii Commitment,Footnote 33 have been priorities over the last decade. The importance of these efforts was emphasized by the Covid-19 pandemic, but abatement of that emergency will test the commitment to such principles. I am hopeful that this book will renew interest in the digital Plastico and that we will see its unveiling in the near future.
Using the Plastico
Three-dimensional models have a number of advantages over 2D representations, not least of which is a sense of presence, a “hereness” in Mindrup's terminology.Footnote 34 Models and their viewers share the same space, rather than projecting into another space as other media do. Models are explored intuitively, allowing our lifetime of experience navigating architectural spaces and objects to guide us toward the information we desire without the training needed to use other information spaces, such as tables, graphs, and filing systems. Because they are free of the physics of the world we inhabit, digital models have even greater advantages, such as infinite scaling, impossible views, and simultaneous use.Footnote 35 In combination with the density and chronology of the archaeological documentation embedded within it, the digital Plastico has the potential to be an extremely powerful research tool.
Yet the Plastico has its own particular limitations, introduced in large part by the vagaries of its production. As the history of the Plastico demonstrated, “in its final form, the Pompeian model constitutes the set of several models produced and progressively assembled: for this reason it will not be possible to ignore the phases of its creation” (55). Users must remind themselves that the Plastico does not show each part of the city at its moment of discovery, and less still, its ancient appearance. Many areas were modeled only after a significant amount of time had elapsed, especially those areas that were created for a second time in the final model. This fact introduces the further complication that some parts of the Plastico are modeling other models rather than the site itself. Finally, there is always simple human error to countenance.
In Chapter VII, Amara explores these intersecting considerations via four somewhat poorly distributed case studies: the House of the Ancient Hunt (VII.4.48), the House of the Black Walls (VII.4.59), the House of the Citharist (I.4.5.25), and the Officina Coriariorum (I.5.2). His excellent analysis demonstrates that while in many cases the modelers produced faithful representations of what remained to be seen on site at that time based on their direct observations, they also used other documentary sources to recreate architectures and decorations that had subsequently disappeared or were simply more easily accessible that way. Naturally, the degree of reliance on these reproductions will correlate with the number of decades that an area has stood exposed since excavation. For anyone studying these four locations, Amara's autopsy will be indispensable and usefully paired with Kockel's and Heslin's discussions of the Temple of Isis and Temple of Apollo models, respectively.Footnote 36
For scholars hoping to use the rest of the digital model of the Plastico, it would be useful to know how long a certain area was exposed prior to it potentially being modeled in the Plastico since this will correlate with the degree to which the model will include information not found anywhere else. That is, the closer in time to its excavation that a model was made, the more likely it will be to represent what the excavators first encountered since there will have been less time for degradation of the materials. Similarly, this compression of time means that there might be few illustrations already created and published for the modelers to rely on instead of the site itself. Usefully, the Atlas (mostly) provides both of these sets of data, and so by finding the difference in years between excavation and model production we can generate a table of data (table 1) to represent the rate of modeling lag. Because the dates of excavation are known, but not always contiguous and because the dates of model production are always a range of years, it is necessary to calculate the longest and the shortest possible rate of modeling lag. To represent these data spatially, I have also created a map (Fig. 1), using the average lag in modeling, a rough figure calculated by finding the average year of excavation and average year of modeling and subtracting the former from the latter. For example, insula V.1 was primarily excavated between 1875 and 1876 while the modeling occurred between 1878 and 1890, for an average lag of only nine years.
Table 1. Calculations for average modeling date, average excavation date, and average modeling lag.
Fig. 1. Map of average modeling lag.
All told, the data show that while some parts of Pompeii could have been modeled in the same year as their excavation, other (even adjacent) sections might have witnessed a century's delay between exposure and modeling. On average, the modeling lag rate was a generation (35 years). The reader should be aware that the information for these calculations was taken from the Atlas and could be improved by reducing the resolution of excavation dates down to the individual building, where known. Nonetheless, this map and table offer a quick look at the degree to which the model might have represented “fresh” excavations or how much it must have relied on secondary sources.
Conclusion
With the completion of this grand digital humanities project, there is now another link in the chain of experiences available today: from accessing a scan of the Plastico on a computer, to viewing the physical cork model in a museum, to visiting the site of Pompeii itself. In closing, it is important to consider the position of this new experience in the long history of illustrating the ancient city. For Goethe (Rome, 1 November 1786), a first visit to Rome was a validation of his previous encounters with its representations:
All my dreams of youth, I see them live before my eyes; the first etchings I can remember (my father had many views of Rome hanging in a room of our house) I now see in reality; and all that I have known for a long time in painting and in drawing, in copperplate and woodcut, in plaster and cork, is here all together before me, all now gathered before my eyes, and wherever I go I find an ancient knowledge in a foreign world. Everything is as I imagined it, and everything is new. (Quoted on page 39)
We see here an appetite for the real, whetted by the simulacra of cutting-edge technology of 250 years ago. When made available online to the public, the digital Plastico likely will have the same effect, driving a public hunger to visit the Naples Museum and Vesuvian cities.
The internet, however, is obviously a commercial as well as cultural marketplace, and we should also anticipate both the commodification of the digital Plastico and resistance to those forces. Like Saint-Non's grand folios (Voyage Pittoresque de Naples et de Sicile, 1781–1786), which brought the ancient world into the homes of paying customers, modern entrepreneurs will see the landscapes of Pompeii as digital assets to be sold to individuals and to companies. Indeed, it is already possible to buy a model of the Pompeii amphitheater for a mere $10.Footnote 37 Soon we might expect the city digitally recreated at scale to be reused in fantastic virtual gaming environments. In this regard, it is no surprise that Epic Games purchased the Sketchfab hosting platform in 2021. It is hard to imagine these considerations are not impacting the decision to keep the digital Plastico largely offline; a 21st-c. parallel of the sales ban placed on Domenico Padiglione.Footnote 38
But while the government in 1820 could prevent those with the ability to see the ancient city from distributing their vision of it in physical media, today the ubiquity of cellphones and social media make attempts to regulate such access a fool's errand and even likely counterproductive, as Goethe's quote suggests. More important for the academic community is the fact that these digital photographs, taken in their millions, are shaping an archaeological record of Pompeii that will undoubtedly skew our perception of the ancient city around these first decades of the 21st c., just as the Plastico model fixed a certain perception around the middle of the 19th c. We should also reflect on the observation that Saint-Non chose to frame his illustrations of “ancient ruins as a residue of that distant past in which history was still in harmony with nature” (38) and ask what the depthless gray voids that surround our digital models of the same ruins are in harmony with.Footnote 39
Finally, it is easy to appeal to the proverb that “imitation is the sincerest form of flattery” when considering that nearly every archaeologically oriented technology seems to find its way to Pompeii for expression. From photography to balloon flight, from felloplasty to photogrammetry, each technique is brought to the ancient city for a subject worthy of its contemporary hype. Yet we should also recall, when judging the continually closing gap between the real and its representation, that there is more to that proverb: “Imitation is the sincerest form of flattery that mediocrity can pay to greatness.” The Plastico of Pompeii, in physical and now digital forms, is well worth its appellation of la grandiosa imitazione as it is as close as we can get to the greatness of its archaeological materials and to the wonder they evoked in the centuries of moments that make up Pompeii's rediscovery.
