A breast is a breast is a breast

A single breast of a young woman was uncovered in Pompeii in 1772. This sensational discovery attracted the attention of William Hamilton, British ambassador to the Kingdom of Naples, antiquarian, archeologist, and husband of Emma, the famous mistress of Lord Nelson. In his Account of the Discoveries at Pompeii: Communicated to the Society of Antiquaries in London (1777), Hamilton informed his fellows about the extraordinary excavation of the Villa of Diomedes, and the objects of domestic use found there: pieces of jewelry, coins, wine jars, fragments of fabric. Most remarkable, though, were the human remains: « eight adult skeletons, and the skeletons of two children. » They were preserved, he explained, by stages in Vesuvius’s eruption (he was an amateur vulcanologist, too): the city was « first covered by a shower of hot pumice-stones and ashes, and then by a shower of small ashes mixed with water », the hardened mixture of which produced impressions of bodies and objects. « In the Museum of Portici, » he noted, « a piece of that sort of hardened mud is preserved; it is stamped with the impression of the breast of a woman, with a thin drapery over it. » ¹Thus began the long story and public fame of the Pompeian breast.

To contemplate Pompeii is to contemplate archeology in its most extreme form, framed by the wish not only for discovery, but for resurrection. Death is the artist, as Chateaubriand put it, and the living feel a Pygmalion-like need to bring life back into the statuary it created. Archeologists themselves hybridized objective observations of Pompeii’s human remains with fanciful stories about those humans’ lives and deaths. But bringing back the dead to a narrated life was the task of novelists, who gave form to the earliest and most titillating archeological fantasies.