Tomb of the Leopards

• 1. Introduction

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  The Tomb of the Leopards sits inside the Necropolis of Monterozzi, near the Italian city of Tarquinia, and it has not lost its power over visitors in roughly twenty-five centuries. Painted around 470-450 BC, it takes its name from two leopards facing each other above a lively banquet scene. D. H. Lawrence, who visited and wrote about it in his travel essays Sketches of Etruscan Places, called the walls "a dance of real delight." He felt he was not underground at all, but in what he described as "some gay chamber of the past." How did a sealed burial chamber become one of the best-preserved windows into Etruscan life? Who are the people at that feast, and what were they celebrating? And why do leopards, animals that never roamed Etruria, preside over the whole scene?

• 2. Why Leopards Underground

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  Leopards did not live in the Etruscan world. The animals depicted above the banquet scene were not part of the local ecosystem, and lions and leopards were creatures that Etruscans most likely rarely encountered firsthand. The same is true of the nearby Tomb of the Lionesses, which shows the pattern was a convention, not a record of nature. Scholars believe the forms arrived through Greek interpretations of hunting leopards that had been popularized in Egypt. By the first quarter of the fifth century BC, this imagery had filtered into Attic art and then into the hands of Etruscan painters. The subject matter of the entire tomb, the leopards included, reflects this Greek-Attic influence. The animals are guardians borrowed from a distant artistic tradition rather than creatures the painter had ever seen.

• 3. The Banquet Scene

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  Three elegantly dressed male-female couples recline at the heart of the painting, attended by two nude boys who carry serving implements. Scholars call this arrangement a conjugal symposium, meaning the feast includes both men and women as participants rather than segregating them. The women are shown with fair skin and the men with a darker complexion, following the same gender conventions found in Archaic Greece, Ancient Near East, and Ancient Egypt. That seating arrangement of three couples also prefigures the Roman triclinium, the formal dining layout that would come to define elite dining across the ancient Mediterranean. The identity of the women has itself been a subject of scholarly debate: some argued they were hetaira, or courtesans, while more recent scholars contend they were equal free women. One figure on the far-right couch holds up an egg, a symbol of regeneration, and other banqueters hold wreaths. The scene is most commonly read as a funerary banquet for the deceased, or a family meal marked on the anniversary of his death, and it carries a celebratory feeling that sets it apart from the more somber banquet scenes found in earlier Etruscan tombs.

• 4. Music and Procession

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  To the left and right of the central banquet, musicians and processional figures fill the remaining walls. On the right, a komos of wreathed figures and musicians approaches the feast. On the left, six musicians and gift bearers move in a statelier and more formal procession. The instruments they carry include an aulos and a chelys lyra, both of which appear regularly together in Etruscan banquet and funerary art. Because most such instruments were made of bone or wood, almost none have survived as physical objects. Painted scenes like this one constitute the primary record of what Etruscan musical culture actually looked like. One figure in the procession is thought to be a eulogizer, and the presence of a singer is consistent with other Etruscan tombs from this period. The processions on both sides are described as more markedly Archaic in style than the central banquet panel, and were executed by different artists from whoever painted the main feast.

• 5. Two Styles, One Room

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  The central banquet panel and the flanking processions were not the work of a single hand. The artist of the central section draws on trends in Greek art and marks a transition from Archaic to Early Classical style in Etruscan painting. The processions on the left and right remain more firmly Archaic and were painted by different artists. This division makes the tomb an unusually compact record of a moment when Etruscan art was moving between two eras. The banquet scene is set within what appears to be an outdoor space, surrounded by slender trees and vegetation, possibly beneath a canopy. The whole room is described as being so vivid with color that Lawrence felt the Etruscans of the sixth century before Christ still seemed to inhabit it, a people he called "vivid, life-accepting" who "must have lived with real fullness."

• 6. Discovery and Legacy

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  The tomb was discovered in 1875 and has since been recognized as one of the best-preserved murals of Tarquinia. Its particular reputation rests on what has been described as its lively coloring and its animated depictions rich with gestures. Lawrence's account in Sketches of Etruscan Places remains one of the most widely read responses to the painting, capturing the unusual sensation of standing in a burial chamber that reads entirely as a scene of living pleasure. The tomb stands within the Necropolis of Monterozzi, which continues to be studied as one of the principal sites for understanding Etruscan visual culture.