Etruscan art is nearly all that we know of Etruscan history. We can trace in it the manners and morals of the people, the power of religion and caste, and the changing tides of economic and cultural contact with Asia Minor, Egypt, Greece, and Rome. It was an art fettered by ecclesiastical conventions and liberated by technical skill; it reflected a brutal and obscurantist civilization, but expressed it with character and force. Oriental influences—Ionic, Cypriot, Egyptian—dictated its earlier forms and styles, and Greek models dominated its later sculpture and pottery. In architecture and painting, however, in bronze statuary and the working of metals, Etruscan art spoke with its own voice and was unique.
The architectural remains are never more than fragments or tombs. Parts of Etruria’s city walls still stand—heavy structures of uncemented masonry firmly and accurately joined. The homes of rich Etruscans defined the classic design of the Italian house: a deliberately forbidding external wall, a central atrium or reception room, an opening in the roof of the atrium to let rain fall into a cistern below, and a circuit of small chambers surrounding the atrium and often faced by a colonnaded porch. Vitruvius has described Etruscan temples, and the tombs sometimes take their form. Essentially they followed Greek models; but the “Tuscan style” modified the Doric by leaving the column unfluted, giving it a base, and planning the cella on a six-to-five proportion of length to breadth, instead of the more graceful Attic relation of six-to-three. A cella of brick, a peristyle of stone, architraves and pediments of wood, reliefs and ornaments in terra cotta, the whole resting on a podium or elevation, and brightly painted outside and within: this was the Etruscan temple. For secular mass architecture—for city gates and walls, aqueducts and drains—the Etruscans (so far as we know) introduced the arch and vault to Italy. Apparently they had brought these majestic forms from Lydia, which had taken them from Babylonia.III But they did not follow up this brilliant method of covering great spaces without a confusion of columns and an oppressive weight of architraves. For the most part they walked in the grooves worn by the Greeks, and left Rome to consummate the arcuate revolution.
The most renowned of Etruria’s products is its pottery. Every museum abounds in it, setting the weary navigator of ceramic halls to wonder what unseen perfection exonerates these stores. Etruscan vases, when they are not clearly copies of Greek forms, are mediocre in design, crude in execution, barbarous in ornament. No other art has produced so many distortions of the human frame, so many hideous masks, uncouth animals, monstrous demons, and terrifying gods. But the black wares (bucchero nero) of the sixth century B.C. have an Italian vigor, and perhaps represent an indigenous development of Villanovan styles. Fine vases were found at Vulci and Tarquinii—imported from Athens or imitated from black-figured Attic shapes. The François Vase, a huge amphora discovered at Chiusi by a Frenchman of that name, was apparently the work of the Greek masters Clitias and Ergotimus. The later urns, red-figured on a black ground, are elegant, but again evidently of Greek manufacture; their abundance suggests that the Attic potters had captured the Etruscan market and driven the native workers into merely industrial production. All in all, the robbers were justified who, when they rifled Etruscan tombs, left so much of the pottery.
We cannot speak of Etruscan bronzes with such reckless irreverence. The bronze casters of Etruria were at the top of their craft. They almost rivaled the potters in productivity; one city alone is reported to have had two thousand statues in bronze. What remains to us from their hands belongs mostly to the period of Roman domination. Among these reliefs two masterpieces stand out: the Orator who now holds forth, with Roman dignity and bronze restraint, in the Archeological Museum at Florence; and—also at Florence—the Chimera found at Arezzo in 1553, and partly restored by Cellini. It is a disagreeable figure, presumably the monster slain by Bellerophon—head and body of a lion, a serpent for a tail, a goat’s head growing anomalously out of the back; but its power and finish reconcile us to its biological extravagance. Etruscan bronze-workers produced, often for distant export, millions of statuettes, swords, helmets, cuirasses, spears, shields, utensils, urns, coins, locks, chains, fans, mirrors, beds, lamps, candelabra, even chariots. Greeting the visitor to the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York is an Etruscan chariot: body and wheels of wood, sheathing and tires of bronze, the high front embossed with figures of considerable grace. Many bronze objects were delicately engraved. The surface was coated with wax, the design was etched in with a stylus, the piece was dipped into acid, the wax-freed lines were burned into the metal, and then the wax was melted away. In the working of silver and gold, bone and ivory, the Etruscan artist was the heir and peer of the Egyptian and the Greek.
Sculpture in stone was never popular in Etruria. Marble was scarce, and the quarries of Carrara were apparently unknown. Fine clays were at hand, however, and soon took shape in a profusion of terra-cotta reliefs, statuettes, and sepulchral or architectural ornaments. About the end of the sixth century an unknown Etruscan artist established a school of sculpture at Veii, and molded the chef-d’oeuvre of Etruscan art—that Apollo of Veii which was found on the site in 1916, and until lately stood in the Villa Giulia at Rome. Modeled on the Ionian and Attic Apollos of the time, this engaging statue shows an almost feminine Mona Lisa face, with delicate smile, archly slanting eyes, and a body of health, beauty, and life; the Italians call it il Apollo che cammina—“the Apollo that walks.” In this, and in many excellent figures on sarcophagi, Etruscan sculptors carried to perfection the Asiatic stylization of hair and drapery, while in the Orator they or their Roman heirs established a tradition of realistic portraiture.
Etruscan painting collaborated with that of Greek Italy in transmitting another art to Rome. The elder Pliny described frescoes at Ardea “of older age than Rome itself”; and at Caere others of “still greater antiquity” and “supreme beauty.”27 The art used pottery, and the interiors of homes and tombs, for its surfaces; only tomb frescoes and vase pictures remain, but in such quantity that every stage of Etruscan painting can be traced in them, from Oriental and Egyptian, through Greek and Alexandrian, to Roman and Pompeian styles. In some tombs we find the first Italian examples of windows, portals, columns, porticoes, and other architectural forms mimicked by painting on inner walls, in the very manner of Pompeii. Often the colors of these frescoes are faded; a few are astonishingly fresh and brilliant after more than a score of centuries. The technique is mediocre. In the earlier pictures there is no perspective, no foreshortening, no use of light and shade to give fullness and depth; the figures are Egyptianly slender, as if seen in a horizontally convex mirror; the faces are regularly in profile, wherever the feet may point. In the later examples perspective and foreshortening appear, and the proportions of the body are represented with greater fidelity and skill. But in either case there is in these paintings a frolicsome and impish vivacity that makes one wonder how pleasant the life of the Etruscans must have been, if their tombs were so gay.
Here are men in battle, and enjoying it; or they play at war in the jousts of the arena. They hunt the boar or lion with all the bravery of men who have or expect an audience; they box or wrestle in the palaestra, while the spectators dispute more violently than the combatants; they ride their horses, or drive their chariots, around the amphitheater; sometimes, resigned to peace, they fish. One pleasant scene shows a couple idly boating on a quiet stream: so old is wisdom. In a grave at Caere the pictured man and his lady recline on a couch; garlanded with laurel, he pledges her his eternal fidelity with a goblet of wine; she smiles and believes him, though she knows he lies. In other burial chambers the Etruscan painter sketches his idea of paradise: endless revelry, with careless lasses dancing wildly to double-pipes and the lyre. Pipes and lyres, trumpets and syrinxes, were apparently essential to every banquet, wedding, and funeral; love of music and the dance is one of the gracious aspects of Etruscan civilization. In the Tomb of the Lioness at Corneto the figures whirl about in nude and Bacchic frenzy.28
It was the natural destiny of the Etruscans to expand north and south, to extend their sway to the foothills of the Alps and the Greek cities of Campania, and then to find themselves face to face, across the Tiber, with growing Rome. They established colonies at Verona, Padua, Mantua, Parma, Modena, Bologna, and beyond the Apennines at Rimini, Ravenna, and Adria; from this modest Etruscan outpost the Adriatic took its name. They hemmed in Rome with Etruscan settlements at Fidenae, Praeneste (Palestrina), and Capua, perhaps also at Cicero’s Tusculum (“little Tuscany”). Finally—in 618 B.C., according to a precise and precarious tradition—an Etruscan adventurer captured the throne of Rome; and for a century the Roman nation was ruled and formed by Etruscan civilization and power.