Etruscan Art - Notes

Chapter 4 Orientalizing Art in Etruria

I N D E X

FIRST STAGE:
Ceramic Forms
Engraved Designs

SECOND STAGE: International Standards
General Characteristics
Imported Sources of Etruscan Art

THE ANIMAL STYLE
Representational Art of the Second Period
International Characteristics
Regional Characteristics
Space and Ground

THIRD STAGE: Culmination
Wider Range of Art
Formalization of the Animal Style

T E X T
FIRST STAGE:
Ceramic Forms
Oriental shapes appear among Etruscan ceramics about the turn from the eighth to the seventh century. At that time imported articles were still rare in Etruria; the Bocchoris vase must have been a thing of considerable value to its Italian owners. But the domestic crafts, likewise, began to accept the new forms, as they had somewhat earlier adopted Greek Geometric models. Indeed a discrepancy between the forms of vases and the applied decoration can often be observed during this early period, the former reflecting oriental influences, while the latter continued in the native Geometric tradition.

A good example of this infiltration of oriental vase form into Etruscan art is the so-called pilgrim flasks:[1] flat, circular bottles of a shape long familiar to the ancient Near East. We know that Phoenician originals of this type were shipped into Etruria; thus it is not astonishing that Etruscan potteries soon turned out flasks of the same oriental type. But almost simultaneously the idea spread to the metal shops. The process was characteristic of this importation of art to the new country in that it implied a transfer of form from one craft to another, and from one material to another. As the metallurgists of central Italy started manufacturing flat bronze flasks of the oriental 'pilgrim' shape but embellished with Geometric decoration in the native style, they actually created a new type of object, not in existence elsewhere. For a while these metal bottles with Geometric ornament proved quite a popular article in Etruria [plate 23].

Even more consequential proved the introduction of jugs with beak-shaped spouts,[2] a ceramic type very popular in the Near East from prehistoric times [plate 24]. The form came to Etruria from Cyprus and was at once imitated in the native impasto technique. But it also invited free variations, over and above mere copying. A remarkable three-necked vessel of this kind with the unmistakably oriental 'beak' belonged to the contents of the Bocchoris Tomb [plate 25].[3] Its lenticular body is totally un-Geometric; indeed, un-Greek. It is treated with a certain freedom and linear fluency, reminiscent of Art Nouveau objects of the late nineteenth century. Ever afterwards the beak-spouted jug, in numerous indigenous variations, remained a popular form in Etruscan Italy. It proved a lasting contribution of the Orient to Italian culture. [p. 49]

Engraved Designs
The growing influx of examples of imported art resulted in a gradual refinement of taste, a [p. 49] greater variety of shapes, and technical improvements. Potters learned to make the surface of their vases very smooth and shining; the impasto colour turned evenly dark grey, approaching black. In the best specimens a design was often engraved on the surface, rather than painted; the engraving technique stressed the metallic effect. Decoration, too, began to change style. Most common is a kind of small amphora decorated with a horizontal double-spiral; the design must be regarded as a stereotyped Greek Subgeometric pattern. In these vessels the ceramic form is treated like metal, and the Regolini-Galassi Tomb in fact contained a specimen made of silver [plate 26].[4] Also among the vases with incised decoration, the figural representations of the Greek Orientalizing style began to make their influence felt. For the first time in history an Italian school of free design--not merely Geometric--developed in these workshops.

Since this fact bears on a matter of considerable importance, a discussion of detail will be in order. An excellent black jug in the Vatican[5] may serve as an example [plate 27]. The globular shape with beaked spout is clearly oriental; not so the engraved design, which can be recognized as the work of an Italian craftsman possessing some knowledge of Greek Orientalizing decoration. A fish, curiously drawn as if viewed from above, is shown on either side of the spout. Two decorative zones follow, one with palmettes on a high stem, the other with stylized flowers. The entire space beneath is given over to a procession of animals: two stags, a horse, and a serpent. The broad muzzles of the quadrupeds betray their Late Geometric, Greek ancestry; but why, in spite of the similarity of type, do these animals look so different? Obviously their maker used a different approach to drawing - not merely another technique

Greek artists like to show that natural creatures consist of well defined parts. Theirs is an analytic approach. In their painted and sculptured images the parts are firmly set against one another: the single figure, even, forms an antithetical composition. Also, the bodies have solidity. This wish to represent solid reality may be one reason why at first the Greek vase-painters in the main preferred compact black silhouettes to drawings by outline; for with the black figures the outlines appear mere attributes of the solid mass which they encompass, and which they oppose to the nothingness of the surrounding space.

To all this the animals depicted on the vatican jug stand in direct opposition. The stag [plate 28] is drawn in mere outline. Its contour encloses nothing--neither an abstract contrapuntal structure nor a natural one of bones and sinews. If it were real, this creature would look like a blown-up rubber animal. Yet it is drawn with great care and certainly not without skill. Only, with this kind of drawing the art consists precisely in the mellow, fluent line which creates a unified shape, like a pattern. The approach is synthetic rather than analytic. Here, as with the Etruscan Geometric figures, we find the shapes defined by delineation, from without. The drawing is undramatic but not uneventful: on the contrary, it is very suggestive and delicate, and in its own [p. 51] way it produces a surprising, somewhat s unrealistic effect. With bent legs, dreamily, peacefully, these animals trot along. The sense of dream is enhanced by the fact, rare in ancient art, that no base line is shown. Thus the whole vase becomes the undefined ground on which the snake creeps and the animals trot--as in a prehistoric rock painting.

I am convinced that all this is no accident; it is a style. More examples can be found, not only in the same typically Etruscan-Italian class of impasto vases with incised design but also in other techniques, such as the embossed reliefs of early Italian bronzes. However, this question leads us to materials belonging to the following period, in which the Orientalizing style of Etruria came to approach its culmination. [p. 52]

SECOND STAGE:
International Standards/General Characteristics
By the middle of the seventh c. the Orientalizing art of Etruria had entered its golden age. This statement is based on the evidence of the great tombs; and it should perhaps be modified by the added observation that among the contents of Etruscan burials, the discrepancy not only of wealth but also of artistic styles was never greater. During this and the following periods the taste of the wealthy detached itself ever more clearly from that of the ordinary people. Innovations occurred on both levels, however; thus the way was opened for the astonishing variety of objects and variability of shapes which mark especially the following, third period.

The Geometric style, though not yet extinct, dropped definitely into the background around the middle of the century. Metals--bronze or better--were preferred to ceramics wherever feasible; and, as a rule, the richer a burial, the fewer clay vases it now contained. In this period there can be no doubt that the upper social strata began to buy the transportable goods of the East in quantity. They hoarded them in their households as in their tombs: things of finely wrought metal or other precious materials such as amber and ivory, not to mention the more perishable objects like expensive textiles of which no samples have come down to us--only an occasional echo in literature. Within a few decades the general level of taste became completely revolutionized.

With this gradual mutation of taste in Italy and its assimilation to international standards we must now occupy ourselves. The new upsurge of artistic activity and inventiveness was at the outset mostly limited to the crafts of daily use, and thereby channeled into fields which we would now classify as minor arts. No brief historical survey can do justice to the ensuing variety of these materials. Instead it will be necessary to concentrate on the really new and significant additions to the already established forms of art in Etruria, as these innovations appear one after the other among our materials. The simultaneous continuation of many popular wares of the older type must meanwhile be taken for granted.

Especially, from now on, we shall have to give increasing attention to representational decoration; for in this developed an art with a content, even though Etruscan art continued to lag behind both the contemporary Greek and the oriental in this respect. Once more the unusual fact throws light on the fundamental difference between the Etrusco-Italian and the Greek situation during the Orientalizing period. In Greek art the liberating effect of the new oriental contacts became at once noticeable; there was a vast store of content waiting, as it were, for the new modes of expression. Italy on the other hand was a land not altogether without art but almost without a native tradition of imagery; and what little imagery the Villanovan style had been ready to include with its ornament remained of a completely impersonal and generic character. No pre-seventh-century Italian work of art of which we know tells a specific story. Because the domestic forms of implements, armour, and jewelry in Italy differed widely from those of the eastern countries, there was a place for a native tradition of crafts, as we saw. To an [p. 52] extent, elements of Greek Geometric art had been able to fuse with this native art, as a decoration. The advent of the Orientalizing period, however, created a more complicated situation. For the wholesale transfer of an art which in its homelands tended to become increasingly representational and which therefore brought to Italy a wholly new imagery readymade, the domestic arts were less prepared than for the Geometric. This was not entirely a problem of skill; it was also a matter of intellectual readiness. What the student of Etruscan Orientalizing art witnesses is a process of adaptation from foreign prototypes which moved much more slowly and reluctantly than the coeval orientalization of Greek art, because they gap between the domestic level and the exemplars was so much greater. [p. 53]

Imported Sources of Etruscan Art
Naturally the transfer of styles from the eastern countries to the West depended on such types of art as could be shipped with sufficient facility over great distances. We find an interesting comment on this fact in Herodotus. According to his report, the Phocaeans who under Persian pressure were forced to relinquish their town in 545 loaded their fifty-oared ships with their 'movable goods, and in addition the images from the temples and other gift-offerings except the bronzes, stone work, and paintings'.[6] This inventory was certainly typical of many other emigrant groups who between the eighth and the sixth centuries came to colonize Italy. It made allowance for some personal furniture; but votive images from the sanctuaries were brought only if they were small enough for transportation. Temple treasures of precious material were probably included. All works of art on a large scale--statues or paintings--had to be abandoned. We have no reason to believe that the early traders could make a very different selection. The traffic of large sculpture and painting into Italy developed at a much later date. As a rule one must assume that the new sources of imagery and industrial design which underlay the Etruscan Orientalizing art were altogether small works, of practical and personal use. The bulk of the Greek and Phoenician commercial importation likewise must have been articles of moderate size and weight.

Ceramics loomed large among the Greek materials. One can say that the art of painting came to Italy by way of the Greek Orientalizing vases. Immigrant potters probably helped to diffuse the knowledge of various Greek Orientalizing styles by starting a local production on the lines which they had learned at home. For instance, the common Etruscan imitations of Protocorinthian and Corinthian vases were really a type of domestic art in the Corinthian style; they were not necessarily copies. These potters by training perpetuated not only the techniques but also the rules of design and composition which they had once acquired. They preferred Corinthian models.[7] Another class of the same period, the vases of the so-called Civitavecchia style,[8] show the influence of Rhodes [29]. [p. 53]

On the other hand, the ivory carvers used a somewhat different set of models. At first, it seems, their craft was chiefly a domain of the Syrians and Phoenicians. Phoenician Orientalizing ivories were actually discovered in Etruria; but Greek prototypes were also in existence. Both kinds offered examples for imitation in native workshops. Moreover, there was always the possibility that ivory reliefs could serve as models to ceramic painters, just as ceramic decoration could be imitated in ivory.[9]

In addition, the well-known Syro-Phoenician and Cypro-Phoenician silver bowls,[10] of which the wealthy tombs of Etruria have furnished us with some truly outstanding examples, must be regarded as a potential source of iconography in Etruria. Scenes of human life in such variety were found in hardly any other art reaching Italy at this period.

Only a small faction of all this imagery appears actually reflected in the native Etruscan art of the time which concerns us in this chapter. The progress of Orientalizing art was rather slow in Etruria, especially during its two initial stages. The copying crafts naturally developed a degree of facility, to be utilized later. But a survey of the materials attributable to the second half of the seventh century will quickly confirm the impression, gained already from the discussion of the Geometric style, that the more interesting products of Etruscan art were those in which the native craftsmen adapted foreign prototypes to some purpose of their own: either by transferring a design from the material in which they found it to another medium; or by using imported prototypes for the decoration of some object to which no counterpart existed in their lands of origin. Only in these cases of comparatively free adaptation can the evolution of a native Orientalizing style in Etruria be comprehended as a consistent, educative process. [p. 54]

The Animal Style / Representational Art of the Second Period
Three objects stand out among the materials which we ascribe to the middle decades of [p. 54] the seventh century: the large bronze stand from the antechamber of the Regolini-Galassi Tomb [30];[11] the bronze cauldron often placed on this stand in earlier photographs, although it probably does not belong to it [31];[12] and the magnificent golden fibula from the so-called cella of the same tumulus [32].[13]

These three objects, though of different destination and materials, should be grouped together because of their decoration. The vase stand is an excellent specimen of a type of furniture about which more will be said in the chapter on industrial design. Cauldrons of bronze as in our illustration 31, decorated with protomes in lions' or griffins' heads, were a popular item of Etruscan art of the seventh century. Their original invention can be traced to the Near East, perhaps Syria.[14] But the same type of vessel was also produced in Greece, where they became known as 'Argive cauldrons'. In Etruria, Cerveteri, Tarquinia, and Vetulonia became chief centres of their manufacture. All in all the cauldrons must have been very common in the wealthier households, though of their purpose [p. 55] nothing is known with certainty. Our third example, the golden fibula [32], is of course a thoroughly Italian contrivance, developed from the native type of safety pin discussed above but of giant size. It is a very showy piece and, as regards size and decoration, unique. [p. 56]

In fact, one of the obstacles with which any discussion of the Etruscan Orientalizing treasures from the great tombs must cope is precisely the circumstance that so many items in their inventories are unique pieces. It is difficult to discover a community of style. For instance, there are many Etruscan vase stands among the finds preserved, but no other is decorated exactly like the one from the Regolini-Galassi Tomb [30]. Likewise, in Greece, bronze cauldrons of the type seen in our illustration 31 are not decorated with embossed reliefs: those in our example are definitely of Etruscan workmanship, although the design, which represents a procession of animals, recalls Greek Orientalizing vase paintings. Obviously the Etruscan practice of free adaptation from models picked at random leads to this apparent lack of rules. While the forms of common implements were prescribed in a general way, more often than not the choice of decorative details depended on chance; either on the personal preference and schooling of the craftsman, or on the accidental selection of models at hand. Likewise the application of such decoration to particular objects must often have been entirely at the discretion of the native artist in the absence, as yet, of a stable domestic tradition. Naturally, at this stage, the more ambitious a work of Etruscan art appears, the more unusual it looks to us. The singular importance of the three objects selected for this account consists in the fact that in spite of their apparent diversity, they exhibit a degree of stylistic consistency, not in their shapes--which are different--but in their style of decoration. Among other things, they demonstrate the formation of a domestic style of figures with common characteristics which to us signalize a new stage of Orientalizing art in Etruria. [p. 57]

International Characteristics
The difference from the products of the preceding period will at once be noticed in all three works. It must be described as a progress towards the level of the leading eastern arts, Greek and Phoenician. Three points should be especially mentioned. [1] Interest has definitely shifted from abstract to figural decoration. [2] The primary subject matter now is monsters and animals. [3] The primary principle of composition is the horizontal frieze.

These three points are more or less true of al Orientalizing styles of the eighth and seventh centuries. The styles were decorative, primarily, not withstanding the fact that the development of figural representation was their chief business. They also were 'animal styles' to some degree, but not to the same degree: the relative frequency of animals, compared with other representations, always remained higher in Etruscan art than in most other Orientalizing schools except, perhaps, the Rhodian. For instance on the Protocorinthian vases which were so popular in Etruria, human figures are much more common. Obviously the native workshops absorbed the foreign influences only partially.

On the other hand the animal representations are more assimilated to eastern styles than they ever were before. As in all Orientalizing art, the figures--monsters and animals-are lined up in horizontal processions marching quietly from one side to the other. Such rows of animals had long been a standard feature of oriental art, especially in the Near East. The superimposed zones of the Regolini-Galassi bronze stand were also used in these styles from the earliest times. However, to assemble a variety of different animals in each zone is a Greek trait; so is the free mingling of fabulous and natural zoology.[15] Oriental art liked to assign one species of animals to each row. While therefore, by general arrangement, the decoration of the bronze stand is related to Greek Orientalizing art, it can hardly be explained as a mere translation into bronze of a Greek model; for instance, of a Protocorinthian vase. The rendering of the animals is not identical with any specific Greek style. We must consider it an Etruscan variant of the common Orientalizing animal style.

Examination of details leads to the same conclusion. From the point of view of eastern art one is dealing here with a mixed iconography. The sphinxes with the Egyptian 'apron' between the forelegs render a Phoenician type.[16] Their wings, too, are stylized in an oriental [p. 57] manner; the wing growing from the averse side bends downward.[17] On the other hand there are two varieties of lions, and those with wings may well depend on Greek, Corinthian representations. Those without wings form a very special race, however, because of their long manes. Ultimately this manner of drawing the mane, as if it consisted of long strands of hair, may also have derived from Protocorinthian models, sloppily rendered.[18] But the result was a new type, distinctly Etruscan; the lions on the golden fibula from the Regolini-Galassi Tomb are of the same breed [32]. Furthermore, it will be noticed that most of these animals walk on curiously high legs. The taste for these stilted creatures must have been acquired from Greek Cycladic art, or perhaps from Crete; it was scarcely Corinthian. As the style of the Regolini-Galassi bronze stand and similar monuments emerges from this analysis, one may call it eclectic; but to me it seems best described by a proper name, such as Etruscan-Orientalizing. [p. 58]

Regional Characteristics
In so far as this Etruscan production now appears as a fully-fledged if somewhat irregular variety of Orientalizing art, one must be able to name its regional properties. I shall point out two such characteristics. One regards its approach towards the animal form as a problem of design. What makes these animals look so strangely undecided, undramatic and loose-jointed? In that respect they still resemble the engraved beasts of the first period; and they differ, most obviously, from their eastern counterparts, especially the Greek. Again the explanation must be the same as before. Not that the designers had no talent; what was lacking was the firm, Geometric training which their Greek contemporaries possessed. With each step in the Italian development which we are in a position to follow, this circumstance stands out more clearly, as something constitutional in Etruscan art; it was the one basic factor which made it a different art from the Greek. Greek Orientalizing art in its rather stylized images did incorporate abstract, geometric principles. To much oriental art, also, a simple but effective geometry was basic. In detail the Etruscan artists adopted many stylizations which their prototypes offered. But during the period with which we are dealing here, they certainly showed no interest in the structured character and the geometrically controlled, rational form of their models. Their emphasis was on representation, not structure. And they persisted in their tendency to conceive of an image as an outward form defined by delineation rather than by structure from within.[19] [p. 58]