Etruscan Art - Notes

Chapter 5 Figurative & Non-Figurative Art

I N D E X

THE HUMAN THEME
Generic Interpretation
Greek Narratives
Oriental Iconography
Panel Compositions

Not included here:
NON-FIGURATIVE ART: JEWELRY
Persistence of Earlier Forms and Decoration
Orientalizing Geometric Style of Jewelry

T E X T
THE HUMAN THEME
Generic Interpretation
Like animals, human figures become more frequent in Etruscan decorative reliefs and painting towards the end of the seventh century; yet, also like the animals, most of them are represented merely generically; that is to say they represent soldiers, horsemen, and so on, just as the animals represent bulls, lions, sphinxes or what not. Beyond this obvious fact it is difficult to find any meaning in them. As representations of natural beings, they are school pieces--preparatory only to the more definite connotations of expression and meaning which may one day accrue to them. So the animals of the Barberini ivory goblet [35] are no more than a surface decoration, appealing to a taste for which the embroidered or woven carpet was still the peak of art. There is no action, and the forms open no view into a larger world. The ground, impenetrable, closes behind those solemn phantoms as if they were walking along an endless wall.

There looms a major problem of art behind these facts. To become a vehicle for the communication of human experience, art cannot limit itself to ornament nor to the shaping of useful things. First of all it must include the representation of real objects and of man himself; it must in its own terms deal with the world in which man lives. But then, in order fully to realize its aim, it is not enough for art to depict the isolated semblances of things. True, in this world of ours, many objects are quite commonly evaluated in generic terms: it is not necessary to attach a personal name to a lion or a goat. Yet man's inner life is emotional as well as cognitive; and in order to do justice to his range of experience, the range of art must be expanded so as to include the notions of the personal and the specific.[1]

It was perhaps the most consequential effect of the Orientalizing period in Greece that it achieved the transition from a predominantly generic to a specific interpretation of subject matter, although much Orientalizing art nevertheless remained on the level of generic representation, in Greece as in Etruria. But in Greek vase paintings and reliefs a more conscious separation of ornament and representation soon becomes noticeable. Closed pictorial compositions appear on the vases, within which the human figures acquire a new importance as well as a new freedom of action and interaction. Thereby Greek art became less decorative and more humanized. A corresponding development was retarded in Etruria, where, during the period here under discussion, human representations with a specific meaning still were much the exception.

The reason can only be sought in the prevailing differences of intellectual climate. Obviously in Etruria there existed no literary tradition which dealt with human deeds and passions, as the Homeric epic did in Greece. The Italian mind was less humanized. Nor were the Etruscan deities interpreted as personal characters, like the Greek.[2] They remained either helpful or fearsome demons, or impersonal representatives of natural powers.[3] Without the Greek example, they might not even for a long time have been envisaged in human form.

Consequently there was no basis in Etruria for a development like the one which occurred in Greece, where the new representational art was coincident with a new personalized religion n--the Greek character gods--and the equally new rise of literary fiction. Homer's Achilles was a freely invented character, like the hero of a modern novel; only the name and the background of the Trojan war were taken from familiar lore. The rise of this fictional poetry, which was unprecedented, fostered in Greece [p. 63] not only a novel comprehension of the personal nature of man, but also an entirely new attitude towards art as a free creation. The conception that art was not a substitute for reality but a created reality in its own right was uniquely Greek. Hence the newness of Greek art, which, being free creation, set no limits to the communication of human experience; but hence, also, its reluctance concerning subject matter where a substitute reality was indeed required, as for instance the recording of historical events or memorial portraits. Yet these two themes were definitely within the range of interest in Etruscan and Roman art; while on the other hand representations of fiction were never the rule in Etruscan art, and when they occurred were almost always concerned with Greek, borrowed stories. Quite different factors set the scope of art in Italy. For a literary and humanized fictional art, as it then developed in Greece, both the native themes and the concepts were lacking.

Therefore when in the Etruscan minor arts of the seventh century human figures are at all shown, they seem more often than not but the equals of the decorative forms around them. They belong to the world of phenomena, like all other creatures; they are not the masters and sufferers of that world. Nothing shows that they are persons with a human consciousness in which experience centres as in a focus, and that they possess a mind which is the measure of all things. In this respect they hardly differ from the occasional human representations of the Etruscan Geometric style. Only their range of action has broadened, though it is still severely restricted; the new figures can ride horses, mount their chariots, march and run. As yet they are isolated beings; they are hardly capable of interaction.

By equipment and occupation a social type now receives much attention on Etruscan monuments, under Greek influence: the armed warrior. At least it conveys a degree of specification, in terms of social distinction, though no further characterization be implied. Essentially this, too, remains a generic type, midway between the most general category, a man, and the individualization signifying, for instance, a namable hero. Like so many representations of Etruscan art, these figures appear viewed from the outside only, encased, dreamily, in their separate and semi-decorative existences, void of a purpose. If to us they often seem inept compared to their Greek counterparts, we notice in fact a disparity not of artistic ability but of intellectual culture. [p. 64]

Greek Narratives
A knowledge of the new Greek literature, or at least of its content, reached Italy by the end of the seventh century. From this time date the first two recognizable narratives of Etruscan art. They relate Greek stories. The monuments in question--of prime importance because of their early date--are rather flat reliefs carved around two cylndrical boxes [titulae] of unknown purpose. Both boxes, discovered near Chiusi[4] and now in Florence, had been fashioned from the hollow section of an elephant's tusk. The decoration consists of superimposed friezes in the typical manner of the developed Orientalizing style, and each box includes among sundry representations the same Homeric story: the flight of Ulysses and his companions from the grotto of Polyphemus. The workmanship differs, but the narrative style is about identical in both examples, and it will be sufficient here to illustrate the one which is better preserved [37].

Four zones of figures are divided by three remarkably fine ornamental ribbons. In the top register, which is partly destroyed, four rams are still visible, walking quietly behind each other and carrying what appear to be four companions of Ulysses.[5] Two men march before them, one armored, the other perhaps bringing forage; for the boat towards which they move seems to be waiting, ready to be loaded. In the next zone one sees armored men marching, in a manner reminiscent of Early Corinthian vases; a warrior with a spear rushes to his chariot, departing; of these scenes no sufficient explanation has yet been given.[6] The remaining friezes are quite ornamental, featuring the customary array of animals and monsters; among them are a strange centaur with human feet and long garment who brandishes a large branch of a tree,[7] and a rather Protocorinthian-looking man on horseback.

Characteristic of this imagery is the paratactical, undramatic, and factual way in which the figures are lined up. This manner of composition merely enumerates facts; it neither [p. 65] judges them nor groups them from a narrator's point of view. It is not visibly related to an ordering cognitive centre or to a personal consciousness. One sees how cautiously, timidly almost, the Etruscan artists relinquished the decorative patterns with which they were brought up; the paratactic frieze, with details rhythmically repeated; the procession of figures moving in one direction; the 'row of animals'. Indeed the rams which carry Ulysses and his men into liberty represent no more than another 'row of animals', to which for once a specific meaning has been imputed. Polyphemus cannot be seen, and one may doubt that he was ever represented. In a Greek work of the same time such rigidity of expression would seem utterly antiquated.

Nevertheless, in all its crudeness, the box as a whole is a princely object. There is a peculiar animation residing in some of the decorative figures, like the lion whose face is drawn as if seen from above, rather distortedly. Etruscan artists apparently had a liking for this convulsive distortion. It was a tour de force of the Orientalizing style, which they performed quite frequently. Only in the semi-barbarian art of the early Middle Ages will decorative details again be found so charged with emotion, and imbued with so savage a revolt against the tyranny of the form which encages them. [p. 66]

Oriental Iconography
All artistic representation is conditioned by conventions; and all art must be conventional before it can be original. An iconographical tradition--a selection of themes commonly represented--must form and take root in the popular consciousness if art is to be established anywhere as a current activity. Hence the transfer of art to a new continent is bound to depend on two conditions: it requires skilled workman as well as transportable examples of artistic representation. For instance in Etruria, if native designers could at all be found and schooled for the new Orientalizing workshops, there still remained the question: what were they to represent? One must not forget that ancient artists were not as a rule accustomed to work from nature directly. The relative scarcity of representation in early Etruscan art as a whole among other things reflects the scarcity of models from abroad from which an impulse to develop a more extensive imagery might have been derived. One knows the important role which easily transportable examples of art like prints or engraving played in the early days of American culture, under circumstances not altogether different; or the importance of illuminated manuscripts for the early development of medieval art in the colonial countries north of the Alps.

In a way comparable to these more recent instance, as far as one can judge now, the Greek painted vases became a primary source of art in Etruria towards the end of the Orientalizing period. At least by the beginning of the sixth century the forms of representation will be found generally Greek in most manifestations of Etruscan art. But the same observation is not necessarily true of all the content to which the art turned, for by this time Etruscan artists had acquired sufficient freedom and mastery of representational form to attempt occasionally the rendition of subjects which lay outside the limits of the Greek parent art. Funerary portraiture was a case in question, as well be shown presently. Likewise it would seem strange under the circumstances, if the Phoenician-oriental import had left no mark on the Etruscan imagery developing during this period.

Traces of oriental iconography, alongside the Greek, can indeed be found, just as they could be discovered in the earlier animal style and the industrial arts. Genuine oriental features are obvious, for instance, among the sculptured images of the minor arts which not infrequently echo Syro-Phoenician examples, not only in items of dress and costume but also sometimes in their statuary types [see below, Chapters 7 and 8]. However, another aspect of this situation still needs more attention than it has so far received. The possibility must at least be taken into consideration that Etruscan works occasionally represent subject matter acquired from oriental art, which may not be immediately [p. 66] obvious to a modern critic because it has been translated into Greek or Greco-Etruscan techniques and forms of representation.

I think that a rather interesting instance of this procedure occurs on two Etruscan vases belonging to the Villa Giulia Museum in Rome, of which one is here illustrated [38].[8] It is a pitcher of good Corinthian form, decorated with animals in superimposed zones in the rather colourful, tapestry-like fashion of the late Proto-corinthian style. Both vases are obviously of local manufacture, and their style may be defined as 'Etrusco-Corinthian' towards the end of the seventh century.

What draws our attention to these two otherwise not uncommon specimens is the representations--quite unusual in this style--of dead men with large birds hovering over them. The motif of the slain left to the vultures on the field of battle hails from the most ancient art of the Near East. Greek art by-passed it, as far as we know. Yet on the vases before us there now unfolds the same macabre fantasy, curiously out of context. How was it transferred to Etruscan vase painting?

Assyrian art offers the nearest parallels, as regards the theme. However the rendering of the human form, both the costume and the bulging outlines, is local and has to be discussed later on. Evidently one is dealing here with the products of an Etruscan officina working chiefly in the Corinthian tradition, but which for some reason added this bit of oriental imagery to its stock of models. In this case the means of transmission can hardly have been a Greek vase painting. It may have been a Phoenician silver bowl; or one of the Cretan 'shields' with embossed reliefs which sometimes carry Oriental borrowings, and of which reminiscences can perhaps be found also in other Italian monuments of the same period.

In this way Etruscan art assembled a mixed iconography of Greek and oriental elements. The reason why the artists or their public wanted these representations is not always easy to name. Often one has the impression that the [p. 67] image itself, as in a children's book, constituted a thing of wonder. As yet, during the Orientalizing period, Etruria hardly offered a cultural content of her own for her artists to represent.

Panel Compositions
Considering the conditions of the seventh century one may now conclude that to the Etruscans, as outsiders to all the art imported from the Aegean, many Greek and Phoenician works of the Orientalizing period must have seemed essentially alike in two fundamental points. Both arts were apt to tell a story; and even if no definite tale was told, their favourite mode of arranging figures, humans as well as animals, was in friezes.

Indeed there is a connection between these two facts. To our way of feeling, the frieze is no longer a natural form of composition; this it ceased to be centuries ago. On the other hand in ancient art the frieze had a tradition of long standing, and especially in the Near East was regarded as the suitable form for pictorial narratives at a very early time. Greek art cultivated it for the same reason: not only conceiving of friezes as ornamented ribbons, as they also often did, but developing an epic kind of composition from this decorative scheme. Thus the frieze became known to the Etruscans as a Greek or, more generally, an eastern scheme of composition, with a dual function, either as a decorative device or as a pictorial vehicle of narrative.

In either case friezes constituted an imported item; and one may doubt whether they were ever quite domesticated in Etruscan art. They played no important role in the basic stock of Villanovan decoration, the Etruscan Geometric style. As to the mythical narrative, it always remained a grecizing genre of art in Etruria. A degree of reluctance towards the continuous frieze as a form of composition was therefore felt for a long time to come in Etruscan painting, and the more this was so, the more significance beyond mere ornamentation attached to a representation. It seems that Etruscan art took much more naturally and with more lasting effects to the alternative, panel composition, which also reached Italy at the time of the mature Orientalizing style. The practice of completely free, unframed design was then still common on the more popular levels of Etruscan art. But in works aspiring to more international standards the new formal discipline now began to express itself, not only in friezes but also in figural representations enclosed by square or nearly-square fields. As figural compositions these representations have no precedent in Etruria; but as a basic device of formal order the square filled with figures can be regarded as no different, in essence, from the windowlike devices of the Villanovan urns or the popular 'metopic' decorations of the Subgeometric vases. It does not seem unreasonable for us to say that by adopting figural compositions in panel form Etruria in fact returned to a decorative principle long practiced in her domestic industries. This observation may at least partly explain why, for their effect on the future, the panel compositions proved perhaps the most consequential innovation of the Etruscan Orientalizing style.

As an early example of rare excellence, one may point to a pair of very ornate golden bracelets from the Regolini-Galassi Tomb, now in the Vatican,[9] which once belonged to the same lady who had owned the lion fibula discussed above. But the bracelets clearly were the more modern products, stylistically [39]. A rectangular system of geometric figures--meanders and open triangles--provides a firm frame in which the figural representations are narrowly fitted. The emphasis is on the latter; they fill the large, superimposed, vertical zones in the middle, while the geometric ornament only forms the marginal accompaniment. This distinction between figural representation and non-figural decoration is remarkable in itself. The fact that all representational fields render the same scene, in decorative repetition, must not blind us to their essentially independent character. For the first time we meet a figural composition in Etruscan art which is constructed like a modern picture: i.e., a representation framed on four sides and thereby set apart from all other elements. [p. 68]

Every field shows three dancing women holding each other's hands; trees appear in the intervals between the dancers.[10] The figures still face the observer, in a manner to which a Greek artist would have objected but which for a while was almost traditional in Etruria, as we know from the earlier dancers on the painted vase from Bisenzio [18].[11] Apart from this rather significant fact the style has changed, however. Details are no longer suppressed, and the women are clearly shown to wear long dresses and to have long locks of hair ending in a spiral curl on either shoulder, in the Phoenician fashion; moreover their feet are turned sideways, as an early Greek vase-painter might have drawn them in order to create a transition to the required pictorial view, the profile. From the surrounding abstract ornament these stylized representations stand out like small golden paintings, lush, appealing, and resplendent. Their soft style seems properly Etruscan; certainly it is not Greek. Yet I think that here, as with the contemporary Barberini ivories and other similar monuments, a Greek element was incorporated in their geometric, formal systematization; and in the case of the Regolini-Galassi bracelets, in particular, that a Greek reminiscence was reflected by the peculiar arrangement of closed representational compositions as a sequence of superimposed fields, as in a modern moving picture.

That is to say, the closed and rectangular, 'metopic' composition which eventually became the leading form of all western painting was then not entirely new. Yet its possibilities had been little explored in earlier art. In Egyptian art, because pictorial representations were almost always founded on base lines, frames around the figures were rarely shown and generally regarded with indifference, if used at all. The Asiatic arts were more frame-conscious and in this sense more geometric; but in their majority they cultivated the frieze and related oblong compositions, where the emphasis is on the horizontal lines above and below, and the lateral limitations often appear as no more than a matter of expediency. Beyond the Babylonian-Assyrian area, panel composition made its art-historical debut in Greek art,[12] and with this important development the bracelets from the Regolini-Galassi Tomb must be aligned. Rhodian gold reliefs and Peloponnesian bronzes with enclosed decorations offer the nearest examples. For the manner of stacking panels one above the other, along a vertical band, Greek, Peloponnesian counterparts can be cited.[13]

Therefore these bracelets acquire considerable symptomatic importance. The same dancing figures might conceivably form a continuous frieze. Actually the frieze was cut up, as it were, to form a series of rectangular pictures.[14] This trend points to the future, and at the same time revives an old Etruscan Geometric preference for decorative squares and near-squares. Likewise the iconography of this composition--dancers between trees--has a bearing on later Etruscan art. Before long we shall meet similar dancers between trees in the Archaic tomb paintings of Tarquinia. [p. 69]