The artist’s visit to Pompeii followed on the heels of These are not my Shoes and inspired a body of work about stereotyping that was an outgrowth of the first. Pompeii was an eye-opener for Antonio Petracca because he discovered a level of sophistication in Southern Italian material culture he hadn’t recognized before. The quantity of magnificent wall paintings with their superb use of perspectival devices, the sophisticated domestic architecture perfectly suited to the blistering climate, the intricate mosaics, elaborate gardens, exquisite hand-forged silver vessels found in the basement of the House of Menander astonished him. Petracca quite frankly admits to having experienced a profound sense of pride, ethnic pride really, in his personal discovery of Pompeii and the level of sophistication he observed in the work of artists he considers his ancient ancestors. The artifacts unearthed from the 45 acres of this prosperous city more than 1,500 years after the eruption were far more elegant, nuanced, and fascinating than anything he had encountered in school. Why wasn’t it covered in any depth? Why was it left out of the curriculum?

Petracca took scores of photographs the single day he was there, recording a variety of villas and private houses, corners of rooms and motifs from the frescoes that interested him. Back home in New York, he began digitally combining this Pompeian imagery on his computer with the kinds of bigoted material generated by our American culture. Instead of doing it through side-by-side juxtaposition as he had in his previous series, he actually merged it with the photographs of the ancient works of art themselves. The words and texts were superimposed upon the ancient murals, while the images were overlaid in simulation of the trompe l’oeil effects employed by the ancient painters. The effects Petracca achieved are more subtle than in the first series, because the tagging actually appears to be part of the ancient works of art. This melding of the positive and the negative, the authentic and the parody underscores the insidiousness of interlocking truth and fiction, portrait and caricature present in ethnic stereotyping in general.

Petracca dubbed this suite of work Pompeii Overlay Tagged. Six of the digitally layered prints and the first painting he has produced thus far in the series (Pompeii Mural Tagged) are making their debut in the present Italian American Museum exhibition.

Petracca’s print Inner Sanctum records a view into the House of Menander, one of Pompeii’s largest and most luxurious aristocratic homes whose owner, Quintus Poppaeus, was related to Emperor Nero’s second wife.4 In the print we are looking south across the formal garden into the peristyle of the house from the tablinium (the main reception room of the atrium of a Roman house which is usually elaborately decorated). There, on the opposite wall of the peristyle, Petracca has inserted an image of his own painting These are not my Shoes. He locates it conspicuously, making it larger than it is in real life, as though it had been one of the homeowner’s most prized possessions, a focal point of his art gallery. At first, of course, this is funny. It’s the ultimate example of Petracca behaving like a bad cultural tourist, tagging something totally foreign, inappropriate, even vulgar on the face of an important historical site. But then thinking about it further, the act becomes quite sad. Petracca places himself in the role of the tourist who is trying to understand his own ancestral culture by trying to find touchstones within his own. So what are they? Italian American stereotypes at worst and at best his own art which is trying so hard to make sense of them. The result is a profoundly gutsy as well as a scathing indictment of the Italian American problem with public image.