Back to Art H. 280 table of contents
The History of Art Survey
Lecture 11
Etruscan Art
Gardner 230-243
A Etruscans and Greeks / Etruscans and Romans
B Early Etruscan Art, 7th through 6th c BCE
C Later Etruscan Art 5th to 1st c BCE
Style Periods: 6-1st century
6-
1 Fibula with Orientalizing lions Cerveteri
2 (Model temple)
3 Apollo, Portonaccio Temple Veii
* 4 Sarcophagus with reclining couple Cerveteri
5 Banditaccia necropolis Cerveteri
6 Plan of the Tomb of the Shields and Chairs Cerveteri
7 Tomb of the Reliefs Cerveteri
* 8 Banqueters and musicians, Tomb of the Leopards Tarquinia
9 Diving and fishing, Tomb of Hunting and Fishing Tarquinia
10 Capitoline Wolf
11 Chimera of Arezzo Arezzo (?)
12 Novios Plautios, Ficoroni Cista Palsetrina
13 Porta Marzia Perugia
14 Sarcophagus of Lars Pulena Tarquinia
15 Aule Metele (Arringatore, Orator) Sanguineto
Historiography
The art of the Etruscans conforms in general to that of the Mediterranean as
a whole, as that of the Greeks to which the rest is usually traced. Indeed there
was a Mediterranean cultural region with variations in each region. This is
the explanation of the cultural periods given the Etruscans, that so exactly
parallel those given the Greeks. The most important detail is the end of Hellenistic
Greece 31 BCE, and the end of the Etruscans 89 BCE. I. E., the dates upon which
each were officially absorbed by the Romans.
This is hegemonic history. Culture is generally attributed to the major political
power of the day. This is not without reasoning. The major political powers
are the major economic powers and so the center of most cultural development.
Talented artists are drawn to the more lucrative markets of these sites. What
leads me to call this hegemonic history is the aristocratic principal of attributing
the artists drawn from many different places to the elite of the regional power
rather than the wide diversity of the culture as a whole. Greek art was the
work we’ve just seen spread from the coast Anatolia and all the Islands
of the eastern and central Mediterranean. The variation of the regional style
are all subsumed, but “influence” or provinciality, to the metropolitian
center.
However we wish to cut up these continuously changing parallel styles with their
distinct regional variations and more strikingly shared basic forms, we recognize
their continuing parallel. They were, after all in continual contact with each
other.
The hegemonic or aristocratic view is that all comes from the center or the
prince or the greatest local power. A more democratic approach recognizes broadly
shared styles with regional variations, in a system that allows provincials
to contribute to the quality of the various centers as much as the centers to
contribute to the periphery.
The Etruscans
The Etruscans are the most prominent of the “Italian” cultures contemporaneous
with the Romans, before their rise to paramountsy in the first the peninsula
and then the Mediterranean. They were the culture just north of the Romans in
central Italy, “between the Arno and the Tiber.” “Centered
on Florence.” Interestingly these people, whom the Greeks called “Tyrrhenians”
and the Romans “Tusci,” spoke a language that was not Indo-European,
like Latin and Greek. Herodotus, the major Greek historian, said they immigrated
to the boot “from Lydia in Asia Minor.” That is the southeastern
corner of the Greek region. Dionysius of Halicarnassus (1st c BCE) claimed they
were native to Italy. “The Etruscan people of historical times were very
likely the result of a gradual fusion of native and immigrant populations.”
(232)
We should note that indeed all cultures are “the result of a gradual fusion of native and immigrant populations.” The alternative, that they are a pure genetic population, is both what many, if not most all, of the world’s nations have claimed over the centuries. But that is the myth of races that has turned out to be false in every studied case. However chauvinistic any tribe, it was composed of men and women, who—like the population of the Homeric equivalent of Lake Woebegone: Isle Woebeuntoya—were no more celibate or patient than Odysseus and Penelope.
We can admit that the origins of the Etruscans still is a mystery and may well remain so.
The “Etruscans emerged as a distinctive people with a culture related
to but distant from those of other Italic peoples and from the civilizations
of Greece and the Orient.
There is something ill considered, but traditional going on here. It is the idea that some cultures are special, while others are not. It is an aristocratic point, for us to question. The anthropological view is that each culture is unique, and as such more or less as special as any other. The Etruscans happen to be one that is more interesting to us than most, because it has left us such interesting remains, both in material objects and in the writing of their contemporaries. All cultures distinctive, that just means we can distinguish them from the others around them. Our authors have merely put them into their survey fetishism of repeating that the only cultures that they recognize are those they list: Greek and Orient. I hope you already realize there is no Orient.
No Orient? How can that be? Well, go back and look at our chapter 2, on the Orient. It lists six or eight different cultures, each somewhat connected through their sharing of the same region, and yet each quite distinct in their chronological periods and in the subregions of the Fertile Crescent they occupied. The two last of these, the Persians and the Hellenistic Greeks, were really quite different from the others. And to get down to that number we have had to leave out all the cultures who were not big enough to get into our brief survey. The Orient that our Gardner’s speaks of is a convenient label for everything non-Greek between Athens and the India, but this is neither a meaningful category, nor one they or anyone else can describe or grasp.
Why, we may well ask, do they want to act as if there was something we can call “the Orient.”
Etruria emerges into our recorded history as a set of city states with a shared
language and culture of seafaring and trade as well as farming, on the west
coast of the Italian boot in the 8-7th century BCE. The Greeks and the Romans,
who were seafarers and farmers on the same coast noted their presence and competed
and traded with them. In the 7th century they became internationally important
through their mining of copper, tin, iron and silver, all of which were in demand.
Cerveteri and Tarquinia, among others, became quite wealthy with this trade.
And they used the wealth and the trade to share in the art and culture coming
out of the much larger and richer Greek culture of the day.
Art historians have divided their art into the same set of style categories
and period dates as already developed for the Greeks: 7th century Orientalizing,
6th Archaic (and lasting to 480 BCE!), Classical 480 - 323 BCE, and Hellinistic
323 to 89 BCE. Why because the art is close enough to the general style they
shared with the Greeks, and whatever they may have contributed to Greek culture
in return has not been easily distinguished, since there is relatively very
little Etruscan material for us to see and a vast amount of the much larger
Greek production, it being a much larger culture as well as a very protean and
productive one.
One can see how this will bias our view of the Etruscans, more or less as a view of American history divided into periods like Leninist, Stalinist, and Kruschevian might.
1 Fibula with Orientalizing lions, 1’, c 650-640 BCE, Cerveteri
So what sort of art have the Etruscans left us? Most of it is small scale tomb
goods, much of that found in the burials of Cerveteri and Tarquinia, on the
coast a few miles north of Rome. Here is a golden fibula (shoulder-pin for holding
a garment together), for a wealthy merchant’s wife. Fibula are an Italic
utensil, but the five lions marching across this one have a distinctly Near
Eastern look to them. The techniques of granulation (the five dot flowers in
the borders) and repoussé (metal foil pushed out from behind) are also
“Eastern,” according to our text.
This is the basic art historical method of analysis. If X resembles Y, and I know more about Y, and particularly if Y is more important than X, we make the assumption that X has gotten its from Y. So our lions here resemble the formulas we’ve already seen in the Ishtar Gate at Babylon of (2-26) of 575 BCE, and the panthers of Temple A at Prinias (5-6) of 625 BCE. [This is what we may call the Prime Aristocratic Assumption: if it looks like something more important, it probably belongs to that culture.]
2 Model Etruscan temple, typical of 6th century BCE, as described by
Vitruvius in the 1st century BCE.
“However eager they may have been to emulate Greek works, the distinctive
Etruscan temperament always manifested itself.” (323) [Another bit
of left over racial thinking: art conceived of as emanating from temperament
rather than conscious decision.] “Etruscan artworks depart markedly
from their prototypes. This is especially true of religious architecture, where
the design of Etruscan temples superficially owes much to Greece but where the
differences far outweigh the similarities.” Only the basements have survived,
but Virtuvius has left us an account of the 1st century BCE. And we have lots
of fragments.
The Etruscan temple resembled Greed gable roofed temple [and every large
structure in the town!]. But it was built of brick and timber, with terracotta
decoration, not stone. It was a mural structure with pillars only on the porch
facade. This porch was nearly half the temple.
Though Gardner’s describes the building as a variation on the Greek model, it would be more efficient and correct to describe it without reference to that structure that they have just said, “superficially owes much to Greece.” If it owes anything it would have been nice to read or see what. Unless the Greeks patented the idea of the rectangle or the gabled roof, this is a quite different design.
The Etruscan temple supports an army of terracotta figures marching across its
roof. The Etruscan order (called Tuscan by the Romans) resembled the Doric,
only it was different; it was wooden, without flutes and with a base, plus they
were more widely spaced. [Except for having an equally plain capital and
being round and vertical, it was completely different.] Usually they
had three sanctums lined up side by side for Tinia, Uni and Minerva —the
Etruscan counterparts of Zeus, Hera, and Athena. There are not pediments or
friezes or metopes or triglyphs.
3 Apulu of the Portonaccio Temple, 5’11”, 510-500 BCE,
Veii
Apulu is the Etruscan equivalent of Apollo. This is a painted terracotta image,
of the god striding, much in the Archaic manner of Kroisos from Anavysos (5-10)
of the same date. It is s tour de force of clay firing at this size. The large
lyre shape between its legs is a structural prop. What is striking, in comparison
to the Greek stone figure are the arms here, extending off flamboyantly into
space. That they didn’t make it undamaged for two and a half millennia
is not mark against the artists.
The stiffness of the figure, and angularity of the cloth folds, and the glued
on smile are typically Archaic. Gardner’s compares it effectively to the
Ionian Kouroi of the Acropolis (5-12). “But this vital figure’s
extraordinary force, huge swelling contours, plunging motion, gesticulating
arms, fan-like calf muscles, and animated face are distinctly Etruscan.”
(235) It comes from a temple roof line.
If the Etruscans had artists capable of the feat of modeling and firing six foot terracotta figures in the late 6th century, should we really suppose that needed to copy Greek sculpture? Is it possible that they shared their Archaic style and the it is an international Mediterranean style, like the Hellenistic? When one realized that the Greek states were themselves spread across this entire region this doesn’t seem far fetched. When one considers that the Greeks had relatively little interest in this media, it becomes more possible that styles here are shared, not copied.
4 Sarcophagus with reclining couple, 3’9” high, c 520 BCE,
Cerveteri
The subject is the couple buried within, shown dining at a banquet. It was fired
in four pieces. There is not equivalent genre in Greece, where monumental tombs
with sarcophagi were not made. When Greeks depicted banquets, they were all
men. There is an “animation” in the figures, a “liveliness.”
If the modeling of the transition from the upright torsos to the atrophied legs
stretching unnaturally to the side is anatomically unbalanced and un-Greek,
so it this active comradeship between the man and the women.
There is both a usefulness and a contradictory problem in all of these comparison’s with the Greeks. It is like discussing American fiction today in comparison with British. We can think of the Americans as descendants of the British, or we can consider them separately creative. But in doing either we may forget that for the last twenty or so years Britain’s top annual prize for fiction, the Booker Prize, has been won by Sri Lankans, Japanese, Irish, Canadian and Scottish writers!
The Etruscans unquestionably respected Greek art. They so eagerly purchased Greek painted ceramics that the best surviving examples mostly come from Etruscan tombs. But this doesn’t mean that their culture was dependent upon the Greeks, but that Etruscan patronage had an impact on the Greek art world.
Note the little Ionic, volute, capital beneath the cushions of our sarcophagus. Does it’s presence indicate Near Eastern or Greek influence, or the fact that this was a cosmopolitan international world with a good deal of shared imagery, like say the Jewish mother who shows up in British, American, and French literature today.
Far more important than whatever they shared with their contemporaries, was the cultural tradition that the Etruscans shared among themselves as a community speaking the same distinct language and so working and living together in a unified culture. The is, Etruscan culture. And as you can see, it is different than contemporary Greek culture. It is helpful to put it in perspective with things we already know, to compare it with contemporary Greek culture. But, like comparing your work with the student sitting next to you in any class, even one you might share some suggestions with, it would be wrong to see your work as a variation on theirs.Part 2 And the woman?
What is probably most interesting here is the interaction, comradeship and intimacy between the wife and husband. She is gesturing expressively, speaking animatedly about something of importance, while he embraces her and gestures toward her. Here is partnership and pride and enjoyment of a couple, that the Greeks seemed to know little of in either art of life.
And this is a standard sarcophagus type among the Italians, not only the Etruscans but later the Romans too. Our hegemonic text in the 11th edition, copyright 2001, includes a section on the “audacity” of Etruscan Women,” that was not there in the 10th edition of 1996. It includes part of the one comment on the topic from the 10th edition, the Greek philosopher Aristotle’s comment, (10th p 189) “on the strange fact that Etruscan men ate with their wives, and the Greeks in general were shocked by the relative freedom that women enjoyed in Etruscan society. Etruscan inscriptions often give the names of both the father and mother of the person being commemorated, a practice unheard of i n Greece (witness the grave stele of “Hegeso, daughter of Proxenos.” (5-55).
We now have the additional information that “Only men, boys, slave girls,
and prostitutes attended Greek symposia. The wives remained a home, excluded
from most aspects of public life. In Etruscan Italy, in striking contrast to
contemporary Greece, women also regularly attended sporting events with men.”
(11th p 236)
What contemporary traditionalists seldom remember about feminist viewpoints, such as we see in Slatkin, is that they have are essentially a response to an anti-feminine standard that has suppressed the place of women in history and culture through most of human history. The power of the viewpoint Slatkin represents comes when it is absorbed into the hegemonic view. The lone women artist in Gardner’s survey up through the Gothic period, Hildegard of Bingen (17-36), has only appeared for the first time in this 2001 edition. The few in the second half were all added since the late 1980s, because of the work of the feminist historians could not be ignored.
Gardner’s Seventh edition, of 1976, contained no references to the lives or artistry of women at all in the chapters on Greece or the Etruscans. There are only six works attributed to women in the entire history, four in the 20th century and three earlier.
5 Banditaccia necropolis, 7th -2nd century BCE, Cerveteri
A great deal of what we know of the Etruscans comes from the burial tumuli (mounds)
in which so many fine specimen were preserved. These are still being discovered
today. The were constructed of masonry blocks and then covered up. Some were
just cut into the stone of the site.
6 Plan of the Tomb of the Shields and Chairs, 6th century BCE, Cerveteri,
The plans of these tombs typically resembled wealthy houses of the time, which
were not different for Romans than Etruscans. Here is another contrast with
the Greeks who built stone temples but not tombs. The Etruscans built temples
from wood and brick and tombs from stone.
7 Tomb of the Reliefs, 3rd c, BCE Cerveteri
This is the most elaborate of known tombs. Several generations were interred
here. It was hollowed out of the tufa bedrock (a relatively soft limestone).
“Stools, mirrors, drinking cups, pitchers, and knives effectively suggest
a domestic context. “ The tomb was a symbolic home for the afterlife.
You can see more if you look carefully. There are hunting dogs, and ... [see
what you can see. Go to the library and find more detailed coverage.]
* 8 Banqueters and musicians, Tomb of the Leopards,
ca 480-470 BCE, Tarquinia
Tarquinia is another Etruscan city site, a bit further north on the coast.
Here to there are cemetery sites filled with tombs, on a ridge overlooking the
town and sea in the distance. The tombs here are dug into the earth, without
mounds bulging above, and they are simpler in design: usually just a single
pent-roofed room at the end of a narrow cut down from the surface. Here
the tradition of decoration was painted. The Tomb of the Leopards is named for
the animal guardians of the interior, visible over the horizontal painted lintel
course.. Gardner’s text calls them “reminiscent of the panthers
on each side of Medusa in the pediment of the Archaic Greek Temple of Artemis
at Corfu (5-15) . We’ll put them both on Plato’s cave and you can
compare for yourself.
The subject here is the traditional banquet. Men are dark and women conventionally
light in color. There are women along with the men as encouched banqueters,
here, being entertained and served. Musicians play doubled flutes and a 7-stringed
lyre. The scene takes place in a tent with a painted covering. The subjects
gesture actively. One man holds up an egg, symbol of regeneration.
9 Diving and fishing, Tomb of Hunting and Fishing Tarquinia
c. 530-520 BCE.
Compared to the Greek vase painting, eagerly collected by Etruscans and found
in many of these tombs, the Etruscan painters are less well developed in their
perspective and foreshortening of forms (mass), but more developed in their
portrayal of landscapes, which is to say, space, and nature. Our fragment shows
a boy diving off a rock and birds flying through the air, with isolated bits
of landscape and a boat below. Gardner’s text says, “may indicate
knowledge of...Tomb of Ti (6-16) and Tomb of Nebamun (3-30)
This seems to absurd for words, to me. Check out the comparison and you decide. The colored hills of the Thera Spring Fresco [4-10]are another suggested comparison. [take a look].
Then we have the suggestion that the diver be compared to the diver painting
from Paestum, which was done in c 480 BCE (5-59), though now with an interesting
twist of interpretation. Painted half a century later than the Tarquinia Tomb
of diving and fishing, the Paestum painting seems to specialists likely taken
from older Etruscan designs. This they say “undermining the now outdated
art historical judgment that Etruscan art was merely derivative and that Etruscans
artists never set the standard for Greek artists.”
This is a demonstration of how historians over time are always revising their
interpretations, when evidence mounts high enough in a new direction. That is
our guarantee that even hegemonic history is capable of refinement.
It also points to the tension I have been pointing out between recognizing the
indigenous creativity of local artists and the more prestigeous importance of
the better known, larger cultures.
Later Etruscan Art
In 509 BCE the Romans expelled the Etruscan kings who had up
to then ruled the city, and replaced that monarchy with a republican form of
government. In 474 BCE an alliance between Cumaen Greeks and
the ruler of Syracuse (Sicily) defeated and destroyed the power of the Etruscan
fleet, ending Etruscan sea power and prosperity. The number and quality of Etruscan
tombs immediately diminished. But the many very fine works of art continued
to be produced.
The great wealth of the Etruscan elites was reduced thus work produced for them. but there were still then numbers highly skilled artists that the previous wealth had created and they were still capable of producing fine work, though not in the amount previously.
10 Capitoline Wolf, 2’ 7” high, c 500-480 BCE, Rome
The Capitoline Wolf is the best known example of Etruscan art, and it comes
from this period. It’s a bronze she wolf, considered [now] to be the mythical
world who mothered Romulus and, the legendary founders of Rome, after their
abandonment. Romulus founded Rome 753 BCE, after killing his
brother.
Though it is indeed the symbol of Rome today, and for the last few centuries, the infants in this example are later, Renaissance additions, by Antonio Pollaiuolo.)
The work is Etruscan, not Roman, because as of this date we don’t know
a Roman style and do well know how this fits the Etruscan ideal. The vitality
the “concentrated in the tense, watchful animal body of the she-wolf,
with her spare flanks, gaunt ribs and taut, powerful legs. The lowered neck
and head, alert ears, glaring eyes and ferocious muzzle capture the psychic
intensity of the fierce and protective beast...”
It’s a nice archaic wolf, with sharply articulated patterns like the tufted hair at its soldiers and the chain-like patterns around its chest and down its back. Even the articulation of the eyes and muzzle show the same sharply defined powerful linear detail. Its angularity contrasts with the classical smoothness and organic curving of the later Classical work, as its fierce expression does with classical calm.
It may be that its familiarity and the wonderful contrasting detail for the two infants feeding at it teats have made it unforgettable, not any particular sculptural quality.
11 Chimera of Arezzo, 400-350 BCE, 2’ 7” high, Arezzo (?)
The Chimera of Arezzo is a somewhat more fantastic and bombastic version of
the same characteristics. A chimera is a fantastic Greek “invention.”
A lion with a serpent’s tail and a goat head growing out of its left side.
It was hunted and killed by Bellerophon (the winged horse of Apollo). Here too
we see the sharp angularity of patterned details and straining muscles of an
animal. The wounds on the goats head and the side plus the defiant stance indicate
a late moment in the final battle.
12 Novios Plautios, Ficoroni Cista, 2’ 6”, late 4th c.,
Palsetrina
396 BCE the Romans took Veii from the Etruscans after a 10 year siege. From
this point on the Romans rose from their single center to take control of first
the peninsula the then the Mediterranean world. 351 BCE they took Tarquinia,
273 BCE Cerveteri.
The Novios Plautios is a bronze container for toiletry articles. The inscription
on the one says Dindia Macolnia had it made for his daughter’s tomb and
the artist was Novios Plautios, whose workshop was in Rome. Besides the three
figures on the lid, it includes a very fine engraved drawing around the drum.
It depicts Jason and the Argonauts in search of the Golden Fleece, a well known
Greek story. It is in the Polygnotan manner with figures seen from behind and
three-quarters as well as full front and profile.
13 Porta Marzia, 2nd c BCE, Perugia
The gate of Mars of the former Etruscan city of Perugia, was dismantled in the
Renaissance, but the architect Antonio da Sangalo, but its upper elements were
preserved, imbedded in a later wall. Those fragments show us the arched arcuated,
opening formed by a set of wedged shaped voussoirs. “Such arches
were built earlier in Greece as well as Mesopotamia (see fig. 2-26), but Italy,
first under the Etruscans and later under the Romans, is where arcuated gateways
and freestanding (“triumphal”) arches became a major architectural
type.”
This modest sentence is a subtle nudge in the direction of the West Vs East we have been following. The arch was spectacularly developed in Mesopotamia, and present ancient Egypt. But it was much later developed in quite interesting ways by the Romans. In other similar conquests it is said the earlier development “influenced” the later one. Here it is just that they “were built earlier” and the emphasis is kept on the “Westerners:”
“The Porta Marzia typifies the Etruscan adaptation of Greek motifs by using Hellenic-inspired pilasters to frame th rounded opening.” The Etruscans are said to copy if from the Greeks and the Romans...
The figures are of Jupiter and his sons Castor and Pollux and their steeds.
14 Sarcophagus of Lars Pulena, Tufa, 6’6 long c 200 BCE, Tarquinia
“In Hellenistic-Etruria the descendants of the magnificent Archaic terracotta
sarcophagus from Cerveteri (fig. 9-4) were made of local stone and were carved
rather than cast.” The leading center of production was Tarquinia. Lars
Pulena is seen reclining at a banquet. In this case his wife is not shown with
him. The somber face is a change from earlier terracottas. The face appears
quite personally realistic. They are still types, rather than individualized
portraits, however. The scroll in his hands is inscribed with his life’s
accomplishments. On the coffin he is shown attacked by two charuns
(death demons)
15 Aule Metele (Arringatore, Orator), 5’7” Bronze, 1st
c BCE, Sanguineto
Here is a self competent, careful portrait of an important orator at life size.
He is raising his arm to address the assembly. The work is one of technical
competence. It “was most likely produced at about the time that Roman
hegemony over the Etruscans became total.” 89 BCE, The
Romans conferred citizenship in Rome in everyone in the Italian peninsula.
Aule Metele wears the toga and boots of a Roman magistrate, but his name is
Etruscan, as are those of his father and mother, included in inscriptions on
his hem. “Aule Metele and his compatriots became Romans, and Etruscan
art became Roman art.”
The art of the Etruscans conforms in general to that of the Mediterranean as a whole, as that of the Greeks to which the rest is usually traced. Indeed there was a Mediterranean cultural region with variations in each region. This is the explanation of the cultural periods given the Etruscans, that so exactly parallel those given the Greeks. The most important detail is the end of Hellenistic Greece 31 BCE, and the end of the Etruscans 89 BCE.
However we wish to cut up these continuously changing parallel styles with their distinct regional variations and more strikingly shared basic forms, we recognize their continuing parallel. They were, after all in continual contact with each other.