The interest in Italy at the beginning of the nineteenth century was
mainly for the sake of its second-hand version of Greek art, and for
the architecture and painting of the Renaissance. On the contrary, now
the objects from Greece itself have far eclipsed the Italian copies,
and the interest lies in the early Italian civilization and its purely
Roman derivatives; while modern taste values the mediæval art of Italy
far from the bastard products of the florid age which followed. The
first detailed studies in Italy were those on Pompeii, especially by
Gell (1817), which made that debased style very popular, and paved the
way for appreciation of better work. The various isolated discoveries
of Etruscan tombs were summed up in the admirable work of Dennis
(1848), which presented a general view of that civilization which has
not been superseded. The earlier Italic culture has been examined in
many places where accidental discoveries have revealed it during the
latter half of the nineteenth century, and especially in the systematic
work of Zannoni, at Bologna (1870–75), and of Orsi, lately, in Sicily.
The history of the city of Rome has been almost rewritten in the
last thirty years owing to the great changes of the new government;
these have been largely worked by Lanciani, and recorded by him and
Middleton. The view of Italian history at present begins in the Stone
age, which has been well studied, and has links with the later periods,
as in the general use of black pottery. The earliest metal objects are
very simple blades of daggers, found in graves, mingled with flint
arrow-heads and knives. The admirable Italian plan of preserving whole
burials undisturbed in museums enables us to see these graves complete
in the Kircherian Museum. A special branch of the early Bronze age
life was the system of lake dwellings (natural or artificially water
girt), which abound in the northern Italian lakes and over the plain
of Lombardy. These towns (“terra mare”) are arranged on a rectangular
plan, and form the earliest stage of many of the present cities. The
full development of the Bronze age civilization seems to have been
later than in Greece, at about 800 B. C., to which belong the great
discoveries of tombs, weapons, and tools at Bologna, and the cemetery
of Falerii.
Upon all the native Italic civilization came an entirely different
influence from the immigrant Etruscan. Traditionally coming from
Asia Minor, he brought art and religion which had no relation to the
Italic. The earliest Etruscan paintings are strongly northern in style,
influenced by north European feeling (Veii). But soon the Etruscan
borrowed largely from other races, from the Greek mainly, but also
from Assyria and Egypt. Thus the fascinating problem in Italy is to
distinguish the various sources of Italic, Etruscan, Græco-Etruscan,
Oriental-Etruscan, and pure Greek, which are found in all degrees of
combination before Roman times, and which can still be traced through
the Roman age. The characteristics of Etruscan taste are: (1) The
extraneous objects and figures, such as rows of pendants to a metal
vase, monstrous heads standing out from a bowl, and statuettes placed
for handles; (2) in forms of vases and furniture, the combination of
many different parts and curves which never form a whole design; (3)
and in sculpture the large round head and staring eyes. In general, an
air of clumsy adaptation by a race deficient in originality. The glory
of the Etruscan was his engineering, which he handed as a legacy to
Rome. Strange to say, although thousands of Etruscan inscriptions are
known, and many words are translated, yet the language is sealed to us,
and none of the many attempts to read it has succeeded. The scientific
study of Etruscan tombs has been well followed lately, as shown in the
Florence Museum, where a separate room is devoted to each city.
In the south of Italy Greek art prevailed, and many of the finest
works belong to this civilization. The Greek in Italy had rather
different ideals to those of Greece; he started more from the level
of Polykleitos and Praxiteles than from the severe age; his favorite
type is that of youth and adolescence, never of maturity. The grace and
feeling of such bronze statues as the Hermes and so-called Sappho of
Herculaneum are peculiar to southern Italy. And when the Greek artist
penetrated north and allied himself with the mechanical skill of the
Etruscan, such splendid work was done as the Orator of Sanguineto.
Rome in the earlier centuries was an Italic town which came under
Etruscan influence as Tuscany was conquered. But from the age of
foreign conquest in the first century B. C., Greek art in a debased
form ruled over all else, and ran into utter degradation in the third
century A. D. It was this art that the power of Rome spread around the
whole Mediterranean, from Palmyra to Britain, and is the parent of most
modern decoration. But in the great reconstruction of the empire under
Diocletian the debased Greek taste was mostly shaken off, and Rome
went back to the old Italic-Etruscan style and motives. The statues
have the round heads and staring eyes of old Etruria; the taste for
quaint accessories, such as lions supporting objects, came back and
passed into mediæval art, and the exaggerated, lengthy forms of men and
animals reappeared.
Of the Christian period De Rossi’s work in the catacombs has given
a firm base of facts for the third to the sixth century A. D., the
actual tomb and body of Saint Cecilia being the most striking result.
The later Roman and mediæval age in Italy is full of interest, but in
that—as in the rest of mediæval Europe—research has been mainly on
architecture and objects which are not the result of excavation.