Part 3

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

Contemporary with the group of the Tomba degli Auguri and the Tomba delle Iscrizioni is the Tomba del Barone, discovered at Corneto in 1827 and named, as already mentioned, after Baron Kestner. After the paintings of this tomb Stackelberg executed a fine water-colour, and Thürmer a number of drawings, now in the University of Strasburg. The style—both in the shape of the heads and in the treatment of the draperies—is still Ionic, but the proportions are more slender, probably owing to Chian or Attic influence.

Composition and technique are both unique in the paintings of this tomb. We content ourselves with reproducing one main wall, the left (fig. 14), where a black horse with light grey hoofs, mane, and tail, is led by a man wearing red boots and a brown mantle lined with green. He is speaking with one hand raised to a woman in a long grey chiton, a brown mantle lined with green, and a brown cap. Then comes a man with green boots leading a brown horse.

[Sidenote: TOMBA DEL BARONE]

Similar quiet pictures are found on the other two walls of the tomb; on the back wall a man is standing with his arm round a young flute-player’s neck, and is greeted by a woman. The dress of the woman is Etruscan; the subjects also are probably Etruscan—the preparations for the pompa and the dancing feast. But everything breathes coolness and calm, and we miss the usual jollity. The technique is equally remarkable. It is not the usual fresco painting: experiments have been made with size-paint, that is, an attempt at painting in distemper on the plaster stucco covering the walls. The attempt has failed; the colour has run in large blotches.

These two characteristics of the artist of the Tomba del Barone are of great interest because the German archaeologist, Gustav Körte, has demonstrated the existence of marks made by Greek artisans on the walls of this tomb. It was not in Etruscan, but in Greek letters that the artist indicated the amount of his day’s work, with a view to his wages. The explanation, then, seems to be the following: a Greek decorator was charged with the task of ornamenting the walls of the tomb, and he did it, as far as the dresses are concerned, according to local tradition; but he experimented boldly with a new technical process, the success of which was prevented by the dampness of the rock-wall; and he composed his pictures with a grandeur of line and a tranquillity in execution which make one think of the pediment of a Greek temple. In the light of this it is easier to realize how much of the Etruscan temperament there really is in the other paintings, all Greek influence on style notwithstanding. It must be noted here that artisans’ marks are the only written evidence left by the decorative painters of Etruria; artists’ signatures are unknown, whether in Greek or in Etruscan. The Etruscan nobles, like the Roman later, evidently employed Greek artists, but granted them no social position.

VII

[Sidenote: TOMBA DELLE BIGHE]

In the next period the predominant stylistic influence is Attic. A whole group of tombs dates from about 500 B.C.: they are thus contemporaneous with the severe red-figured vase-paintings. Very Attic and, at the same time, like a complete pictorial procession, representing everything which took place at a great Etruscan funeral, is the Tomba delle Bighe, previously mentioned and now published by Weege. As the pictures in this tomb are clearer and more complete than most Etruscan paintings, we will take some of them as a starting-point for a closer examination of the facts of Etruscan life.

There are two friezes on the three walls of the tomb: a narrower and lighter above; and a broader one below, in which the figures are painted on a deep red ground; the height of the friezes is respectively 36 and 90 cm., and they are separated by a broad, coloured band. The narrow frieze with the dark figures on light ground still reminds one of the black-figured Attic vases, whereas the lower purple frieze, in which the skin of the men is reserved in a somewhat lighter red, that of the women in white, recalls the red-figured vase-paintings, all differences notwithstanding.

On the right-hand main wall (fig. 15), in the broad frieze, men and women are dancing in honour of the dead among laurel branches. There are the usual ecstasy and the familiar animated gestures with the big fan-like hands, reminding one of the figures in archaic Greek vase-painting and plastic art.[30]

[Sidenote: THE TUTULUS—CHARIOT RACE]

Especially splendid is the female flute-player who turns round as she dances, her light chiton and red cloak fluttering about her; she can almost compare with ‘la bella ballerina’. The dancing-women all wear the high Etruscan wreathed cap, the so-called _tutulus_, which in the Tomba delle Iscrizioni is also worn by a male dancer. We meet with it again in Etruscan terracotta sculpture. The fashion is of Oriental origin, and goes back, ultimately, to the pointed ’sugar-loaf hat’ of the Hittites. It probably reached Etruria by way of Cyprus, where it is frequently seen in reliefs of the seventh century B. C. In Etruria the pointed woollen cap became part of the national dress.[31] Rome of course adopted the headgear and preserved the Etruscan tradition in the priesthoods; a purple tutulus adorned the Roman Flaminicae, and certain secondary priests wore a tutulus down to the time of Tertullian.[32] In early Rome all women wore the tutulus, and under it a head-cloth such as is shown in Etruscan terracottas (fig. 16); this is clear from a description of a Roman mourning scene in Dionysius of Halicarnassus (xi. 39), where the women tear their many and various fillets and hair-ornaments off their heads.[33]

The dancing scene, in the painted frieze referred to above (fig. 15), ends at the sideboard on the left, which bears a number of metal bowls: a cup-bearer, partially obliterated in the original, is just putting down a vessel. The wine to inspire the dancers is ready.

In the narrow frieze—the most beautiful and most carefully executed of those in the tomb, but very badly copied in the facsimile of the Glyptotek—we see the preparations for a chariot race. The horses are being led out and harnessed to the chariot. We reproduce, after Stackelberg’s drawing, the most interesting part of the frieze (fig. 17), in which three young men are busy harnessing two horses to the light, two-wheeled chariot, the Biga. The chariot is represented in foreshortening, and the shaft is lifted up by a naked boy. The young men have each one foot strongly foreshortened.

[Sidenote: TOMBA DELLE BIGHE]

We find here the same experimentation with this new and difficult problem, as in the Greek vase-paintings of about 500 B. C., in the vases of Euthymides and Euphronius. The horse to the right is blue, that to the left grey, both have red hoofs and red harness, and two youths, with a sort of shawl round their loins, are busily engaged with them, striking them on the flanks to get them into place. These two excellent figures are quite misdrawn and misconstrued in the Ny Carlsberg facsimile, the draughtsman not having realized that they are seen from behind.

We have, therefore, preparations for a chariot race; in a wall-painting in the Tomba del Morente at Corneto we have a still earlier phase represented, the lassoing of the horse which is to be harnessed (fig. 18); here the horse is red, with blue mane and tail. The disposition of the colours is no more naturalistic in Etruscan wall-painting than in the pediments of Greek temples: in applying the colours, the painter’s object was purely decorative.

After the preparations comes the ceremonial parade of the racing chariots past the stands; three chariots are seen in a row (fig. 15): the first has not yet begun to move, the horses are pawing the ground impatiently, and the groom is standing at their heads trying to pacify them; the second chariot has already started, and the team of the third chariot is going a little faster, a fine crescendo which reminds one of good Greek art rather than of Etruscan. To the left are the stands for the spectators, which are continued on the back wall; similar stands are seen in the corner where back wall and left main wall adjoin. We give, after Stackelberg’s drawing, the two parts from the first-mentioned corner (fig. 19). On elevated platforms, bounded above by lines evidently meant to indicate curtains which might be drawn before the ‘box’ against sun or heavy showers, men and women are seated and show their absorption in the games by their eager gestures. The foremost woman to the right actually greets the procession of chariots with her raised hand. She is a matron wearing a shawl (epiblema) over the arms, and the back of her head, and under that a tutulus. Next to her sits a young girl with a tutulus, noble in bearing and gesture like a young goddess. Then follows a varied company of youths, women, and a bearded man. The young man, who is represented partly frontal with his chin resting on his hand and the head and left leg frontal, is of special interest. The problem of foreshortening has been very neatly solved. Under the wooden floor of the stands the common folk are disporting themselves, some of them engrossed in anything but the games.

[Sidenote: THE AUDIENCE]

In order to understand the significance of this representation one has to realize that such detailed pictures of spectators at athletic games are unknown in Greek art. The nearest parallel is the assembly of the gods, the Olympian spectators, in the frieze of the Treasury of the Siphnians at Delphi,[34] and in the Parthenon frieze, between which the Tomba delle Bighe chronologically occupies an intermediate position, about twenty-five years later than the former, and about fifty years earlier than the latter. At the same time we learn that female spectators were also present; this was not so at the Olympic games, but seems to have been a common Italic custom. The stands, too, appear typically Italic; on such ἴκρια the spectators were seated at those athletic games and contests which in earlier times, according to Vitruvius (v. 1), were held in the market-places of Italian towns. Amphitheatres were not known till the first century B.C., but if one imagines these market-places on festival days with such wooden stands built up on all four sides, and these stands curved round at the corners in order that the spectators might see better, one can understand how the shape of the amphitheatre originated.[35]

[Sidenote: TOMBA DELLA SCIMMIA AT CHIUSI]

Within the sphere of Etruscan painting also, this is the only large representation of an audience. Elsewhere the artist limited himself to the individual figure as representative of the spectators; thus in the Tomba della Scimmia (the Monkey Tomb) at Chiusi, the only spectator is a lady dressed in black and sheltered by a sunshade; she is seated on a high chair without a back (diphros), her feet on a footstool (fig. 20). The tomb was discovered in 1846 by François. The pictures are executed in a thin colour, probably a sort of water-colour, applied directly to the stone without an intermediate layer of stucco; a similar technique is employed in the other and larger tomb at Chiusi, the Tomba Casuccini. The four walls are decorated with scenes from the race-course and the palaestra. Behind the lady on the wall which is reproduced, we see two men in rapid motion and with ample gestures probably intended to render the bustle and hurry at the funeral, which is also represented, as we have seen, by one of the figures in the Augur tomb (cp. fig. 4). The sunshade carried by the ‘widow’ was an Oriental fashion, but in the fifth century B.C. the women of Greece had adopted it, as is shown by the _Knights_ of Aristophanes (l. 1348 σκιάδειον). To the left the usual flute-player is standing, and the round dais in front of him is not an altar, but, as Milani was the first to point out, the small table on which prizes were placed.[36] Next comes a girl with a censer on her head. She is generally taken to be a female juggler, but carrying a tall object on one’s head is still a common practice with the women of the South, and censers (thymiateria), as we learn from Dionysius of Halicarnassus, were always carried at the ‘pompae’ in early Rome; at the high festivals they were placed in front of the Roman doorways.[37] They were sometimes of costly material.[38] But our woman seems to be standing on a platform, and the near presence of the flute-player, and the turning of her body and position of her arms, seem to indicate some difficult dance performed with the big object borne on her head in a small, limited space; hence a kind of old Etruscan dervish-dance of which we have no other knowledge. The two figures next to her are a big and a small man who are cooling their bleeding noses with sponges: the artist gives the atmosphere of the scene after the fight. On one of the other walls in this tomb the boxers are ready for action, raising their cestus-bound fists against each other, one hand closed for attack, the other open for defence, as frequently described in the ancient authors.[39] Cicero tells us that boxers sighed and groaned, in order to increase the force of the blow.[40] These cestus fights must have been terrible. The guard, nowadays less, was then more important than the blow, for it was too dangerous to take the risk of being hit by one’s opponent when attacking him, even if one was confident that one’s own blow would be the harder; one had to play for an opening, at the same time guarding against the single blow which was sufficient to knock a man out. Finally, on the extreme left of the picture (fig. 20) we meet with a scene which is repeated in another picture in the same tomb, as well as in the Tomba del Triclinio: a rider seated sideways and at the same time leading another horse. The race with a led horse was an Oriental custom, and appears for the first time on the Phoenician metal bowls of the eighth and seventh centuries B.C. This seat, sideways on the horse, is of Scythian origin, and in Greek art usually characterizes the Amazons. The Etruscans, with their passion for difficult games, evidently combined the two in order to make the races as exciting as possible.

[Sidenote: TOMBA DELLE BIGHE]

In the small frieze on the back wall of the Tomba delle Bighe we find a rider with a led horse, dressed in tunic and helmet, and seated astride; we reproduce part of it after Stackelberg’s water-colour (fig. 21). To the left of him we see a naked man standing on one leg and nursing his raised left leg. It was formerly conjectured that he was playing leap-frog with the young man planting the jumping-pole in the ground behind him, but it is not usual to play leap-frog on one leg, and Weege has pointed out the same position in athletic scenes on Greek vases and supposes it to be a kind of preparatory exercise. His supposition is correct: any modern acrobat would recognize it as one of his exercises; the contraction of the muscles by nursing right and left knee in turn. Acrobats practise this exercise when travelling, to keep themselves fit when they are unable to train.

FOOTNOTES:

[30] Cp. Fr. Poulsen, _Delphi_, fig. 44.

[31] Daremberg-Saglio, _s. v._ _Tutulus_. Fr. Poulsen, _Der Orient und die frühgriech. Kunst_, p. 97, fig. 99, and p. 107. Martha, _L’art étrusque_, p. 306, fig. 206 (Cyprus). _Antike Denkmäler_ iii, pl. 1.

[32] In the same manner the Roman priests used flint knives in their cult, and their razors had to be of copper, and, as late as Roman imperial times, they used black vessels (_nigrum catinum_), corresponding to the Etruscan bucchero vases, at sacrifices. Livy i. 24. 9: Juvenal vi. 343. Cp. Müller-Deecke, _Die Etrusker_ ii. p. 275.

[33] The Latin name of the head-cloth is _struppus_, and from that a festival at Falerii, _struppearia_, derived its name. It comes from Ionia, and is mentioned in the poems of Sappho (χειρόμακτρον).

[34] Fr. Poulsen, _Delphi_, fig. 44.

[35] Cp. Daremberg-Saglio and Pauly-Wissowa, _s. v._ _Amphitheatrum_.

[36] _Museo archeol. di Firenze_, p. 303.

[37] Livy xxix. 14. 13.

[38] Cicero, _In Verrem_ iv. 46. See also Karl Wigand, _Thymiateria_.

[39] For instance in Apollonius Rhodius, _Argonautica_ ii. 68.

[40] Cicero, _Tusculanae disputationes_ ii. 56.

VIII

[Sidenote: PALAESTRA LIFE]

We will not dwell on all the forms of wrestling contests and boxing matches which appear in the small frieze of the Bighe tomb, but only describe a part of the left main wall, which presents an important and difficult problem (fig. 22). To the left of a young man in a himation (not reproduced) we see the lower part of a statue of a deity, who would seem, from the faint traces in Stackelberg’s water-colour, to have wings on his ankles. If so, it is Hermes, the protector of the palaestra, and the black object in front of him is a small altar. On the other side of the altar a boy, accompanied by one of the caretakers of the palaestra, clad in a blue mantle and carrying a knotted stick, is standing with his hand raised. This usually indicates the adorer praying to the divinity for victory in the contest. An absolutely Greek palaestra interior! We have now escaped from the sphere of the customary rude games held at the Etruscan funerals, and the question arises whether the Etruscan knew real palaestra life of the Greek type or not. In the Oscan towns of Lucania and Campania the youths were devoted to Greek sports, and Weege is therefore inclined, in view especially of this picture, to believe the same of the nobles of Etruria at the height of their glory in the sixth and fifth centuries B.C. But this is a dangerous inference. Wherever else we meet with Etruscan athletic types they are rough and lumbering of build and evidently professionals. In the Tomba delle Bighe a Greek artist has been at work; this was already admitted by Stackelberg and Kestner, and the same view is held in our own times. Although the artist has complied with the demands of his patron more fully than the Greek artist in the Tomba del Barone, who only troubled himself to do so as far as dress was concerned, but for the rest painted entirely in the spirit of his native country, Greek influence, nevertheless, has penetrated everywhere. It is seen, for instance, in the incongruities of the picture: the spectators in the corners, suggesting actual athletic games; then this interior from a Greek palaestra, which _might_ be interpreted, however, as part of a public contest; next comes the prize table, as in the Tomba della Scimmia, but on both sides himation-clad boys are seen, loitering like typical figures of the everyday life of the palaestra, who have absolutely nothing to do with the concentrated excitement of the sports in the arena. To the left of the low table we see a little armed dancer, with helmet, shield, and spear, in Greek nudity, not fully dressed like the gladiator in the Tomba della Scimmia; his lance is bent zigzag-wise, apparently an Etruscan peculiarity. With the Greeks also, the armed dance—the pyrrhiche—formed part of the sepulchral festival, especially in Cyprus and Crete, where it was called prylis;[41] and the custom may very well have been adopted by the Etruscans.

FOOTNOTES: