Life and Death 
Pompeii Mosaics: Preserve of the rich
There is one thing that really bothers me about mosaics: they are the preserve of the rich. There is no way around it. Mosaics take ludicrous amounts of time to make, require skilled craftsmen to execute and there are no short cuts.
Ever since they first embellished palace floors, mosaics have been recognised as symbols of wealth and status. Before Porsche Cayennes and infinity pools, they demonstrated that their owners enjoyed luxury and had money to throw around.
Look at the Pompeii mosaic portrait of a gentlewoman above. Her hair is coiffed, her lips are pursed, her pearls are large. She has the haughty look of one for whom only the best will do. Who can blame her? How glorious it was, how deliciously comfortable, for bare feet to walk on stone, swept and freshly washed, after being accustomed to floors of beaten earth.
The Roman mosaic floors which survive generally speak of this world of ease and plenty. We get a sense of languid content and quiet delight in domestic order. What I liked about the Pompeii mosaics in Life and Death in Pompeii and Herculaneum, was that they also spoke of real people with vulnerabilities and idiosyncrasies.
everyday mosaics in Pompeii
The best, as far as I am concerned, is this wonderfully eccentric mosaic of a pot of fish sauce.
It’s barking mad. Its owner, Mr. Aulus Umbricius Scaurus, was clearly very proud of his fish sauce business. He felt such fondness for the product that had made him wealthy that he wanted it immortalised in stone.
He intended to make sure that the whole world knew, loud and clear, that he was the maker, the connoisseur, the lover and producer of the best fish sauce on the market. You can almost see him waddling complacently over his new floor admiring it from every angle and congratulating himself on his originality.
A skeleton and a dog
The other oddball mosaic in the exhibition is the one of the skeleton holding two jugs of wine 
which was thought to come from a dining room.
We learn in the exhibition catalogue that the mosaic was meant as a message for the diners to ‘seize the day’. In the face of the inevitability of death it is a rather bizarre design choice to have in the middle of your floor. Death was never very far away in the days before antibiotics and effective medicines. Was there any need to ram home the message when everyone was meant to be having a good time?
The famous Pompeii dog mosaic (left), often copied, is also in the exhibition. It’s a simple black and white work with touches of red. It decorated an entrance hall leading straight from the street and conveys an obvious warning to all those who enter.
However, there’s a wryness in the work. The dog is tied and is bouncing forward in a friendly manner (unlike the more aggressive CAVE CANEM dog mosaic) and you get the feeling that this dog was part of a family.
Pompeii mosaics: technical brilliance
The exhibition also includes other, more conventional, but no less remarkable mosaics. Firstly, there are three theatrical mosaic masks from the pre Christian era, one of which is fake, with an interesting explanation of how the experts can tell. For sheer technical ability, detail, and close attention to life nothing beats the woman’s portrait (above) and this well known aquatic scene of fish swimming around an octopus wrestling with a lobster.
But it’s the details, in the Pompeii mosaics or otherwise, which make this exhibition worth seeing. They bring the ancient world before us as a world of ordinary, imperfect people whose dying made them extraordinary and whose art shows their drive for perfection.
Dont forget the graffiti
Don’t miss the graffiti in the lower half of a fresco demonstrating the ‘second style’ in Pompeii painting. It’s a child’s drawing. A simple, clumsy shape of a human figure with a line for a mouth and dots for eyes. It was made by stabbing at the wall and chipping away at the plaster. It’s this, like so much else, which makes the exhibition more about life than death.