Etruscan art

• 1. Introduction

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  Etruscan art came from a civilization that ruled central Italy between the 10th and 1st centuries BC, and almost everything we have of it was pulled from tombs. The great majority of survivals came from those tombs, crammed with sarcophagi, grave goods, and broken terracotta. From around 750 BC, Greek art poured in and reshaped Etruscan taste, yet the work always kept its own character. Here is the strange part. The Etruscans controlled some of the finest marble in Italy, including Carrara, and barely touched it. They poured their genius into clay and bronze instead. Why did a people so skilled with stone refuse to carve it? Why was their afterlife so bleak that it shaped nearly every image they made? And how did a tradition known mostly through its graves come to preserve something the Greeks themselves let vanish?

• 2. Buried Genius

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  Etruscan tombs housed the remains of whole lineages and served as sites for recurrent family rituals. Because nearly everything we have was dug out of them, what survives is dominated by religion and the funerary cult, whether or not that fairly represents Etruscan art as a whole. The afterlife the Etruscans imagined was negative. That outlook stood in sharp contrast to ancient Egypt, where the next life simply continued the earthly one, and to Greece, where people felt confident relations with their gods. Roman interest in Etruscan religion centred on divination and reading the will of the gods, rather than the gods themselves, which may have distorted what came down to us. The cemeteries themselves are the map of this world. Excavations at Cerveteri, Tarquinia, Populonia, Orvieto, Vetulonia, and Norchia have yielded most of what we know. At Cerveteri, some painted tombs, now emptied of their contents, can still be entered and viewed.

• 3. The Clay Masters

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  Figurative sculpture in terracotta was a particular strength, especially life-size work on sarcophagi and temples. The Etruscans were accomplished sculptors in terracotta, both small and monumental, as well as in bronze and alabaster, yet they produced very little in stone, unlike the Greeks and Romans. Terracotta sculptures from temples have nearly all had to be reconstructed from a mass of fragments. The painted terracotta Apollo of Veii, made between 510 and 500 BC, shows the mastery behind these large pieces. It came from the temple at Portanaccio and is attributed to a sculptor named Vulca. Its style recalls the Greek Kroisos Kouros, but placing statues along a temple roof line was an original Etruscan idea. The Sarcophagus of the Spouses, from late 6th century BC Cerveteri, gives the form its most famous face, with a near life-size couple reclining together. A similar one survives in the Louvre, while this example sits in the National Etruscan Museum. From the end of the 4th century BC, evidence of physiognomic portraits begins to appear, and Etruscan portraiture grew more realistic.

• 4. Lost Walls Recovered

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  Etruscan wall paintings that survive are almost all tomb frescoes, mainly at Tarquinia, dating from roughly 670 BC to 200 BC. Their peak fell between about 520 and 440 BC. The Greeks very rarely painted their own tombs in this period, with rare exceptions such as the Tomb of the Diver in Paestum and the Macedonian royal tombs at Vergina. The whole tradition of Greek wall and panel painting, arguably the art Greek contemporaries prized most, is almost entirely lost. That loss gives the Etruscan tradition an added importance, even where it does not match the best Greek masters. The frescoes were made by applying paint to fresh plaster, so the image became part of the wall as the plaster dried. Colours came from ground-up minerals mixed into the paint, and fine brushes were made of animal hair. From the mid 4th century BC, chiaroscuro modelling began to suggest depth and volume. Feasting and symposium scenes are common, alongside sport, hunting, and mythological subjects borrowed from the Greeks. The figures rarely obey proportion. Surviving frescoes frequently show animals or men out of scale, and the concept of proportion does not appear in them at all.

• 5. Black Clay And Borrowed Vases

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  Bucchero ware was the early and native style of fine Etruscan pottery, burnished, unglazed, and rendered black in a reducing kiln deprived of oxygen. It grew out of pottery techniques from the Villanovan period and was often decorated with white lines. In time it may have become a kind of heritage style, kept especially for tomb wares. Etruscan vase painting tells a different story of borrowing. Produced from the 7th through the 4th centuries BC, it followed Greek vase painting closely, especially the trends of Athens, but lagged by some decades. The Etruscans used the same techniques, largely the same shapes, and both the black-figure and later red-figure methods. Beyond making their own, the Etruscans were the main export market for Greek pottery outside Greece. Some Greek painters probably moved to Etruria, where richly painted vases were a standard part of grave inventories. It has been suggested that many elaborately painted vases were bought specifically for burial, a cheaper substitute for silver and bronze vessels, and less likely to attract robbers.

• 6. Mastery In Bronze

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  Etruscan cast-bronze sculpture was renowned and widely exported, though few large examples survive, because the metal was too valuable and was later recycled. According to Pliny, the Romans looted 2,000 bronze statues from the city of Volsinii alone after capturing it. The Monteleone chariot stands as one of the finest examples of large bronzework, the best-preserved and most complete to survive. Beyond casting, Etruscan craftsmen excelled at engraving bronze with complex linear images, their lines filled with a white material to make them stand out. That technique went mostly onto the round backs of polished bronze mirrors and the sides of cistae. A major centre for cista manufacture was Praeneste, an Italic-speaking town inside the Etruscan cultural sphere, somewhat like early Rome. In modern museums the white filling is gone and the surfaces have degraded, so these pieces read far more faintly than they once did. The Chimera of Arezzo, dated 400 BC, now in Florence, and the Mars of Todi of the same year in the Vatican show how far the bronze tradition reached.

• 7. Faces For The Dead

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  The Etruscans excelled in portraying humans, and throughout their history they practised both cremation and inhumation. Cinerary urns and sarcophagi have turned up together in the same tomb, proving both rites ran side by side across generations. In the 7th century they began depicting human heads on canopic urns. When they started burying their dead in the late 6th century, they used terracotta sarcophagi showing the deceased reclining on the lid, alone or with a spouse. Placing figures on the lid was an Etruscan invention, one the Romans later copied. The Hellenistic period changed the scale of this craft. Funerary urns were generally made in two pieces, the lid often showing a banqueting figure and the front carved in relief. In and around Chiusi in Northern Etruria, terracotta urns were mass-produced from clay. The work did not require skilled artists, and much of what remains is mediocre, made en masse. Yet the colours offer a clue, since the choices used changed over time and help with dating. A finer note survives at the other end, the Sarcophagus of Seianti Hanunia Tlesnasa, made between 150 and 140 BC and now in the British Museum.

• 8. Five Stages Of A Vanishing

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  The Villanovan period, from 900 to 700 BC, already shows the Etruscan emphasis on funerary art, with impasto pottery shaped as hut urns and small bronze fittings. The Etruscans emerged from this Villanovan culture. During the Orientalising period, from 700 to 575 BC, foreign trade drew imports of Greek and Near Eastern art, with palmettes and the foreign lion entering the visual vocabulary. The wealthy upper class began filling large tombs with grave goods, and a Greek-influenced painted pottery appeared, drawing more from Corinth than Athens until 600. The Archaic period, from 575 to 480 BC, brought the Etruscan temple with its brightly painted terracotta and produced much of the finest Etruscan art. The Persian conquest of Ionia in 546 sent Greek artist refugees into Southern Etruria. In the Classical period, from 480 to 300 BC, the Etruscans peaked economically, then saw Rome pick off their cities one by one, with Veii conquered around 396 BC. By the Hellenistic phase, from 300 to 50 BC, the cities were absorbed into Rome, the last painted vases came early, and large painted tombs ended in the 2nd century. After that, telling Etruscan from Roman became hard to judge.