Sibbald A.T. - The English of Antiquity

THE Etruscans were a strong-limbed, broad-headed, industrious race, given to road-building, sewer-making, canal-digging and nature-taming generally. They were religious, too, commercial, manufacturing, keen of business, of course luxurious, not wholly unmindful of beauty, but preferring the strength and comfort that comes of a practical view of things: a people in the end whose hard-earned riches and long-tested mechanical science failed to save their political being when imperilled by an ambitious, warlike neighbour. Still, though subdued in the field, their arts and civil polity conquered the conquerors. For centuries they ruled the seas, and were the great wave-lords of antiquity. English in their maritime skill and force, they were like the English in many other habits and points of character, especially in their fondness for horse-racing and pugilistic encounters. Their origin is lost in the remotest antiquity of the East. Nevertheless their earliest civilization comes to us indubitably filtered through Egyptian and Assyrian sources.

Of all the old peoples of Italy that have made a mark in history, leaving an impress on modern civilization, none interest more than the Etruscans. They have left a written language which no one can read; stupendous public works which time fails to destroy; and a rich and suggestive art, frail often in material, but exquisite in workmanship, which the grave has preserved during a silence of nearly thirty centuries. Everywhere their cities crowned the most picturesque and impregnable mountain sites, rejoicing in varied views, pure air and excessive climbing, as greatly as modern towns delight in the easy access, heavy atmosphere and cramped scenery of the lowlands. Independently of other inducements, it is worth while to make the tour of the ancient cities of Etruria on account of the loveliness of their situations and the varied beauty of the landscape encircling them. Take for instance Volterra, set on high, overlooking the Mediterranean, the fertile Pisan territory, and a Plutonic tract of country at its feet, split and warped into savage fury of chasm and nakedness by internal fires. Its situation marks it finally for a doom as tragic as that of the cities of the Plain; indeed, one more dramatic – for it will be thrown down from its towering height into a bottomless quicksand below, which is swallowing in immense mouthfuls the mountain on which it stands.

Orvieto is as firmly as Volterra is loosely placed, on its foundation of rock. Following the circuit of the perpendicular precipice on which the town stands, its walls rise many hundred feet in parts, in as straight a

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line as if all built up of masonry. Perugia struggles in a vagabond manner along the crests of several hills or terraces, evincing a desire to get into the rich valleys below. Chiusi, with a glorious outlook over two lakes, girt around with a green swell of mountains, whose olive-grounds and vineyards rise and fall until they dash their fragrance against its ugly walls, shows like a dark spot in the bountiful nature around it. The kingly virtues of Porsenna are as much lost sight of in his now beggarly capital as is his famous tomb, once a wonder of the world.

The Maremma is a vast cemetery of Etruscan cities, but disease and desolation have replaced their once vigorous commercial life. Scarcely a spadeful of earth can be turned up without disturbing the dust of their inhabitants. The same picturesque choice of sites of towns obtains here as elsewhere. Cortona is the queen of them all, though Citta-della-Pieve, garlanded with oak and chesnut forests, looks on a landscape not so diversified, but in some details more exquisitely lovely.

I wish I could credit the founders of Etruscan cities with a love of the beautiful in nature in regard to the situations they selected. But they had no greater liking this way than modern Italians. Sanitary considerations and personal security led them up the hills to live and to girt themselves around with solid walls. The plains were damp and unwholesome before they were drained and planted. Still, in “locating” themselves as they did, and in disposing their walls and gateways, they must have obeyed a latent instinct of beauty even in a land where nature is so bountiful that it is difficult to go amiss in laying the foundations either of a house or a town. We find in them all a varied succession of surprising views which could scarcely be more completely pleasurable had the sites of their cities been specially chosen with this end.

In treating of Etruscan art it is not necessary to specify its antiquarian distinctions, but only its general characteristics. The best way to get at these is to study the contents of the tombs. They were excavated and built much after the plan of the dwellings of the living, with a similar disposition of chambers or halls, corresponding to the room required for the dead, except when they took the form of mausoleums or monuments, and were made immense labyrinthian structures, whose ruins now seem more the work of nature than of man. Interiorly they were lavishly decorated with painting and sculpture in relief on the walls and ceilings. When first opened, these decorations are quite fresh and perfect. After an experience of the ghastly relics of modern sepulchres, it is with pleased astonishment one enters for the first time an Etruscan house of the dead. If it be a sepulchre hitherto undisturbed, the visitor finds himself, or he can easily so imagine, in the presence of the original proprietors. The apartments opening one into another have a look of domestic life, while the ornamentation is not confined to mythological or symbolical subjects; but is intermingled with scenes of social festivity, games, picnics, races, theatrical exhibitions, and whatever they

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enjoyed in their every-day world; thus indicating that they fancied they were entering upon a new life corresponding in many particulars with their old. It is another form of the Indian notion of new and better hunting-grounds in the land of the Great Spirit. But the good or evil past had much to do in their minds with the reception that awaited them. Guardian genii, effigies of the avengers of wrong, protectors of the good, symbols of immortality, occult doctrines put into pictorial life, these looked down on them from carved roofs and frescoed walls, which were further secured from wanton sacrilege at the hands of the living by figures of monstrous serpents and demon heads, or the snake-entwined visage of the terrible Medusa. There was so much of value to tempt the cupidity of even the heirs in the tombs of the wealthy, that it was necessary to render them awful as well as sacred to the common imagination. Indeed, there is room for believing that, while in some instances deposits of jewels and other costly objects were made in compliance with the religious customs, they were afterwards covertly withdrawn by means of a secret entrance known only to the persons interested, if not of the family itself; perhaps left expressly by conscience-hardened workmen for the sake of plunder. But, as enough has been already secured by modern excavators to stock the principal museums of Europe, it proves that the practice of burying treasures of art was in general respected among the old Etruscans, who, doubtless thinking to need them again, wished to have them within their ghostly reach.

If the tomb be anterior to the Roman fashion of burning the corpses, we often find the noble lady or great officer laid out in state on bronze biers and funeral couches, looking as in life, with their jewellery or armour on them, as prompt, to all appearance, for the pursuits of love or war as ever. Their favourite furniture, vases, bronzes, articles of toilet, and sometimes children’s toys – the pet dolls and engraved primers – are placed about them ready for instant use. A few minutes’ exposure to the air reduces the bodies to dust; but the records of their personal tastes and habits remain.

The family scene of some of the sepulchres is made more real by rows of portrait statues in various attitudes placed on urns or sarcophagi, and arranged in order around the chamber, very much after the manner of a fashionable reception. In those days, guests more often reclined at banquets than sat upright. We see them, therefore, commonly in that position; and if husband and wife, decorously embracing or caressing, the arm of the man thrown lovingly over the shoulder of the partner of his home. Each is draped as in life, wearing their usual ornaments and insignia of rank. The base, which contains the ashes or bodies, is elaborately sculptured, sometimes in full relief, with mythological or historical scenes, or symbols and events relating to the deceased persons. The oldest and most common of these cinerary urns are coarsely

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painted and modelled in terra-cotta, but the finer are done in marble or alabaster, under Grecian influence, with occasional gilding.

These tombs are the libraries and museums of Etruscan history. Without them, not only would there have been important gaps in the annals of the people, and, indeed, all real knowledge of their life lost, but modern art would also have missed its most graceful and precious models and patterns in bronze, jewellery, and plastic materials in general. These offer a most needed contrast to the graceless, clumsy, meaningless, or vicious styles of ornament which prevailed after the loss of mediæval art, and before a revival of the knowledge of the pure forms of the antique Grecian taught us what beauty really is. We may estimate the extent to which the manufacture of artistic objects was carried by this people by the fact that from the small town of Volsinium, the modern Bolsena, Flavius Flaccus carried off to Rome 2,000 bronze statues. It is believed by many that the Etruscans were superior to the Greeks in the working of bronze, or anticipated them in perfecting it and the making of fictile vases. Each nation possessed a consummate art of its own, the origin of which in either was equally archaic and rude, while in time both styles in Italy became so intermingled that it requires a practised eye to discriminate between them, especially after Greek colonies settled in Southern Italy and their artists were employed throughout the peninsula.

Etruscan art proper is as thoroughly characteristic and indigenous as is the Greek; but instead of a keen sense of beauty as its animating motive, there was a love of fact. It is essentially realistic, delighting in vigour and strength, and in telling its story plainly and forcibly, rather than with grace and elegance of expression. Before it was subjected to Greek influence, it was more or less heavy and exaggerated, with an unwitting tendency to the grotesque, faulty in detail, often coarse, but always expressive, emphatic and sincere. Ignoring the extreme principles of Greek selection, it takes more to common nature as its guide. Nevertheless, it has a lofty idealism, or, more properly speaking, creative faculty of its own, which, as we shall see in its best art, inspires its natural truth with a feeling of the sublime. This supernal mystical element, which it has always exhibited, comes of the Oriental blood of the race. Grecian art is poetry; Etruscan, eloquence. Homer inspires both; but the difference between them in rendering the same thought is very obvious. There was an essential distinction in their ideas of death and the future life, as interpreted by their sepulchral art.

Apparently the Greek was so absorbed in his sensuous enjoyment, or so shaken in his earlier faiths by the varied teachings of his schools of philosophy, that he formed no very precise notions of his condition after death. In its most spiritual aspect it was vague and shadowy, very beautiful and poetical in the interior sense of some of his myths, but lacking the exhortative and punitive character of the more fixed and

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sterner Egyptian and Etruscan dogmas. Respect for the gods, beauty, heroism, enjoyment, leaving the hereafter to expound itself, or viewing it fancifully; these were in the main the sentiments and feelings at the bottom of Greek theology.

But the Etruscan was far more practical and positive, notwithstanding the large admixture of Oriental mysticism in his belief. Indeed this positiveness may be traced back to a strong element of unquestioning faith in Asiatic ancestors, whose imaginations were extremely susceptible to the spiritual influences of unseen powers, and were also opposed to the pantheistic ideas of the more intellectual Greeks. None had it stronger than the Persians, and Jews. Descending from them, it rooted itself deeply in the creeds of Christendom – firmest and severest in Protestantism. As all know, whenever it has come in collision with science, religion is apt to require the latter to give way, or be denounced as heretical.

In this connection it is interesting to note how far the Etruscan idea of the future coincides with Christian ethics.

The joyous reliance on his fancy which contented his neighbour, evidently did not satisfy the conscience of the Etruscan. Like the more northern races, whose harshest doctrines find speech in the diabolism of Calvinistic theology, he, too, must have a positive, material hell, with suitable demons, but with the special and noteworthy difference that his final doom was not a question of faith only, but of works. His good and evil deeds were accurately weighed by the infallible judges, and he was sentenced accordingly. Etruscan tomb-sculpture is much taken up by these solemn scenes. At the door leading to eternal torment sits an expectant fiend, and directly opposite is the entrance to the regions of happiness, guarded by a good angel. These await the decision of the fate of the soul on trial, which is attended by the good and evil genii, supposed to be ever present with the living.

The demonism of Etruria is sterner and less mystical than the Egyptian, although not as frightful as that of mediæval Christendom. Images of terror, however, are common, and made as ugly and repulsive as those of an opposite character are made handsome and attractive. Still Typhon, one of the angels of death, is a beauty in comparison with his more modern namesake, and even big-eared, heavy-limbed Vulcan, with his fatal hammer, is mild and pleasing beside Spinello’s Beelzebub. Their most successful attempts at ferocious ugliness arrive only at a grotesque exaggeration of the negro physiognomy in a form of the ordinary human shape. Serpents figure largely in these paintings, but as often in a good as a bad sense, as the symbol of eternity. The important truth that we find in them is the recognition of an immediate judgment passed on the soul after death, and the substantiality of the rewards or punishment awaiting it.

The Etruscans were eminently a domestic people of warm, social

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affections. Woman evidently was held in equal esteem to man. Everywhere she shares his cares and pleasures. The position of wife is one of the highest honour and influence, subordinate to no accomplished class of courtesans as in Greece, nor accompanied by the great laxity of manners that at a subsequent period defiled Rome. Indeed, Etruscan art is singularly pure and serious, except as it borrowed from foreign sources its dissolute Bacchic rites. But these were never very popular. Their artists prefer exhibiting the natural sentiments and emotions with a touching simplicity of positive treatment. A favourite subject was the death-parting of families. Husband or wife, lover or friend, embrace or shake hands tenderly, the dying with an elevated expression of resignation and hope, the survivors with a quiet grief that bespeaks a conviction of future reunion. Children weep around, or are held to the dying lips to take a last kiss; the pet dog watches sympathetically the sorrowful scene; hired mourners perform their functions, and the whole spectacle is serious and impressive. The dignified courtesy manifested by the principals in these farewells shows that no doctrinal despair poisoned their latest hour on earth, but rather that they looked upon the separation as one does a call to a necessary journey. A spirit horse for the man, or a chariot for the woman, with winged attendants, are always depicted quietly waiting outside the house until their services are needed for the journey to the new country. If death has already occurred, their torches are reversed. The Greeks loved to look on death in a seriously beautiful shape, like Endymion sleeping, or Hylas borne off by water-nymphs. They sought to disguise to themselves its painful and dismal features. Death was best regarded as a sweet slumber or a delightsome ravishment. An Etruscan shielded his senses by no such poetical expedients. He felt it was a real journey to a new life, and so represented it for good or bad on the evidence of his actual character. His artistic creations peopling the world which opened itself to his dying view were not merely men deified and super-sensuous, but a distinct supernal race with attributes corresponding to their spiritual functions. What his devils were we have seen; his genii, furies, and other celestial powers were grand in idea, often sublime in creation, and, as well as he knew to make them, beautiful; more elevated in conception and functions than those of the Grecian mythology; fit precursors of the angels and archangels of Giotto, Orcagna and Luca Signorelli. In truth mediæval art had but little to do to adjust this phase of the Etruscan to its own purpose. The infant Jupiter in the arms of his nurse, as seen in the Campagna bas-reliefs, is the legitimate model in motive and grouping of subsequent Madonnas and Bambinos. But the most striking of their supernal creations are the two so-called female furies which guard the portal of the principal sarcophagus of the Volunni sepulchre near Perugia.

The contents of this family vault merit attention because of their pure

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Etruscan character and feeling in the best time of their art, when its native strength was tempered by the Grecian sense of the beautiful. Several generations of the Volunni are found deposited here in elegant urns, all admirable as art, but especially the two that face the visitor as he enters the principal chamber. One contains the ashes of the chief of his family, the other, the remains of a lady of the same name of high distinction. Both these monuments are remarkable for extreme simplicity, purity of style, breadth of design, and refined adaptation to their honoured purpose. The man lies in a semi-upright posture, with head upraised on a richly draped couch. He is not dead, as we moderns persist in representing our departed friends, as if we were disbelievers in the doctrine of immortality, leaving on the spectator’s mind only a disagreeable impression of material dissolution; nor does he sleep, as the mediævalists in better taste and feeling represent their dead, while calmly waiting the universal resurrection; but, with greater truth than either, he lives.

This characteristic vitality of the Etruscan effigies is worthy of observation in two respects. First, it displays the skill of their artists in rendering individual likeness – making their figures natural without diminishing aught of the solemnity of their purpose. They are the veritable persons they represent, receiving us moderns with the same polite dignity which would have distinguished them had our call been two thousand years earlier, while they were still in the flesh. Secondly, we learn from it that they believed their dead entered at once on a new life without any intermediate sleep or purgatorial probation. I interpret the Etruscan in his tomb to mean that he still regarded himself in all respects as his old identical earthly self called to a new part in life, but retaining every original characteristic and experience, and holding that future changes in him must be the result of processes of growth and development in accordance with laws analogous to those that regulated the formation of his personality on earth. Meantime he remains himself and none other at our gracious service, if I read the lesson in stone aright. It seems to me that the Pagan Etruscan recognised this vital principle of creation more decidedly, or at all events more practically, than we Christians do. They may have sensualized their faith in immortality overmuch by their funeral feasts, games, and music, or other exhibitions of their enjoyment of the good things of life, with the evident expectation of something corresponding to these pleasures and honours hereafter. But, as the moral qualities of the departed were made the test of his spiritual condition, the lesson was a salutary and hopeful one. The base of the chief monument of the Volunni is as completely a spiritualized motive in art of this sort as exists, uniting consummate simplicity of treatment to a sublimity of character, excelled only in this respect by Blake’s design of Death’s Door, which is the highest conception in the most chaste and suggestive form that the Christian

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mind has as yet achieved to embody its idea of eternal life. The figures do not so much express the new birth as the mysteries attending it. On each side of the door, which represents the passage from the tomb to the life beyond, sits a colossal, winged, female figure, in whom the nobility of both sexes is harmoniously united, devoid of any sexual feeling proper, chastely draped, wearing sandals, a burning torch uplifted in one hand, the other slightly turned towards the door, and with an expression that seems to penetrate the secrets of eternity. I say colossal figures, though, in reality, they are very small, but so grand is their treatment that nothing actually colossal as to size excels the impression they make of supernal force and functions. They are in a sitting attitude with the feet drawn up and crossed; but the artist has succeeded in giving them a self-supporting look, and also of taking away from the spectator the feeling that they could need any material support. As they will they are in rest or motion. This is a real sublimity of art, because it diverts the mind from thought of material laws to sole cognizance of its loftiest spiritual functions. In this subtle superiority of spirit over matter, these figures, perhaps, surpass the sculptures of Michael Angelo, and in other respects are akin to his extraordinary power, devoid of the physical exaggeration which obtains in so much of his work, but which further stamps him as a genuine descendant of ancient Etruscan masters now unknown to us by name. Even with his finest symbolical statues, Night and Day, it is difficult on first view, to get rid of an unwelcome sense of weight, size and solidity, though this finally disappears as their full meaning and nobleness flow into the mind. The superiority of their Etruscan prototypes is manifest at once from the fact that they suggest nothing below the standard of their conception. We feel the trembling awe of the four shadowy figures, now dimly seen issuing from the tomb with an anxious, inquiring look at the mystical guardians of the gates of Eternity. Modern learning calls them Furies. Their countenances, nevertheless, are benevolent and inviting. If we meet no more unkindly faces than theirs on being ushered into the other life, it will be a desirable welcome.

The monument of the lady is less elaborate, but as finely treated in its way. A beautiful head of Medusa on a panel is the sole ornament of the base of the urn, the cornice of which, like the others, contains obituary inscriptions. A handsome matron in her prime is seated on the top in a curule chair. She is profusely draped, the right arm, however, being bare and upraised, and the hand with unconscious action lightly touching her shoulder, as she earnestly listens, and looks a little forward and downwards. One fancies her a judge; of a surety, one accustomed to be obeyed, but still just and gracious, and in every sense a lady.

Etruscan women were trusted housekeepers. They sat at the head of the table and kept the keys, except those of the wine-cellars. They had greater social freedom, and were more eligible to public posts

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than are their English sisters, whom they so much resemble in their domestic habits. One of the female ancestors of Mæcenas had a military command. There is nothing unreasonable, therefore, in believing that the distinguished lady of the Volunni sepulchre once held an important office of state – a supposition which seems the more plausible from the masculine pose of the right hand on the knee, which is authoritative in movement and indicative of firmness and decision. It does not detract at all from the feminine grace and beauty of the statue, but rather adds dignity and character to it. As an art motive, this monument is as effective and suggestive as Buonarotti’s “Duke Juliano,” misnamed Lorenzo.

The miniature winged genii, modelled in terra-cotta, attached to the lamp hung from the roof of the tomb, are graceful and appropriate conceptions, on a par in sentiment with Fra Angelico’s guiding angels in his “Last Judgment.” A spiritual, almost ecstatic element, akin to his, is sometimes to be met with in the best specimens of genuine Etruscan art. It is not to be confounded with the Grecian beautiful, for it is the result of a higher clairvoyance of the imagination into spiritual life. It seems strange at first thought that such a lofty mystic element should be found in the art of a people whose chief attributes of their supreme good or god were strength, riches, wisdom – not love; not even admitting into their triad of divine credentials, like the Greeks, beauty, but taking the same materialized and practical view of the purposes of life that the English race does under the specious term “common sense.” But through their grosser understanding of things there is ever to be detected the spiritual light which discloses their Oriental origin, purged of the worst shapes of Asiatic superstition and mysticism, manifesting itself in impressive and intelligible speech after 2,000 years of silence in Pagan graves. The greatest puzzle of Etruscan art is the extraordinary bronze found at Arezzo, but now in the Ufizzi Gallery, called, in antiquarian despair of interpretation, the Chimera. It has the body of a lion, with the head of a goat growing out of its back, poisoned by the bite of a serpent that forms the tail of the compound beast, whose entire body is showing the fatal effects of the venom.

Andrew T. Sibbald.

Footnotes