Time Travel to Pompeii, Before the Blowup

“Pompeii: Life in a Roman Town,” at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, presents 400 objects documented in a 350-page scholarly catalog. Viewers can rent “acoustiguides,” interact with numerous computers, and take in everything from rare paintings and sculpture to working models of ancient Roman cranes and hydraulic pumps.

In short, this is a big-time historical exhibition with a tender heart. Originated and launched by Italy’s National Archeological Museum in Naples, the encyclopedic panorama would be as appropriate in a museum of natural history, as impressive in any city.

As it happens, though, Los Angeles is its only U.S. venue. That’s mordantly apt. Pompeii and L.A. share the myth of being verdant gardens of hedonism teetering on the brink of apocalypse.

Tragically, Pompeii’s legendary status exists largely because it was wiped out by an eruption of Mt. Vesuvius in AD 79. Otherwise it was a small colony that raised sheep, pressed wine, made red tile, argued politics and acted as host to affluent Romans with villas on the sunny bay.

Nothing in the show evokes cliches that cast Pompeii’s destruction as an act of divine retribution against Roman decadence. Instead, by juxtaposing art and artifacts, the ensemble wafts a gentle, pensive rumination on the idea of life being worth its risks. Sections devoted to nature, science and technology blur happily together. The ambient envelope thus created makes a startlingly vivid, oddly familiar image of a vanished place. Talismanic evidence that Romans were as fallibly real as anybody else is embodied in an often-reproduced fresco portrait of a man and wife. Although it was long thought to be the image of a cultivated intellectual couple, recent scholarship has led to the belief that they’re a baker and his lady endearingly putting on airs. Roman yuppies.

Foliage in a garden-scene fresco wafts with the pale delicacy of new ferns. The poetry is enhanced by slightly awkward depictions of doves, a fountain and sculpted busts of two fellows who seem to be dreaming of a couple of nude babes in bas-relief. It’s a real double-take piece. Were ancient Romans really witty enough to joke about the idea that sculpted men would naturally fantasize about modeled women? Sounds more like Hockney or Saul Steinberg.

Nearby, tiny bits of glass form a mosaic of anatomically convincing Mediterranean sea life. Originally part of a floor, its floral borders link it generically to the fresco. Here it may dawn on visitors that the Pompeian visual style was a decorative Realism that permeates most everything on view as well as our notion of the inhabitants. The occasional orgy notwithstanding, Pompeians were practical folk dedicated to work and enjoyment. Curious about the world, they liked little bronze sculptures of exotic animals, discovered as their empire expanded. Lions, elephants, ibises and monkeys are lifelike, but their makers couldn’t resist adding delicate curls to a mane or an elegant curve to a tail.

Useful things such as axes, chisels and storage jars were allowed their own rugged shapes. Perfection appears easygoing in a metalworker’s simple silver goblets or the deft understatement of a round bronze table with clawed legs.

But artisans couldn’t pass up a chance for fun. Counterweights for scales were often small bronze busts of warriors or goddesses. When something hefty was required to flatten something else, they made at least one in the shape of a swine with a handle.

Dawning science retained a quality of magic. A plaster copy of the famous “Globe of the Atlas Farnese” still depicts the signs of the zodiac among the constellations. Surgery is conflated with oracular insight in an elegant marble relief in which, according to a prediction, a hero gains victory by using rust from a spear that wounded him to heal his injury. None of this seems very far from L.A.’s endless flirtation with the occult and dedication to natural medicines. Even when wrestling the realities of technology, Pompeians couldn’t resist the decorative touch.

History acknowledges Rome’s technological genius in such awesome engineering feats as its great aqueducts, precursors of our freeways. This exhibition shows something of the artful ingenuity Pompeii employed in building. Moving materials for massive construction projects eventually requires knowing how far stuff has to travel. To this end, carts were designed with primitive odometers. The back axle rotates a couple of gears. With each complete turn, a weight drops into a little box. Calibrated to release 400 units for each Roman mile, the mechanism was extraordinarily accurate.

A scale model of a man-driven wooden crane enlightens anyone who ever wondered how Roman builders got all those big columns into place. Another shows how well-heeled Pompeians achieved central heating.

I’m told that art-insider critics are complaining that the show doesn’t really belong in an art museum. If they mean that material has to be boring to deserve such prestigious display, they’re right. “Pompeii” uses the tools of cultural history to create an enchanting, intimate poem in everyday time, space and feeling. I’m not exactly sure why that’s not art. Curators for the local presentation are LACMA’s Nancy Thomas and independent curator Tina Oldknow.

* “Pompeii: Life in a Roman Town,” Los Angeles County Museum of Art, 5905 Wilshire Blvd. Through Jan. 9, closed Wednesdays. (323) 857-6000.