The first stage of development is represented by the Tomba Campana at Veii. This tomb was discovered in 1843, and a good description of it is given by Canina in Antica Città di Veii (1847), but it has never been published with adequate illustrations. A new and thorough treatment of the ornamentation and motives of its pictures is given in a Leipzig dissertation by Andreas Rumpf (Die Wandmalereien in Veii, 1915). But this, too, is without illustrations. The central doorway of the back wall is provided with an ornamental painted border and flanked by paintings in yellow, grey, and red on a blue ground. The work is primitive. The ornamentation is akin to that of Greek vase-painting of the seventh century B.C. The pictures are purely decorative: animals and fabulous animals such as lion, sphinx, deer, and panther fill the surface side by side with lotus-flowers and palmettes. There is no narrative element. To be sure, Weege, like others before him, has tried to construe one of the pictures (fig. 1) into a mythological scene: the boy on the horse, which is led by the bridle by a man walking behind, is thought to be a dead man on his way to Hades, and the man with the loin-cloth, carrying an axe over his shoulder, to the left in front of the horse, to be the Etruscan death-god and conductor of souls, Charun, to whom we shall return later. Weege also thinks that the animal crouching on the back of the horse is a hunting leopard. But, apart from the rather puzzling question, what the hunting leopard has to do with the ride to Hades, the animal is not a hunting leopard at all: it is a feline animal with a short tail, while the hunting leopard has a long tail. The animal was only placed there to fill up the space, thus illustrating the poverty of ideas in these pictures. Moreover, as the man with the axe is not characterized as Charun, either by colour or by dress, it seems unnecessary to force a mythological explanation. The human figures in this picture, as in the Melian vases of the seventh century B.C., are purely decorative: they ride when the space above the back of the horse has to be filled in, and they walk when a long, narrow field makes the human figure more appropriate than a seated or walking animal as a means of filling the space. The absurd alternation of colours within the same figure, every single animal being coloured in compartments of yellow and red and having alternately red and yellow legs, affords a good instance of purely decorative conception and suggests the idea of woven tapestry. Hence it is an all but obvious conclusion to imagine, as prototype of this painting, some magnificently coloured wall-tapestry imported into Etruria in the seventh century B.C. from Crete or one of the islands in the Aegean Sea, to the vase-paintings of which the ornamentation of the tomb shows close affinity.4 Thus there is in these pictures neither any action nor any reference to death or the tomb. They serve as a decorative ornamentation of the tomb-chamber, like the six painted shields in the inner chamber of the tomb, which suggest those ‘brass circles’ mentioned by Livy (VIII, 20, 8) as common votive offerings in early Rome. We can imagine the home of a rich Etruscan in the seventh century decorated with similar frescoes: painted tapestries and painted shields as substitutes for real wall-tapestries and metal shields.5 The Tomba Campana is the most impressive but not the only representative of this earliest class of tombs, in the ornamentation of which only decorative considerations have been kept in view. Tombs at Cosa, Chiusi, Magliano, and Caere contain still more primitive paintings of the same sort, but they are badly preserved and still more imperfectly described.6
The next stage in the development is represented by the Tomba dei Tori at Corneto, discovered in 1892 and admirably published by G. Körte in Antike Denkmäler.7 The back wall of the main chamber in this tomb has two doors, and it is between these that the one large figure painting is placed, again in such a way as to suggest a tapestry stretched on the wall (fig. 2). But now the picture has a narrative content, inasmuch as a scene from the Greek cycle of myths is depicted: Achilles watches for the Trojan prince Troilus at a well. Achilles, to the left, wears a crested Corinthian helmet, sword, greaves, and red loin-cloth. Troilus is naked and only decorated with armlets and elegant shoes. He wears his hair long, according to Ionic fashion, and in his hand he carries a goad (kentron). This is, as a rule, only used when two horses are ridden, and the drawing shows traces of double contours near the head and the right leg of the horse; it is probable, therefore, that two horses were originally planned. In this picture also, the proportions of man and horse are impossible, but progress is perceptible in the monochromatic treatment of the body and legs of the horse. On the other hand, the old manner of painting in stripes or compartments is still retained in the running chimera in the pediment above; it also lingers for a very long time in the pedimental figures of the following period. The style is Ionic of the first half of the sixth century B.C. A truly Ionian monster, created under Oriental influence, is the human-faced bull in the pediment above the door, one of the two bulls from which the tomb derives its name, and which are omitted here because of the obscene groups on either side of them. Other decorative details point to Cyrene and Egypt, especially the characteristic frieze of lotuses and pomegranates, which corresponds with the Cyrenaic vases of the sixth century B.C., and the stylized flower-bed under the belly of the horse, which has its origin in Egyptian and its parallels in Phoenician and in orientalizing Greek art.8 In this tomb the painting is not executed al fresco but in a yellowish-white pigment which unfortunately scales off in large flakes.
Thus in the Tomba dei Tori, besides a decorative treatment of the wall surface with friezes, we have a main picture with a mythological subject, painted in the Greek spirit and perhaps actually executed by a Greek mural painter. We do not find even the slightest allusion to death or entombment, or the least trace of any Etruscan characteristics. The inscription in the large frieze is of interest because it shows the Etruscan language in its archaic form, with a rich vocalization which must have made it much more euphonious than the language spoken later, in the fourth or following centuries. The inscription runs: ‘arnth spuriana s[uth]il hece ce fariceka,’ and means, ‘Aruns Spurinna monumentum sepulcrale ... condidit, adornavit,’ or the like.9
A considerable group of Etruscan tomb-paintings, dating from the middle of the sixth century, show in their composition close connexion with Ionic vase-painting, especially with the so-called Caeretan hydriae, while their main pictures tell us something about the Etruscans themselves and their conceptions of Life and Death and Eternity. Only in the animal friezes beneath the painted roof-supports does the old decorative conception of the human and animal figure still linger; elsewhere the pictures now have content and meaning.
We may take the Tomba degli Auguri in Corneto, discovered in 1878, as our starting-point. There are coloured drawings as well as full-sized facsimiles of its pictures in the Helbig Museum.
The middle of the back wall of this tomb is occupied by a painted door flanked by two men in white chitons and short black cloaks lined with red; on their feet are peaked shoes. They raise both arms in a gesture of lament, ‘beating their foreheads’ as the ancient texts have it.10 With this scene (fig. 3) the key-note is struck: the living stand at the door of the tomb and moan for the dead, a subject specially appropriate to the decoration of the walls of a tomb.
The scenes on the main walls are also associated with the funeral ceremonies. On the right-hand main wall (fig. 4) a boy is seen to the left in a white tunic with black dots, carrying a stool and raising one arm and his face to a man who, dressed in a red and brown cloak and brown shoes, seems to beckon to the boy with his right hand, gesticulating at the same time with his left. Between them a small figure is seated who reminds one of the small boys in the Greek tomb reliefs ‘weeping on their cold knees’. To the right is another man clad in chiton and mantle, gesticulating violently with his left hand, and carrying a crook in his right. Above him, and above the excited man to the right, runs the inscription: ‘Tevarath’, probably meaning umpire (βραβευτής, ἀγωνοθέτης). For now follow representations of athletic contests: two wrestlers engaging in the initial grips, the elder bearded, the younger beardless: between them are seen the prizes—metal bowls; these are supposed to be arranged in the background, but owing to the lack of perspective they seem to be in the way of the combatants. This scene throws light on the preceding one: the man with the crook is evidently not an augur, as originally conjectured because of the staff and the flying birds, but the umpire who has to see that no unfair tricks are used; the other man is the spectator who has not yet seated himself, but beckons to the slave-boy to bring him the stool on which he will sit down like the Roman knights of later times who brought their own stools into the orchestra of the theatre. On the other hand, the mourning, crouching slave-boy seems to repeat the death lament of the back wall. Here already, then, we can observe the curious fragmentariness of the scenes in Etruscan art: they look as if they had been cut out of more comprehensive wholes, and put together without logical sequence. Clarity and unity are wanting. There is not the sustained composition or the pleasure in detailed narrative which are regular in Greek and Egyptian art. The Etruscan artist is content with hints and fragments.
To the right of the wrestlers, on the same main wall, is a particularly interesting representation: beneath the inscription Phersu, a man, dressed and masked like a punchinello, is leading a dog in a long leash which is wound round his antagonist and ends in a wooden collar round the neck of the dog. The ferocious blood-hound has inflicted bleeding wounds on the legs and thighs of the antagonist, and the antagonist, whose head is muffled in a sack, is vainly trying to disentangle himself from the leash and to hit the dog with a club. The explanation of this exciting and brutal contest, to which no parallel can be found in Greek art, is evidently that Phersu tries to make his dog bite his antagonist to death before the latter can get his head out of the sack and hit man and dog with his club. If the club-bearer succeeds in freeing himself from the sack and the dog, Phersu has only one chance: to run away. As runner, he has his legs stiffened with thongs, and in the much damaged fresco on the left main wall of the tomb we see the flight of Phersu (fig. 5) and (not reproduced) the club-bearer pursuing him. They are separated by a pair of pugilists who are boxing to the accompaniment of flutes, again an evidence of Etruscan indifference to incongruities in the composition. The escaping Phersu is painted alone in another tomb at Corneto, the Tomba del Pulcinella, the name of which is derived from this figure, but here he is placed beside a horseman (fig. 6), who represents the equestrian processions at funerals, to which we shall turn our attention later. The Tomba del Pulcinella, which was discovered in 1872, also dates from the sixth century B.C., and like the Tomb of the Augur it bears the stamp of Ionic art, especially in the receding contours of the crown of the head and in the plump forms of the body.
In these two sepulchres, then, we are confronted with representations which are associated not only with death and the tomb, but also with Etruscan local customs and national character. It is true that prize-fights and wrestling contests in connexion with obsequies are known in the Greek civilized world as well, for instance from the description in the Iliad of the funeral of Patroclus, and lingered for a long time especially in the outskirts of the Greek world—thus King Nicocles of Cyprus, in the beginning of the fourth century B.C., honoured his deceased father with choral dancing, athletic games, horse-races, trireme races.11 But we know of no example from Hellas of a fight like that between Phersu, accompanied by his blood-hound, and the muffled club-bearer: a fight the attraction of which, apart from its sanguinary character, evidently depended on the disparity of the weapons, as it did in the combat between gladiator and retiarius, the man armed with net and trident, in the Roman arenas of a later day.12
From the Greek author Athenaeus,13 we learn that the gladiatorial games originated in Campania, where they were introduced as entertainments at banquets, but that the Romans adopted them from the Etruscans. This tradition is confirmed by the facts that the name applied to the leader and trainer of the Roman gladiatorial school, lanista, is of Etruscan origin, and that the person, who even in late Rome14 dragged the corpses from the arena, the so-called Dispater, was furnished with satyr-ears and a mask with savage features, and carried a hammer, thus being a faithful copy of the Etruscan death-god, Charun.15 Moreover, as the Etruscans in the heyday of their glory, in the sixth and fifth centuries B.C., also ruled over Campania, it is most natural to attribute to them, and not to the Campanian Graeculi, the doubtful honour of being the actual ‘inventors’ of gladiatorial combats. These combats were a piquant and exciting substitute for actual human sacrifices in honour of the deceased noble or the gods, and as one of the parties was given a chance to save his life the practice may even be considered an advance in humanity.
Etruscan obscurity and inconsistency lead to curious confusion in the transition from mythological pictures to funereal scenes. Thus we find on the front of an early archaic Etruscan terracotta sarcophagus, now in the British Museum,16 a representation in relief, manifestly inspired by Greek mythology, of a battle scene with men and women as spectators; at one end of the sarcophagus, the left, leave-taking before marching out to battle; on the back, a banqueting-scene, evidently representing the funeral feast, since the relief on the other end of the sarcophagus shows four mourning women, two of them holding drinking-bowls in their hands.
A good idea of the different sort of athletic contests at the great Etruscan funerals is given by the wall-paintings in the Tomba delle Iscrizioni at Corneto, described and copied by Stackelberg and Kestner in 1827,17 and represented in the Ny Carlsberg Glyptotek by facsimiles and coloured drawings executed in 1907, after a chemical treatment of the plaster stucco, which brought out a number of details more plainly. The pictures are of the same period as those of the Augur tomb, and of similar style. The numerous inscriptions from which the tomb has derived its title seem to be mostly proper names. Each of the three wall-surfaces of this tomb, which contains only one chamber, has a false painted door in the middle. Of the first figures on the left main wall, two pugilists, only very little is preserved (fig. 7). They are contending, like the two wrestlers to the right of them, one of whom has lifted the other from the ground, to the accompaniment of the flute-player who is standing between the two groups. This and many other Etruscan paintings confirm the statement of Aristotle18 that the Etruscans made their boxers perform to the sound of the flute. Flute-playing was so popular that masters scourged their slaves and caused their cooks to work in the kitchen to the sound of the flute; and here again the Romans adopted the Etruscan tradition and gave their flute-players a recognized position in the community, as is shown by the amusing story about the strike of the Roman flute-players19: the flute-players left Rome in disgust and went in a body to Tibur, and the only device the Romans could think of was to make the excellent fellows drunk and cart them back to Rome, where the citizens made haste to confirm the ancient privileges of the flute-players and to add several new ones in order to make the awakening more pleasant.
On the other side of the false door the equestrian procession begins and is continued on the back wall to the central false door (fig. 8). Four young naked horsemen, some of them with staves in their hands, are received by a naked youth who carries a palm-branch over his shoulder. Apart from the nakedness, which must be attributed to the influence of Greek art, this equestrian procession is genuinely Etruscan. Appian derives the festive processions at triumphs and funerals from Etruscan prototypes, while Dionysius of Halicarnassus finds their prototypes in Hellas. But it cannot be denied that Dionysius’s description of these pompae in early Rome20 suggests Etruria: first came young horsemen, then foot-soldiers; after these, athletes with their sexual organs covered (in contrast to Greek custom), then the tripartite chorus of dancers in purple cloaks and bronze belts, then the grotesque dancers, flute-players, lyre-players, and thurifers, and finally the procession of chariots with the images of the gods. In the following pages we shall make acquaintance with all these groups in the Etruscan world of art.
The equestrian procession is presumably the preliminary to a horse-race. The nobles of Etruria were celebrated for their race-horses and often sent their chariot-teams to the games in early Rome.21 It is a characteristic fact that one of the few Etruscan words given by the Greek lexicographer Hesychius is no other than the word for horse, δάμνος according to the Greek version.22
To the right of the false door in the back wall three jolly dancers are seen: the first has his brow wreathed, carries a drinking-bowl in hand, and wears boots, red skirt, and blue neckerchief. The figure is shown by the flesh tint to be male, not female as stated in Carl Jacobsen’s catalogue. After him dances the flute-player, with red boots, blue loin-cloth, and red chaplet, and last comes a naked dancing youth with boots, necklace, and chaplet.
Dancers appear in a number of Etruscan tomb-paintings, and abandon themselves to their gambols with a frenzy which might seem incompatible with death and entombment. In the Tomba del Morto at Corneto, dating from the same period, we find traces of a pirouetting dancer close to the couch of the dead and the lamenting mourners; the dance was thus as important as the funeral lament (fig. 9). The finest representations of Etruscan mourning dancers are found in the Tomba del Triclinio, which dates from the beginning of the fifth century B.C.: the Ny Carlsberg Glyptotek contains several earlier, inferior facsimiles, made from the copies in the Museo Gregoriano and only touched up at Corneto by the painter Mariani;23 and some more recent ones carefully executed on the spot (fig. 10). On each wall three female and two male dancers are seen among trees; fillets and singing-birds appear in the foliage. The male dancers play on lyre and flute; the dancing-girls have castanets and the foremost a strap or chaplet with bells over her shoulder. Similar chaplets with bells are often seen hanging on the walls in pictures representing the symposia in honour of the dead (see below), and bear witness to the childish predilection of the Etruscans for gipsy-like noise and merry-making. The most beautiful dancing-girl, however, in any Etruscan tomb is the already mentioned ‘bella ballerina di Corneto’, discovered on a wall in the Tomba Francesca Giustiniani. We give this figure, which has never been reproduced, after the facsimile in the Ny Carlsberg Glyptotek which arrived there shortly before the death of Carl Jacobsen and gave him one of the last pleasures in his life (fig. 11).
When I examined the original in the tomb at Corneto I made the following notes: the drapery (chiton), which is ornamented with a pattern of dotted rosettes, is distinctly preserved from the hips down to the elegant fluttering edge. Much of the middle part of the body has been destroyed; the fluttering ends of the red scarf across the shoulders are visible to right and left. The upper part of the body and the shoulders are also well preserved. The right arm is raised, and visible from shoulder to elbow; a faint outline of the left arm is also visible.24 Of the head, the brow, the beginning of the nose, the ear, the green fluttering head-dress, the red hair with a loosened tress in front of the ear have been preserved. To the spectator the picture still conveys an impression of joy, of graceful movement, and of filmy fluttering draperies.
Here also we find Etruscan tradition continued on Roman soil, not only in the dancers of the festival processions, but in the tradition that Etruscan dancers, ludii or ludiones, were imported to Rome to dance at the great festivals. The Greeks compared the Roman reel to the Dionysiac ‘cancan’, σίκιννις, while its Roman name is tripudium; it was danced at every period of Roman history by the Salii, the ancient priesthood of the Roman war-god, on the chief festival of the god, March 19. According to Livy (vii. 2. 4-7) the earliest Roman poetry, the coarse Fescennines, originated in the text which accompanied the dance of the ludiones, and the fact that the dancers during the Fescennines daubed their faces with minium supports the theory of Etruscan influence, which also makes itself felt in the custom observed by the Roman triumphators, who in the earliest times daubed their whole bodies with minium. For we know that the Etruscans coated the images of their gods with minium at their festivals, and that the Romans gave the ancient terracotta statue of the Capitoline Jupiter a similar coat of ‘war paint’ at the high festivals, a task which it fell to the censors to superintend.25 The red minium was meant to heighten the natural red-brown hue of the men; it produced an artificial virile complexion, just as white lead and chalk served to emphasize the pale feminine hue.26
The primitive nature of the verses connected with these dances is shown by the song of the Salii, the burden of which is the five times repeated ‘triumpe’ (jump!) and the text of which runs: ‘Help us, lares, let not the evil disease fall upon any more of us, Mars! Be satisfied, cruel Mars! Jump on to the threshold. Cease jumping. Help us, Mars!’ At the triumphs also, ‘carmina incondita’, as Livy tells us, were sung (iv. 20. 2), and we venture to think that Etruscan poetry was no better than this, and that the disappearance of the texts, which accompanied the dances, is no great loss. Varro mentions tragedies in the Etruscan language, but they were undoubtedly versions of the Greek ones, even worse than those made for the Romans by Livius Andronicus. Apart from some religious and a little historical literature, and a number of recipes for the gathering of simples, capable of rousing the admiration of the Greeks for ‘the descendants of the Tyrrhenians, the people skilled in medical lore’,27 no tradition of any Etruscan intellectual life in writing or poetry has been handed down to posterity.
We pass on to the right main wall in the Tomba delle Iscrizioni (fig. 12) where dancers in a row with drinking-bowls in their hands alternate with servants carrying wine in large bowls. That the funeral dance was animated by free indulgence in wine is often exemplified in the tombs. In the Tomba delle Leonesse, named after the beasts of prey in the pediment, which are really hunting leopards, a red-brown lad to the right is dancing with a girl; to the left is a woman with castanets, and in the centre, flanked by a flute-player and a lyre-player, stands the wine-bowl wreathed with fresh leaves (fig. 13), ‘the wine-bowl filled with joy,’ in Xenophanes’ words. Evidently the Etruscans drank heavily to celebrate the memory of their dead, as Xenophon relates of another barbarian tribe, the Odrysians.28 To the right of the false door of the same main wall in the Tomba delle Iscrizioni (fig. 12), a man in a loin-cloth with a laurel branch in each hand is greeting another man, who carries chaplets and rests one leg on the cushions of a couch. Laurel branches constantly recur in the reliefs of the Etruscan cinerary urns, where the death lament round the bier of the deceased is reproduced, and it seems probable that laurel branches were carried round the house and used for wall decoration in the house of the deceased on the funeral day, for the purpose of purification. This decoration of the walls, then, would be the subject of our picture, together with the other preparations for the funeral, as shown by the paintings.29 Perhaps it was a general custom of the Etruscans to decorate their walls on festival days with laurel branches, just as the Egyptians decorated theirs with lotus, and this would often account for all the foliage which appears in the backgrounds of the paintings alternating with suspended chaplets, even where the action—the death lament (fig. 9) or the symposium—takes place indoors. In other cases, however, as in the Tomba dei Tori (fig. 2) and in the Tomba del Triclinio (fig. 10), there is no doubt that real trees and open-air scenes are represented, but even there the chaplets are often seen hanging—on the wall. Again a proof of the want of clarity in Etruscan art! Trees, however, in the background of scenes with figures are also found on South Italian vases of the same time, and thus seem to be a common Italic trait.
Contemporary with the group of the Tomba degli Auguri and the Tomba delle Iscrizioni is the Tomba del Barone, discovered at Corneto in 1827 and named, as already mentioned, after Baron Kestner. After the paintings of this tomb Stackelberg executed a fine water-colour, and Thürmer a number of drawings, now in the University of Strasburg. The style—both in the shape of the heads and in the treatment of the draperies—is still Ionic, but the proportions are more slender, probably owing to Chian or Attic influence.
Composition and technique are both unique in the paintings of this tomb. We content ourselves with reproducing one main wall, the left (fig. 14), where a black horse with light grey hoofs, mane, and tail, is led by a man wearing red boots and a brown mantle lined with green. He is speaking with one hand raised to a woman in a long grey chiton, a brown mantle lined with green, and a brown cap. Then comes a man with green boots leading a brown horse.
Similar quiet pictures are found on the other two walls of the tomb; on the back wall a man is standing with his arm round a young flute-player’s neck, and is greeted by a woman. The dress of the woman is Etruscan; the subjects also are probably Etruscan—the preparations for the pompa and the dancing feast. But everything breathes coolness and calm, and we miss the usual jollity. The technique is equally remarkable. It is not the usual fresco painting: experiments have been made with size-paint, that is, an attempt at painting in distemper on the plaster stucco covering the walls. The attempt has failed; the colour has run in large blotches.
These two characteristics of the artist of the Tomba del Barone are of great interest because the German archaeologist, Gustav Körte, has demonstrated the existence of marks made by Greek artisans on the walls of this tomb. It was not in Etruscan, but in Greek letters that the artist indicated the amount of his day’s work, with a view to his wages. The explanation, then, seems to be the following: a Greek decorator was charged with the task of ornamenting the walls of the tomb, and he did it, as far as the dresses are concerned, according to local tradition; but he experimented boldly with a new technical process, the success of which was prevented by the dampness of the rock-wall; and he composed his pictures with a grandeur of line and a tranquillity in execution which make one think of the pediment of a Greek temple. In the light of this it is easier to realize how much of the Etruscan temperament there really is in the other paintings, all Greek influence on style notwithstanding. It must be noted here that artisans’ marks are the only written evidence left by the decorative painters of Etruria; artists’ signatures are unknown, whether in Greek or in Etruscan. The Etruscan nobles, like the Roman later, evidently employed Greek artists, but granted them no social position.
In the next period the predominant stylistic influence is Attic. A whole group of tombs dates from about 500 B.C.: they are thus contemporaneous with the severe red-figured vase-paintings. Very Attic and, at the same time, like a complete pictorial procession, representing everything which took place at a great Etruscan funeral, is the Tomba delle Bighe, previously mentioned and now published by Weege. As the pictures in this tomb are clearer and more complete than most Etruscan paintings, we will take some of them as a starting-point for a closer examination of the facts of Etruscan life.
There are two friezes on the three walls of the tomb: a narrower and lighter above; and a broader one below, in which the figures are painted on a deep red ground; the height of the friezes is respectively 36 and 90 cm., and they are separated by a broad, coloured band. The narrow frieze with the dark figures on light ground still reminds one of the black-figured Attic vases, whereas the lower purple frieze, in which the skin of the men is reserved in a somewhat lighter red, that of the women in white, recalls the red-figured vase-paintings, all differences notwithstanding.
On the right-hand main wall (fig. 15), in the broad frieze, men and women are dancing in honour of the dead among laurel branches. There are the usual ecstasy and the familiar animated gestures with the big fan-like hands, reminding one of the figures in archaic Greek vase-painting and plastic art.30
Especially splendid is the female flute-player who turns round as she dances, her light chiton and red cloak fluttering about her; she can almost compare with ‘la bella ballerina’. The dancing-women all wear the high Etruscan wreathed cap, the so-called tutulus, which in the Tomba delle Iscrizioni is also worn by a male dancer. We meet with it again in Etruscan terracotta sculpture. The fashion is of Oriental origin, and goes back, ultimately, to the pointed ’sugar-loaf hat’ of the Hittites. It probably reached Etruria by way of Cyprus, where it is frequently seen in reliefs of the seventh century B. C. In Etruria the pointed woollen cap became part of the national dress.31 Rome of course adopted the headgear and preserved the Etruscan tradition in the priesthoods; a purple tutulus adorned the Roman Flaminicae, and certain secondary priests wore a tutulus down to the time of Tertullian.32 In early Rome all women wore the tutulus, and under it a head-cloth such as is shown in Etruscan terracottas (fig. 16); this is clear from a description of a Roman mourning scene in Dionysius of Halicarnassus (xi. 39), where the women tear their many and various fillets and hair-ornaments off their heads.33
The dancing scene, in the painted frieze referred to above (fig. 15), ends at the sideboard on the left, which bears a number of metal bowls: a cup-bearer, partially obliterated in the original, is just putting down a vessel. The wine to inspire the dancers is ready.
In the narrow frieze—the most beautiful and most carefully executed of those in the tomb, but very badly copied in the facsimile of the Glyptotek—we see the preparations for a chariot race. The horses are being led out and harnessed to the chariot. We reproduce, after Stackelberg’s drawing, the most interesting part of the frieze (fig. 17), in which three young men are busy harnessing two horses to the light, two-wheeled chariot, the Biga. The chariot is represented in foreshortening, and the shaft is lifted up by a naked boy. The young men have each one foot strongly foreshortened.
We find here the same experimentation with this new and difficult problem, as in the Greek vase-paintings of about 500 B. C., in the vases of Euthymides and Euphronius. The horse to the right is blue, that to the left grey, both have red hoofs and red harness, and two youths, with a sort of shawl round their loins, are busily engaged with them, striking them on the flanks to get them into place. These two excellent figures are quite misdrawn and misconstrued in the Ny Carlsberg facsimile, the draughtsman not having realized that they are seen from behind.
We have, therefore, preparations for a chariot race; in a wall-painting in the Tomba del Morente at Corneto we have a still earlier phase represented, the lassoing of the horse which is to be harnessed (fig. 18); here the horse is red, with blue mane and tail. The disposition of the colours is no more naturalistic in Etruscan wall-painting than in the pediments of Greek temples: in applying the colours, the painter’s object was purely decorative.
After the preparations comes the ceremonial parade of the racing chariots past the stands; three chariots are seen in a row (fig. 15): the first has not yet begun to move, the horses are pawing the ground impatiently, and the groom is standing at their heads trying to pacify them; the second chariot has already started, and the team of the third chariot is going a little faster, a fine crescendo which reminds one of good Greek art rather than of Etruscan. To the left are the stands for the spectators, which are continued on the back wall; similar stands are seen in the corner where back wall and left main wall adjoin. We give, after Stackelberg’s drawing, the two parts from the first-mentioned corner (fig. 19). On elevated platforms, bounded above by lines evidently meant to indicate curtains which might be drawn before the ‘box’ against sun or heavy showers, men and women are seated and show their absorption in the games by their eager gestures. The foremost woman to the right actually greets the procession of chariots with her raised hand. She is a matron wearing a shawl (epiblema) over the arms, and the back of her head, and under that a tutulus. Next to her sits a young girl with a tutulus, noble in bearing and gesture like a young goddess. Then follows a varied company of youths, women, and a bearded man. The young man, who is represented partly frontal with his chin resting on his hand and the head and left leg frontal, is of special interest. The problem of foreshortening has been very neatly solved. Under the wooden floor of the stands the common folk are disporting themselves, some of them engrossed in anything but the games.