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Transcriber’s note:
Text enclosed by underscores is in italics (_italics_).
Superscripted characters are enclosed by curly brackets
immediately after a caret character (example: inscriptionum
Graecarum_,^{3})
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ETRUSCAN TOMB PAINTINGS
* * * * * *
Oxford University Press
_London_ _Edinburgh_ _Glasgow_ _Copenhagen_
_New York_ _Toronto_ _Melbourne_ _Cape Town_
_Bombay_ _Calcutta_ _Madras_ _Shanghai_
Humphrey Milford Publisher to the UNIVERSITY
* * * * * *
[Illustration: FIG. 11. ‘LA BELLA BALLERINA’ IN THE TOMBA FRANCESCA
GIUSTINIANI
After the facsimile of the Ny Carlsberg Glyptotek
_Frontispiece_]
ETRUSCAN TOMB PAINTINGS
Their Subjects and Significance
by
FREDERIK POULSEN
Keeper of the Classical Department of the Ny Carlsberg Glyptotek,
Copenhagen
Fellow of the Danish Royal Society
Translated by Ingeborg Andersen, M.A.
[Illustration: Publisher’s Device]
Oxford
At the Clarendon Press
1922
TO MY FRIEND IN STUDIES
AND TRAVELS
OVE JÖRGENSEN, M.A.
PREFACE
The following sketch is based upon investigations made in the Etruscan
Tombs at Corneto and Chiusi, and on comparison of the original
wall-paintings with the facsimiles and drawings made from them and
preserved in the Helbig Museum in the Ny Carlsberg Glyptotek. It was
originally published in Danish, in 1919, as a guide to students in that
Department.
I am greatly indebted to Mr. G. F. Hill, of the British Museum, for his
revision of the translation.
Meanwhile the first volume of the promised work of Fritz Weege
(_Etruskische Malerei_, Halle, 1921) has appeared, copiously and
splendidly illustrated. The text contains general views concerning
Etruscan religion and society rather than descriptions of the paintings
themselves, and I cannot refrain from saying that I find Weege’s
statements and opinions, and the parallels which he adduces, too often
more fanciful than convincing, in spite of the vast erudition displayed
therein. I do not find anything in my own text which I feel inclined to
alter after reading his book.
FREDERIK POULSEN.
COPENHAGEN,
_January_ 1921.
LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS
_Facing page_
1 Wall-painting from the Tomba Campana 7
2 Main picture in the Tomba dei Tori at Corneto 7
3 Back wall in the Tomba degli Auguri 11
4 Right main wall in the Tomba degli Auguri 12
5 Part of the left main wall in the Tomba degli Auguri. (After a
coloured drawing in the Helbig Museum) 12
6 Painting from the Tomba del Pulcinella 12
7 Left main wall of the Tomba delle Iscrizioni 15
8 Back wall of the Tomba delle Iscrizioni 15
9 Picture from the Tomba del Morto at Corneto 16
10 Picture from the Tomba del Triclinio 16
11 ‘La bella ballerina’ in the Tomba Francesca Giustiniani
_Frontispiece_
12 Right main wall in the Tomba delle Iscrizioni 19
13 Back wall in the Tomba delle Leonesse at Corneto 20
14 Left main wall in the Tomba del Barone 20
15 Right main wall in the Tomba delle Bighe 22
16 Etruscan terracotta head in the Ny Carlsberg Glyptotek 22
17 Part of the small frieze in the Tomba delle Bighe.
(After _Arch. Jahrb._ 1916) 22
18 Wall-painting from the Tomba del Morente: the lassoing of
the horse 24
19 Part of the small frieze in the Tomba delle Bighe.
(After _Arch. Jahrb._ 1916) 24
20 Part of the Tomba della Scimmia at Chiusi 24
21 Part of the small frieze in the Tomba delle Bighe.
(After _Arch. Jahrb._ 1916) 27
22 Part of the small frieze in the Tomba delle Bighe.
(After _Arch. Jahrb._ 1916) 27
23 Symposium in the Tomba delle Bighe 27
24 Back wall in the Tomba dei Leopardi
(After _Arch. Jahrb._ 1916. Pl. 9) 31
25 Married couple on an Etruscan cinerary urn 31
26 Picture from the Tomba degli Scudi at Corneto 35
27 Picture from the Tomba degli Scudi at Corneto. (After a coloured
drawing in the Helbig Museum) 35
28 Arnth Velchas and wife on couch. Picture in the Tomba dell’ Orco
(After a coloured drawing in the Helbig Museum) 36
29 Head of Arnth Velchas’ wife. From the Tomba dell’ Orco 37
30 Back wall in the Tomba del Vecchio 37
31 Symposium in the Tomba Golini at Orvieto 38
32 Wall-painting in the Tomba Golini 38
33 Kitchen interior in the Tomba Golini 40
34 Painting in the Tomba del Letto funebre, at Corneto 40
35 Demon in the Tomba dell’ Orco 49
36 Picture in the Tomba dell’ Orco at Corneto 50
37 Hades, Persephone and Geryon in the Tomba dell’ Orco 50
38 Drawing from Michelangelo’s sketch-book 51
39 Wall-painting from the Tomba François at Vulci 54
40 Painting in the Tomba Golini at Orvieto 54
41 Painting from the Tomba della Pulcella 54
42 Relief on a tomb altar from Chiusi. In the Barracco
Collection in Rome 56
43 Cinerary urn from Chiusi 56
44 Roman sarcophagus in the Ny Carlsberg Glyptotek 58
45 Procession of the dead in the Tomba del Tifone 58
46 Painted frieze in the Tomba del Cardinale 58
47 Part of the frieze in the Tomba del Cardinale 58
ETRUSCAN TOMB-PAINTINGS
I
The tombs and tomb-paintings of Etruria constitute a field of
archaeology in which the investigator is particularly apt to be
reminded of numerous sins of omission and to be haunted by a painfully
uneasy conscience. Indeed, the older archaeologists have less reason to
plead guilty before the bar of science than those of more recent times.
When the discovery and excavation of the Etruscan tombs began to make
headway in the twenties of the nineteenth century, publications in text
and illustrations followed comparatively close upon the discoveries.
The first misfortune, however, took place when three of the most
interesting tombs were published, the Tomba delle Bighe, the Tomba
delle Iscrizioni, and the Tomba del Barone.
[Sidenote: STACKELBERG AND KESTNER]
It was the major-domo of the Bishop of Corneto, Vittorio Masi, who
first opened them together with other tombs in the vicinity of Corneto.
In the spring of 1827 he invited two German barons, Stackelberg, an
able archaeologist, and Kestner, the Hanoverian ambassador in Rome, to
inspect them, and, if they so desired, to survey, draw, and publish the
pictures in the tombs. The two men arrived, accompanied by Thürmer, a
Bavarian architect, to find the tombs themselves despoiled of their
accessories, but the walls covered with wonderful pictures dating
from the sixth and fifth centuries B.C. They set to work immediately,
studying and copying the pictures in the richest of the tombs, the
Tomba delle Bighe. Stackelberg made five charming water-colours in
order to save the colouring for posterity; Thürmer executed eleven
careful drawings. In all, the two men painted and drew two hundred and
twenty-five figures, and the whole of the material is now preserved
in the Archaeological Seminar of the University of Strasburg. In his
diary Stackelberg gives a vivid description of the discomfort which
they experienced, drawing by torchlight in the cold, dank tomb-chamber,
and only emerging now and then into the warm Italian spring sunlight
in order to recuperate or to enjoy a light repast on the top of the
tumulus, commanding a view of the sea. To this were added fatiguing
social duties; local patriotism was aroused in Corneto; the noble
families in the town vied in displaying hospitality to the Germans, and
big banquets were held, at which sonnets were recited to the ‘heroes’
who once slept in the tombs. The drawing and copying of the colours
on the walls in the Tomb of the Chariots, as well as in the Tomb of
the Inscriptions and in the Tomb of the Baron—so called after Baron
Kestner—were rightly considered the chief matter, because in the very
first summer after they were opened, the dampness of the tombs in a
few weeks ruined large portions of them, especially in the Tomba delle
Bighe. After his return to Rome, Baron Stackelberg caught typhoid fever
and did not recover till late in the winter. In the next spring he went
to Germany, where his excavations had created such an immense sensation
that even the aged Goethe asked Stackelberg to dine with him in Weimar
and studied the drawings with the greatest interest. But, in spite of
the national enthusiasm called forth by the excavations, the projected
great work came to nothing; the coloured plates of the paintings,
with the then existing means of reproduction, promised to be so
expensive that the publishers took alarm. Pending these negotiations,
the paintings from the three tombs were published in French and
Italian works in very poor and incorrect reproductions, and no other
reproductions were available till 1916, when the German archaeologist,
Weege, at last managed to bring out an admirable publication of the
Tomba delle Bighe, the most important of the three tombs.[1]
Similar uncoloured, not very reliable drawings continued to be the
method of reproducing the Etruscan tomb-paintings in the following
decades; after these drawings were made the reproductions in handbooks
like Jules Martha’s _L’Art étrusque_ (Paris, 1889). An Englishman,
George Dennis, in his _Cities and Cemeteries of Etruria_ (London,
1878), gives a vivid description of Tuscan scenery and of the ancient
tombs. At times he rises to a lyrical enthusiasm; for instance, in
his description of a dancing figure, ‘la bella ballerina di Corneto’,
in the Tomba Francesca Giustiniani. But neither Dennis nor any later
visitor procured copies which come up to their enthusiasm; in fact, the
beautiful ballerina has never even been drawn or photographed, and is
not to be found in any work on archaeology or art. Dennis’s book throws
a dreadful light upon contemporary excavation. About Veii, he writes
that the greater part of the district belongs to the Queen of Sardinia,
who in the excavating season positively lets out tracts of land to
Roman dealers, who rifle the tombs of everything convertible into cash
and then cover them in with earth. He describes such an excavation
at Vulci: a tomb being opened, nothing but pottery was found; the
excavators, in their disgust, smashed and destroyed everything, in
spite of the English traveller’s protests and entreaties. This took
place on the estate of the Princess of Canino.[2]
[Sidenote: MODERN LITERATURE]
This happened in the sixties. In the seventies such vandalism comes
to an end; but the publications do not improve. For example, in the
excellent article on the Tomba François at Vulci which Körte published
in the _Archäologisches Jahrbuch_ for 1897, the illustrations are
poor: and it was not until 1907 that Körte published, in the second
volume of the _Antike Denkmäler_, beautiful coloured reproductions
of the paintings in three tombs at Corneto, the Tomba dei Tori,
the Tomba delle Leonesse, and the Tomba della Pulcella. A popular
description by Mary Lovett Cameron, _Old Etruria and Modern Tuscany_
(London, 1909), marks no progress as far as the illustrations are
concerned, and the text is amateurish and superficial.[3] Von Stryk’s
dissertation, _Die etruskischen Kammergräber_, published at Dorpat
in 1910, is unillustrated: the text is full of errors, and in the
discursive descriptions no account is taken of the difference between
the present state of the tomb-paintings and that revealed by the
earlier publications. Weege’s above-mentioned article on the Tomba
delle Bighe and the Tomba dei Leopardi only appeared in 1916: here at
last the entire material is utilized—the old drawings and descriptions,
modern photographs, and the author’s own careful notes. According to a
prospectus recently issued, a larger work on Etruscan tomb-paintings,
by the same author, is shortly to appear; it will be awaited with
interest.
It is to be hoped that Mr. Weege’s book will supply a want which is
felt the more acutely when we consider the growing interest in antique
painting displayed in the last decades. In 1904 Furtwängler, with the
assistance of the painter Reichhold, began the publication of the
great work on the masterpieces of Greek vase-painting (_Griechische
Vasenmalerei_), which was continued by Hauser: part of the third
volume is now published. In 1906 appeared the first instalment of
Paul Hermann’s great collection of plates after antique, especially
Pompeian, wall-painting; this work, which is still in progress,
contains beautiful reproductions with and without colours (_Denkmäler
der Malerei des Altertums_). Finally, in 1914, Walther Riezler
published a splendid work on the white Attic lekythoi (_Weissgründige
attische Lekythen_). But during these years nobody thought of bringing
to light the treasures hidden away in the sepulchral chambers of
Corneto, Chiusi, and Orvieto, although these pictures were much more
exposed to destruction than either the vases in the well-guarded rooms
of the Museums or the Pompeian wall-paintings. For after heavy showers
the floors of the deeply sunk tombs of Corneto are under water, and the
damp then loosens the tufa of the walls so that the layer of stucco,
on which the colours are laid _al fresco_, peels off. The heavy iron
doors which the Italian Government has placed before the entrances are
worse than useless, because they shut the moisture in and prevent the
tombs from getting dry. If these doors had been placed at the top of
the stairs leading to the tombs, thus changing place with the lattice
doors which are now there, all would have been well. At Corneto, it
is moisture which demolishes the stucco layer, varying from ¼ to
1 cm. in thickness, and bleaches the colours—red chalk, vermilion,
lime-colour, ochre, cobalt, and copper colours, at Chiusi it is the
drought which most frequently destroys the paintings, the colours here
being laid directly on the stone walls.
[Sidenote: THE NY CARLSBERG FACSIMILES]
We have, therefore, every reason to be deeply grateful to the late
Carl Jacobsen who, at the beginning of the nineties, had the Etruscan
tomb-paintings facsimiled on their actual scale. A somewhat similar
experiment had already been tried, and the result is a number of
facsimiles preserved in the Museo Gregoriano of the Vatican, but
these are more decorative than exact. At first, the Italian painters,
to whom Helbig, at the request of Carl Jacobsen, entrusted the
task—the first was Marozzi—evidently imagined that Carl Jacobsen
wanted these paintings as mural decorations for his museum and had
no artistic or scientific aim in View, and letters from Helbig
show that, as late as 1895, he did not scruple to let Becchi, the
painter, fill in a damaged head from a picture in the Tomba dei Vasi
Dipinti after the reproduction in _Monumenti_, vol. ix (1870). The
first copies sent to the Ny Carlsberg Glyptotek were therefore of
the same ‘picture-postcard’ colouring as the earlier ones in the
Museo Gregoriano, but gradually Carl Jacobsen increased the rigour
of his demands for conscientious exactitude, and the facsimiles now
on exhibition in the Helbig Museum of the Ny Carlsberg Glyptotek are
almost all executed according to the more modern and better principles
of copying. To be sure, these copies still leave a great deal to be
desired in the way of scientific exactitude; I have been able myself
to ascertain this by a careful comparison with notes taken from the
originals in the tombs of Corneto, and Weege more especially has
pointed out rather grave mistakes in the copies of the paintings from
the Tomba delle Bighe. But these may be supplemented by a series of
beautiful coloured drawings dating from the last years of Jacobsen’s
life: they are framed and constitute a whole picture-book open to the
public in the Helbig Collection. A large number of ground plans and
decorative details are included in these drawings, in addition to the
most important of the paintings, and here the copying has been executed
with great accuracy. The Ny Carlsberg Glyptotek, then, thanks to Carl
Jacobsen, is the place where investigators can most easily form an idea
of the development of Etruscan wall-painting, far more easily than in
Florence where the late Director, Milani, ordered new copies which, in
my opinion, are considerably inferior to those of Carl Jacobsen. But
for all that, the facsimiles of the Ny Carlsberg Glyptotek ought not to
be the last word of science on the subject. Mr. Weege proposes, as the
method of the future, the taking in the tombs themselves of gigantic
photographs on which careful painters might add the colouring; instead
of two there will thus only be one possibility of distortion, namely,
in the colours themselves. But one might perhaps go still further and
take large chromatic photographs which would fix both forms and colours
for all time, so that we might view the gradual destruction of the
originals with less dismay than at present.
[Sidenote: FUTURE REPRODUCTIONS]
A detailed estimate of the _artistic_ significance and properties of
the Etruscan wall-paintings is not yet possible, if only because no
adequate pictures for reproduction exist. What can be done—and what
will be attempted in the following pages—is to give an account of the
content of the pictures and of the main lines of their development.
Even that is not superfluous. Investigators have never really given
themselves time to enter deeply into the spirit and content of these
pictures, or to ask themselves the question which arises, one may say,
with every picture, namely, how far the representation is a loan from
Greek art and civilization, and how far it bears the local Etruscan
stamp.
[Illustration: FIG. 1 WALL-PAINTING FROM THE TOMBA CAMPANA]
[Illustration: FIG. 2 MAIN PICTURE IN THE TOMBA DEI TORI AT CORNETO]
FOOTNOTES:
[1] _Jahrbuch des deutschen archäologischen Instituts_, xxxi. 1916, p.
106 ff.
[2] _Cities and Cemeteries_, p. 119.
[3] The same is true of the second edition of Luigi Dasti’s _Notizie di
Tarquinia-Corneto_, 1910.
II
[Sidenote: TOMBA CAMPANA AT VEII]
The first stage of development is represented by the Tomba Campana
at Veii. This tomb was discovered in 1843, and a good description of
it is given by Canina in _Antica Città di Veii_ (1847), but it has
never been published with adequate illustrations. A new and thorough
treatment of the ornamentation and motives of its pictures is given in
a Leipzig dissertation by Andreas Rumpf (_Die Wandmalereien in Veii_,
1915). But this, too, is without illustrations. The central doorway of
the back wall is provided with an ornamental painted border and flanked
by paintings in yellow, grey, and red on a blue ground. The work is
primitive. The ornamentation is akin to that of Greek vase-painting of
the seventh century B.C. The pictures are purely decorative: animals
and fabulous animals such as lion, sphinx, deer, and panther fill the
surface side by side with lotus-flowers and palmettes. There is no
narrative element. To be sure, Weege, like others before him, has tried
to construe one of the pictures (fig. 1) into a mythological scene: the
boy on the horse, which is led by the bridle by a man walking behind,
is thought to be a dead man on his way to Hades, and the man with the
loin-cloth, carrying an axe over his shoulder, to the left in front of
the horse, to be the Etruscan death-god and conductor of souls, Charun,
to whom we shall return later. Weege also thinks that the animal
crouching on the back of the horse is a hunting leopard. But, apart
from the rather puzzling question, what the hunting leopard has to do
with the ride to Hades, the animal is not a hunting leopard at all: it
is a feline animal with a short tail, while the hunting leopard has a
long tail. The animal was only placed there to fill up the space, thus
illustrating the poverty of ideas in these pictures. Moreover, as the
man with the axe is not characterized as Charun, either by colour or
by dress, it seems unnecessary to force a mythological explanation.
The human figures in this picture, as in the Melian vases of the
seventh century B.C., are purely decorative: they ride when the space
above the back of the horse has to be filled in, and they walk when
a long, narrow field makes the human figure more appropriate than a
seated or walking animal as a means of filling the space. The absurd
alternation of colours within the same figure, every single animal
being coloured in compartments of yellow and red and having alternately
red and yellow legs, affords a good instance of purely decorative
conception and suggests the idea of woven tapestry. Hence it is an
all but obvious conclusion to imagine, as prototype of this painting,
some magnificently coloured wall-tapestry imported into Etruria in the
seventh century B.C. from Crete or one of the islands in the Aegean
Sea, to the vase-paintings of which the ornamentation of the tomb shows
close affinity.[4] Thus there is in these pictures neither any action
nor any reference to death or the tomb. They serve as a decorative
ornamentation of the tomb-chamber, like the six painted shields in
the inner chamber of the tomb, which suggest those ‘brass circles’
mentioned by Livy (VIII, 20, 8) as common votive offerings in early
Rome. We can imagine the home of a rich Etruscan in the seventh century
decorated with similar frescoes: painted tapestries and painted shields
as substitutes for real wall-tapestries and metal shields.[5] The Tomba
Campana is the most impressive but not the only representative of this
earliest class of tombs, in the ornamentation of which only decorative
considerations have been kept in view. Tombs at Cosa, Chiusi, Magliano,
and Caere contain still more primitive paintings of the same sort, but
they are badly preserved and still more imperfectly described.[6]
FOOTNOTES:
[4] Cp. Fr. Poulsen, _Der Orient and die frühgriechische Kunst_,
p. 128, where I tried to prove that the pictures of the tomb are
influenced by the art and style of decoration of the island of Cyprus.
Rumpf (_op. cit._ 50) was nearer the mark in perceiving the connexion
with the decorative art of Crete and the Cyclades in the seventh
century B.C. The horsemen, in particular, recall the frieze from Prinia
in Crete, _Bollettino d’Arte_, 1908, p. 457 ff.
[5] Shields were also common mural decorations with the early Greeks,
cp. Poulsen, _Orient_, p. 77, and Alcaeus, _fragm._ 15 (Bergk).
[6] See the summary account in Rumpf, _op. cit._ 61 ff.
III
[Sidenote: TOMBA DEI TORI AT CORNETO]
The next stage in the development is represented by the Tomba dei Tori
at Corneto, discovered in 1892 and admirably published by G. Körte
in _Antike Denkmäler_.[7] The back wall of the main chamber in this
tomb has two doors, and it is between these that the one large figure
painting is placed, again in such a way as to suggest a tapestry
stretched on the wall (fig. 2). But now the picture has a narrative
content, inasmuch as a scene from the Greek cycle of myths is depicted:
Achilles watches for the Trojan prince Troilus at a well. Achilles,
to the left, wears a crested Corinthian helmet, sword, greaves, and
red loin-cloth. Troilus is naked and only decorated with armlets and
elegant shoes. He wears his hair long, according to Ionic fashion, and
in his hand he carries a goad (kentron). This is, as a rule, only used
when two horses are ridden, and the drawing shows traces of double
contours near the head and the right leg of the horse; it is probable,
therefore, that two horses were originally planned. In this picture
also, the proportions of man and horse are impossible, but progress
is perceptible in the monochromatic treatment of the body and legs of
the horse. On the other hand, the old manner of painting in stripes or
compartments is still retained in the running chimera in the pediment
above; it also lingers for a very long time in the pedimental figures
of the following period. The style is Ionic of the first half of the
sixth century B.C. A truly Ionian monster, created under Oriental
influence, is the human-faced bull in the pediment above the door, one
of the two bulls from which the tomb derives its name, and which are
omitted here because of the obscene groups on either side of them.
Other decorative details point to Cyrene and Egypt, especially the
characteristic frieze of lotuses and pomegranates, which corresponds
with the Cyrenaic vases of the sixth century B.C., and the stylized
flower-bed under the belly of the horse, which has its origin in
Egyptian and its parallels in Phoenician and in orientalizing Greek
art.[8] In this tomb the painting is not executed _al fresco_ but in a
yellowish-white pigment which unfortunately scales off in large flakes.
Thus in the Tomba dei Tori, besides a decorative treatment of the
wall surface with friezes, we have a main picture with a mythological
subject, painted in the Greek spirit and perhaps actually executed
by a Greek mural painter. We do not find even the slightest
allusion to death or entombment, or the least trace of any Etruscan
characteristics. The inscription in the large frieze is of interest
because it shows the Etruscan language in its archaic form, with a
rich vocalization which must have made it much more euphonious than
the language spoken later, in the fourth or following centuries. The
inscription runs: ‘arnth spuriana s[uth]il hece ce fariceka,’ and
means, ‘Aruns Spurinna monumentum sepulcrale ... condidit, adornavit,’
or the like.[9]
FOOTNOTES:
[7] II, Tafel 41, and Hilfstafel 1-8.
[8] Poulsen, _Orient_, p. 67.
[9] I am greatly indebted to Professor O. A. Danielsson of Upsala for
information about this as well as about other inscriptions, and for
numerous linguistic suggestions on the general subject of my treatise.
IV
A considerable group of Etruscan tomb-paintings, dating from the middle
of the sixth century, show in their composition close connexion with
Ionic vase-painting, especially with the so-called Caeretan hydriae,
while their main pictures tell us something about the Etruscans
themselves and their conceptions of Life and Death and Eternity. Only
in the animal friezes beneath the painted roof-supports does the old
decorative conception of the human and animal figure still linger;
elsewhere the pictures now have content and meaning.
[Sidenote: TOMBA DEGLI AUGURI]
We may take the Tomba degli Auguri in Corneto, discovered in 1878, as
our starting-point. There are coloured drawings as well as full-sized
facsimiles of its pictures in the Helbig Museum.
[Illustration: FIG. 3. BACK WALL IN THE TOMBA DEGLI AUGURI]
The middle of the back wall of this tomb is occupied by a painted door
flanked by two men in white chitons and short black cloaks lined with
red; on their feet are peaked shoes. They raise both arms in a gesture
of lament, ‘beating their foreheads’ as the ancient texts have it.[10]
With this scene (fig. 3) the key-note is struck: the living stand
at the door of the tomb and moan for the dead, a subject specially
appropriate to the decoration of the walls of a tomb.
The scenes on the main walls are also associated with the funeral
ceremonies. On the right-hand main wall (fig. 4) a boy is seen to the
left in a white tunic with black dots, carrying a stool and raising
one arm and his face to a man who, dressed in a red and brown cloak
and brown shoes, seems to beckon to the boy with his right hand,
gesticulating at the same time with his left. Between them a small
figure is seated who reminds one of the small boys in the Greek tomb
reliefs ‘weeping on their cold knees’. To the right is another man
clad in chiton and mantle, gesticulating violently with his left
hand, and carrying a crook in his right. Above him, and above the
excited man to the right, runs the inscription: ‘Tevarath’, probably
meaning umpire (βραβευτής, ἀγωνοθέτης). For now follow
representations of athletic contests: two wrestlers engaging in the
initial grips, the elder bearded, the younger beardless: between them
are seen the prizes—metal bowls; these are supposed to be arranged in
the background, but owing to the lack of perspective they seem to be
in the way of the combatants. This scene throws light on the preceding
one: the man with the crook is evidently not an augur, as originally
conjectured because of the staff and the flying birds, but the umpire
who has to see that no unfair tricks are used; the other man is the
spectator who has not yet seated himself, but beckons to the slave-boy
to bring him the stool on which he will sit down like the Roman knights
of later times who brought their own stools into the orchestra of the
theatre. On the other hand, the mourning, crouching slave-boy seems to
repeat the death lament of the back wall. Here already, then, we can
observe the curious fragmentariness of the scenes in Etruscan art: they
look as if they had been cut out of more comprehensive wholes, and put
together without logical sequence. Clarity and unity are wanting. There
is not the sustained composition or the pleasure in detailed narrative
which are regular in Greek and Egyptian art. The Etruscan artist is
content with hints and fragments.
[Sidenote: TOMBA DEL PULCINELLA]
To the right of the wrestlers, on the same main wall, is a particularly
interesting representation: beneath the inscription Phersu, a man,
dressed and masked like a punchinello, is leading a dog in a long leash
which is wound round his antagonist and ends in a wooden collar round
the neck of the dog. The ferocious blood-hound has inflicted bleeding
wounds on the legs and thighs of the antagonist, and the antagonist,
whose head is muffled in a sack, is vainly trying to disentangle
himself from the leash and to hit the dog with a club. The explanation
of this exciting and brutal contest, to which no parallel can be found
in Greek art, is evidently that Phersu tries to make his dog bite his
antagonist to death before the latter can get his head out of the sack
and hit man and dog with his club. If the club-bearer succeeds in
freeing himself from the sack and the dog, Phersu has only one chance:
to run away. As runner, he has his legs stiffened with thongs, and in
the much damaged fresco on the left main wall of the tomb we see the
flight of Phersu (fig. 5) and (not reproduced) the club-bearer pursuing
him. They are separated by a pair of pugilists who are boxing to the
accompaniment of flutes, again an evidence of Etruscan indifference to
incongruities in the composition. The escaping Phersu is painted alone
in another tomb at Corneto, the Tomba del Pulcinella, the name of which
is derived from this figure, but here he is placed beside a horseman
(fig. 6), who represents the equestrian processions at funerals, to
which we shall turn our attention later. The Tomba del Pulcinella,
which was discovered in 1872, also dates from the sixth century B.C.,
and like the Tomb of the Augur it bears the stamp of Ionic art,
especially in the receding contours of the crown of the head and in the
plump forms of the body.
[Illustration: FIG. 4. RIGHT MAIN WALL IN THE TOMBA DEGLI AUGURI]
[Illustration: FIG. 5. PART OF THE LEFT MAIN WALL IN THE TOMBA DEGLI
AUGURI
After a coloured drawing in the Helbig Museum]
[Illustration: FIG. 6. PAINTING FROM THE TOMBA DEL PULCINELLA]
In these two sepulchres, then, we are confronted with representations
which are associated not only with death and the tomb, but also
with Etruscan local customs and national character. It is true that
prize-fights and wrestling contests in connexion with obsequies are
known in the Greek civilized world as well, for instance from the
description in the _Iliad_ of the funeral of Patroclus, and lingered
for a long time especially in the outskirts of the Greek world—thus
King Nicocles of Cyprus, in the beginning of the fourth century B.C.,
honoured his deceased father with choral dancing, athletic games,
horse-races, trireme races.[11] But we know of no example from Hellas
of a fight like that between Phersu, accompanied by his blood-hound,
and the muffled club-bearer: a fight the attraction of which, apart
from its sanguinary character, evidently depended on the disparity of
the weapons, as it did in the combat between gladiator and retiarius,
the man armed with net and trident, in the Roman arenas of a later
day.[12]
[Sidenote: GLADIATORS IN ETRURIA]
From the Greek author Athenaeus,[13] we learn that the gladiatorial
games originated in Campania, where they were introduced as
entertainments at banquets, but that the Romans adopted them from the
Etruscans. This tradition is confirmed by the facts that the name
applied to the leader and trainer of the Roman gladiatorial school,
_lanista_, is of Etruscan origin, and that the person, who even in late
Rome[14] dragged the corpses from the arena, the so-called _Dispater_,
was furnished with satyr-ears and a mask with savage features, and
carried a hammer, thus being a faithful copy of the Etruscan death-god,
Charun.[15] Moreover, as the Etruscans in the heyday of their glory,
in the sixth and fifth centuries B.C., also ruled over Campania, it is
most natural to attribute to them, and not to the Campanian Graeculi,
the doubtful honour of being the actual ‘inventors’ of gladiatorial
combats. These combats were a piquant and exciting substitute for
actual human sacrifices in honour of the deceased noble or the gods,
and as one of the parties was given a chance to save his life the
practice may even be considered an advance in humanity.
Etruscan obscurity and inconsistency lead to curious confusion in the
transition from mythological pictures to funereal scenes. Thus we find
on the front of an early archaic Etruscan terracotta sarcophagus, now
in the British Museum,[16] a representation in relief, manifestly
inspired by Greek mythology, of a battle scene with men and women as
spectators; at one end of the sarcophagus, the left, leave-taking
before marching out to battle; on the back, a banqueting-scene,
evidently representing the funeral feast, since the relief on the other
end of the sarcophagus shows four mourning women, two of them holding
drinking-bowls in their hands.
FOOTNOTES:
[10] Παίειν τὰ μέτωπα, Dionys. Halicarn. x. 9; ‘frontem
ferire’, Cicero, _Epist. ad Attic._ i. 1; for other instances see
Sittl, _Gebärden der Griechen and Römer_, p. 21.
[11] Isocrates ix. 1.
[12] With reference to _phersu_, which is supposed to be synonymous
with and the origin of the Latin _persona_, see Pauly-Wissowa, vi. 775,
and S.P. Cortsen, _Vocabulorum Etruscorum interpretatio_ in _Nord.
Tidsskr. for Filologi_, 1917, p. 174.
[13] iv. 153 f.
[14] Tertullian, _Ad nation._ i. 10.
[15] Pauly-Wissowa, iii. 2178.
[16] B 630. Figured in _Terra-cotta Sarcophagi in British Museum_, pl.
ix-xi.
V
[Sidenote: TOMBA DELLE ISCRIZIONI]
A good idea of the different sort of athletic contests at the great
Etruscan funerals is given by the wall-paintings in the Tomba delle
Iscrizioni at Corneto, described and copied by Stackelberg and
Kestner in 1827,[17] and represented in the Ny Carlsberg Glyptotek by
facsimiles and coloured drawings executed in 1907, after a chemical
treatment of the plaster stucco, which brought out a number of details
more plainly. The pictures are of the same period as those of the
Augur tomb, and of similar style. The numerous inscriptions from which
the tomb has derived its title seem to be mostly proper names. Each of
the three wall-surfaces of this tomb, which contains only one chamber,
has a false painted door in the middle. Of the first figures on the
left main wall, two pugilists, only very little is preserved (fig. 7).
They are contending, like the two wrestlers to the right of them, one
of whom has lifted the other from the ground, to the accompaniment of
the flute-player who is standing between the two groups. This and many
other Etruscan paintings confirm the statement of Aristotle[18] that
the Etruscans made their boxers perform to the sound of the flute.
Flute-playing was so popular that masters scourged their slaves and
caused their cooks to work in the kitchen to the sound of the flute;
and here again the Romans adopted the Etruscan tradition and gave their
flute-players a recognized position in the community, as is shown by
the amusing story about the strike of the Roman flute-players[19]: the
flute-players left Rome in disgust and went in a body to Tibur, and the
only device the Romans could think of was to make the excellent fellows
drunk and cart them back to Rome, where the citizens made haste to
confirm the ancient privileges of the flute-players and to add several
new ones in order to make the awakening more pleasant.
[Illustration: FIG. 7. LEFT MAIN WALL OF THE TOMBA DELLE ISCRIZIONI.
After a coloured drawing in the Helbig Museum]
[Illustration: FIG. 8. BACK WALL OF THE TOMBA DELLE ISCRIZIONI]
On the other side of the false door the equestrian procession begins
and is continued on the back wall to the central false door (fig. 8).
Four young naked horsemen, some of them with staves in their hands, are
received by a naked youth who carries a palm-branch over his shoulder.
Apart from the nakedness, which must be attributed to the influence of
Greek art, this equestrian procession is genuinely Etruscan. Appian
derives the festive processions at triumphs and funerals from Etruscan
prototypes, while Dionysius of Halicarnassus finds their prototypes
in Hellas. But it cannot be denied that Dionysius’s description of
these _pompae_ in early Rome[20] suggests Etruria: first came young
horsemen, then foot-soldiers; after these, athletes with their sexual
organs covered (in contrast to Greek custom), then the tripartite
chorus of dancers in purple cloaks and bronze belts, then the grotesque
dancers, flute-players, lyre-players, and thurifers, and finally the
procession of chariots with the images of the gods. In the following
pages we shall make acquaintance with all these groups in the Etruscan
world of art.
The equestrian procession is presumably the preliminary to a
horse-race. The nobles of Etruria were celebrated for their race-horses
and often sent their chariot-teams to the games in early Rome.[21] It
is a characteristic fact that one of the few Etruscan words given by
the Greek lexicographer Hesychius is no other than the word for horse,
δάμνος according to the Greek version.[22]
To the right of the false door in the back wall three jolly dancers are
seen: the first has his brow wreathed, carries a drinking-bowl in hand,
and wears boots, red skirt, and blue neckerchief. The figure is shown
by the flesh tint to be male, not female as stated in Carl Jacobsen’s
catalogue. After him dances the flute-player, with red boots, blue
loin-cloth, and red chaplet, and last comes a naked dancing youth with
boots, necklace, and chaplet.
[Sidenote: TOMBA DEL MORTO]
[Sidenote: TOMBA DEL TRICLINIO]
Dancers appear in a number of Etruscan tomb-paintings, and abandon
themselves to their gambols with a frenzy which might seem incompatible
with death and entombment. In the Tomba del Morto at Corneto, dating
from the same period, we find traces of a pirouetting dancer close to
the couch of the dead and the lamenting mourners; the dance was thus as
important as the funeral lament (fig. 9). The finest representations
of Etruscan mourning dancers are found in the Tomba del Triclinio,
which dates from the beginning of the fifth century B.C.: the Ny
Carlsberg Glyptotek contains several earlier, inferior facsimiles,
made from the copies in the Museo Gregoriano and only touched up at
Corneto by the painter Mariani;[23] and some more recent ones carefully
executed on the spot (fig. 10). On each wall three female and two male
dancers are seen among trees; fillets and singing-birds appear in the
foliage. The male dancers play on lyre and flute; the dancing-girls
have castanets and the foremost a strap or chaplet with bells over her
shoulder. Similar chaplets with bells are often seen hanging on the
walls in pictures representing the symposia in honour of the dead (see
below), and bear witness to the childish predilection of the Etruscans
for gipsy-like noise and merry-making. The most beautiful dancing-girl,
however, in any Etruscan tomb is the already mentioned ‘bella
ballerina di Corneto’, discovered on a wall in the Tomba Francesca
Giustiniani. We give this figure, which has never been reproduced,
after the facsimile in the Ny Carlsberg Glyptotek which arrived there
shortly before the death of Carl Jacobsen and gave him one of the last
pleasures in his life (fig. 11).
[Illustration: FIG. 9. PICTURE FROM THE TOMBA DEL MORTO AT CORNETO]
[Illustration: FIG. 10. PICTURE FROM THE TOMBA DEL TRICLINIO]
When I examined the original in the tomb at Corneto I made the
following notes: the drapery (chiton), which is ornamented with a
pattern of dotted rosettes, is distinctly preserved from the hips down
to the elegant fluttering edge. Much of the middle part of the body
has been destroyed; the fluttering ends of the red scarf across the
shoulders are visible to right and left. The upper part of the body and
the shoulders are also well preserved. The right arm is raised, and
visible from shoulder to elbow; a faint outline of the left arm is also
visible.[24] Of the head, the brow, the beginning of the nose, the ear,
the green fluttering head-dress, the red hair with a loosened tress
in front of the ear have been preserved. To the spectator the picture
still conveys an impression of joy, of graceful movement, and of filmy
fluttering draperies.
[Sidenote: ETRUSCAN DANCE AND SONG]
Here also we find Etruscan tradition continued on Roman soil, not only
in the dancers of the festival processions, but in the tradition that
Etruscan dancers, _ludii_ or _ludiones_, were imported to Rome to dance
at the great festivals. The Greeks compared the Roman reel to the
Dionysiac ‘cancan’, σίκιννις, while its Roman name is _tripudium_; it
was danced at every period of Roman history by the Salii, the ancient
priesthood of the Roman war-god, on the chief festival of the god,
March 19. According to Livy (vii. 2. 4-7) the earliest Roman poetry,
the coarse Fescennines, originated in the text which accompanied the
dance of the _ludiones_, and the fact that the dancers during the
Fescennines daubed their faces with minium supports the theory of
Etruscan influence, which also makes itself felt in the custom observed
by the Roman triumphators, who in the earliest times daubed their whole
bodies with minium. For we know that the Etruscans coated the images of
their gods with minium at their festivals, and that the Romans gave the
ancient terracotta statue of the Capitoline Jupiter a similar coat of
‘war paint’ at the high festivals, a task which it fell to the censors
to superintend.[25] The red minium was meant to heighten the natural
red-brown hue of the men; it produced an artificial virile complexion,
just as white lead and chalk served to emphasize the pale feminine
hue.[26]
The primitive nature of the verses connected with these dances is
shown by the song of the Salii, the burden of which is the five times
repeated ‘triumpe’ (jump!) and the text of which runs: ‘Help us, lares,
let not the evil disease fall upon any more of us, Mars! Be satisfied,
cruel Mars! Jump on to the threshold. Cease jumping. Help us, Mars!’
At the triumphs also, ‘carmina incondita’, as Livy tells us, were sung
(iv. 20. 2), and we venture to think that Etruscan poetry was no better
than this, and that the disappearance of the texts, which accompanied
the dances, is no great loss. Varro mentions tragedies in the
Etruscan language, but they were undoubtedly versions of the Greek
ones, even worse than those made for the Romans by Livius Andronicus.
Apart from some religious and a little historical literature, and a
number of recipes for the gathering of simples, capable of rousing
the admiration of the Greeks for ‘the descendants of the Tyrrhenians,
the people skilled in medical lore’,[27] no tradition of any Etruscan
intellectual life in writing or poetry has been handed down to
posterity.
[Illustration: FIG. 12. RIGHT MAIN WALL IN THE TOMBA DELLE ISCRIZIONI]
[Sidenote: TOMBA DELLE ISCRIZIONI]
[Sidenote: LAUREL DECORATIONS]
We pass on to the right main wall in the Tomba delle Iscrizioni (fig.
12) where dancers in a row with drinking-bowls in their hands alternate
with servants carrying wine in large bowls. That the funeral dance was
animated by free indulgence in wine is often exemplified in the tombs.
In the Tomba delle Leonesse, named after the beasts of prey in the
pediment, which are really hunting leopards, a red-brown lad to the
right is dancing with a girl; to the left is a woman with castanets,
and in the centre, flanked by a flute-player and a lyre-player, stands
the wine-bowl wreathed with fresh leaves (fig. 13), ‘the wine-bowl
filled with joy,’ in Xenophanes’ words. Evidently the Etruscans drank
heavily to celebrate the memory of their dead, as Xenophon relates of
another barbarian tribe, the Odrysians.[28] To the right of the false
door of the same main wall in the Tomba delle Iscrizioni (fig. 12),
a man in a loin-cloth with a laurel branch in each hand is greeting
another man, who carries chaplets and rests one leg on the cushions
of a couch. Laurel branches constantly recur in the reliefs of the
Etruscan cinerary urns, where the death lament round the bier of the
deceased is reproduced, and it seems probable that laurel branches were
carried round the house and used for wall decoration in the house of
the deceased on the funeral day, for the purpose of purification. This
decoration of the walls, then, would be the subject of our picture,
together with the other preparations for the funeral, as shown by the
paintings.[29] Perhaps it was a general custom of the Etruscans to
decorate their walls on festival days with laurel branches, just as the
Egyptians decorated theirs with lotus, and this would often account
for all the foliage which appears in the backgrounds of the paintings
alternating with suspended chaplets, even where the action—the death
lament (fig. 9) or the symposium—takes place indoors. In other cases,
however, as in the Tomba dei Tori (fig. 2) and in the Tomba del
Triclinio (fig. 10), there is no doubt that real trees and open-air
scenes are represented, but even there the chaplets are often seen
hanging—on the wall. Again a proof of the want of clarity in Etruscan
art! Trees, however, in the background of scenes with figures are also
found on South Italian vases of the same time, and thus seem to be a
common Italic trait.
FOOTNOTES:
[17] Kestner, _Annali_ i (1829), p. 101 ff.
[18] Athenaeus iv. 154a.
[19] Livy ix. 30. 5-10. Plutarch, _Aetia Romana_, 55.
[20] Dionys. Halicarn. vii. 72-3.
[21] Livy i. 35. 9.
[22] Hesych. _s. v._ The word is not mentioned in S.P. Cortsen’s
_Vocabulorum Etruscorum interpretatio_ in _Nordisk Tidsskr. for
Filologi_, 1917; no doubt because he considers Hesychius’s statement
insufficiently authoritative. Cp. Skutsch, Pauly-Wissowa, vi. 775.
[23] Helbig’s letters of June 21 and December 10, 1895.
[24] Thus the facsimile at this point gives more than I at any rate
could see: on the other hand, less as far as brow and nose are
concerned.
[25] Plutarch, _Aetia Romana_ 98.
[26] Plautus, _Truculentus_ 290, 294, _Mostellaria_ 259 ff. In Greece
also, women used white lead as paint: Lysias i. 14 and 17.
[27] Quotation from Aeschylus by Theophrastus (who endorses the
opinion): _History of Plants_ ix. 15. 1.
[28] _Hellenica_ iii. 2. 5.
[29] Cp. Tacitus, _Histor._ iv. 53, on the inauguration of the rebuilt
Capitolium: ’spatium omne quod templo dicabatur evinctum vittis
coronisque; ingressi milites, quis fausta nomina, _felicibus ramis_.’
VI