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ETRUSCAN TOMB-PAINTINGS

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The tombs and tomb-paintings of Etruria constitute a field of archaeology in which the investigator is particularly apt to be reminded of numerous sins of omission and to be haunted by a painfully uneasy conscience. Indeed, the older archaeologists have less reason to plead guilty before the bar of science than those of more recent times. When the discovery and excavation of the Etruscan tombs began to make headway in the twenties of the nineteenth century, publications in text and illustrations followed comparatively close upon the discoveries. The first misfortune, however, took place when three of the most interesting tombs were published, the Tomba delle Bighe, the Tomba delle Iscrizioni, and the Tomba del Barone.

STACKELBERG AND KESTNER

It was the major-domo of the Bishop of Corneto, Vittorio Masi, who first opened them together with other tombs in the vicinity of Corneto. In the spring of 1827 he invited two German barons, Stackelberg, an able archaeologist, and Kestner, the Hanoverian ambassador in Rome, to inspect them, and, if they so desired, to survey, draw, and publish the pictures in the tombs. The two men arrived, accompanied by Thürmer, a Bavarian architect, to find the tombs themselves despoiled of their accessories, but the walls covered with wonderful pictures dating from the sixth and fifth centuries B.C. They set to work immediately, studying and copying the pictures in the richest of the tombs, the Tomba delle Bighe. Stackelberg made five charming water-colours in order to save the colouring for posterity; Thürmer executed eleven careful drawings. In all, the two men painted and drew two hundred and twenty-five figures, and the whole of the material is now preserved in the Archaeological Seminar of the University of Strasburg. In his diary Stackelberg gives a vivid description of the discomfort which they experienced, drawing by torchlight in the cold, dank tomb-chamber, and only emerging now and then into the warm Italian spring sunlight in order to recuperate or to enjoy a light repast on the top of the tumulus, commanding a view of the sea. To this were added fatiguing social duties; local patriotism was aroused in Corneto; the noble families in the town vied in displaying hospitality to the Germans, and big banquets were held, at which sonnets were recited to the ‘heroes’ who once slept in the tombs. The drawing and copying of the colours on the walls in the Tomb of the Chariots, as well as in the Tomb of the Inscriptions and in the Tomb of the Baron—so called after Baron Kestner—were rightly considered the chief matter, because in the very first summer after they were opened, the dampness of the tombs in a few weeks ruined large portions of them, especially in the Tomba delle Bighe. After his return to Rome, Baron Stackelberg caught typhoid fever and did not recover till late in the winter. In the next spring he went to Germany, where his excavations had created such an immense sensation that even the aged Goethe asked Stackelberg to dine with him in Weimar and studied the drawings with the greatest interest. But, in spite of the national enthusiasm called forth by the excavations, the projected great work came to nothing; the coloured plates of the paintings, with the then existing means of reproduction, promised to be so expensive that the publishers took alarm. Pending these negotiations, the paintings from the three tombs were published in French and Italian works in very poor and incorrect reproductions, and no other reproductions were available till 1916, when the German archaeologist, Weege, at last managed to bring out an admirable publication of the Tomba delle Bighe, the most important of the three tombs.1

Similar uncoloured, not very reliable drawings continued to be the method of reproducing the Etruscan tomb-paintings in the following decades; after these drawings were made the reproductions in handbooks like Jules Martha’s L’Art étrusque (Paris, 1889). An Englishman, George Dennis, in his Cities and Cemeteries of Etruria (London, 1878), gives a vivid description of Tuscan scenery and of the ancient tombs. At times he rises to a lyrical enthusiasm; for instance, in his description of a dancing figure, ‘la bella ballerina di Corneto’, in the Tomba Francesca Giustiniani. But neither Dennis nor any later visitor procured copies which come up to their enthusiasm; in fact, the beautiful ballerina has never even been drawn or photographed, and is not to be found in any work on archaeology or art. Dennis’s book throws a dreadful light upon contemporary excavation. About Veii, he writes that the greater part of the district belongs to the Queen of Sardinia, who in the excavating season positively lets out tracts of land to Roman dealers, who rifle the tombs of everything convertible into cash and then cover them in with earth. He describes such an excavation at Vulci: a tomb being opened, nothing but pottery was found; the excavators, in their disgust, smashed and destroyed everything, in spite of the English traveller’s protests and entreaties. This took place on the estate of the Princess of Canino.2

MODERN LITERATURE

This happened in the sixties. In the seventies such vandalism comes to an end; but the publications do not improve. For example, in the excellent article on the Tomba François at Vulci which Körte published in the Archäologisches Jahrbuch for 1897, the illustrations are poor: and it was not until 1907 that Körte published, in the second volume of the Antike Denkmäler, beautiful coloured reproductions of the paintings in three tombs at Corneto, the Tomba dei Tori, the Tomba delle Leonesse, and the Tomba della Pulcella. A popular description by Mary Lovett Cameron, Old Etruria and Modern Tuscany (London, 1909), marks no progress as far as the illustrations are concerned, and the text is amateurish and superficial.3 Von Stryk’s dissertation, Die etruskischen Kammergräber, published at Dorpat in 1910, is unillustrated: the text is full of errors, and in the discursive descriptions no account is taken of the difference between the present state of the tomb-paintings and that revealed by the earlier publications. Weege’s above-mentioned article on the Tomba delle Bighe and the Tomba dei Leopardi only appeared in 1916: here at last the entire material is utilized—the old drawings and descriptions, modern photographs, and the author’s own careful notes. According to a prospectus recently issued, a larger work on Etruscan tomb-paintings, by the same author, is shortly to appear; it will be awaited with interest.

It is to be hoped that Mr. Weege’s book will supply a want which is felt the more acutely when we consider the growing interest in antique painting displayed in the last decades. In 1904 Furtwängler, with the assistance of the painter Reichhold, began the publication of the great work on the masterpieces of Greek vase-painting (Griechische Vasenmalerei), which was continued by Hauser: part of the third volume is now published. In 1906 appeared the first instalment of Paul Hermann’s great collection of plates after antique, especially Pompeian, wall-painting; this work, which is still in progress, contains beautiful reproductions with and without colours (Denkmäler der Malerei des Altertums). Finally, in 1914, Walther Riezler published a splendid work on the white Attic lekythoi (Weissgründige attische Lekythen). But during these years nobody thought of bringing to light the treasures hidden away in the sepulchral chambers of Corneto, Chiusi, and Orvieto, although these pictures were much more exposed to destruction than either the vases in the well-guarded rooms of the Museums or the Pompeian wall-paintings. For after heavy showers the floors of the deeply sunk tombs of Corneto are under water, and the damp then loosens the tufa of the walls so that the layer of stucco, on which the colours are laid al fresco, peels off. The heavy iron doors which the Italian Government has placed before the entrances are worse than useless, because they shut the moisture in and prevent the tombs from getting dry. If these doors had been placed at the top of the stairs leading to the tombs, thus changing place with the lattice doors which are now there, all would have been well. At Corneto, it is moisture which demolishes the stucco layer, varying from ¼ to 1 cm. in thickness, and bleaches the colours—red chalk, vermilion, lime-colour, ochre, cobalt, and copper colours, at Chiusi it is the drought which most frequently destroys the paintings, the colours here being laid directly on the stone walls.

THE NY CARLSBERG FACSIMILES

We have, therefore, every reason to be deeply grateful to the late Carl Jacobsen who, at the beginning of the nineties, had the Etruscan tomb-paintings facsimiled on their actual scale. A somewhat similar experiment had already been tried, and the result is a number of facsimiles preserved in the Museo Gregoriano of the Vatican, but these are more decorative than exact. At first, the Italian painters, to whom Helbig, at the request of Carl Jacobsen, entrusted the task—the first was Marozzi—evidently imagined that Carl Jacobsen wanted these paintings as mural decorations for his museum and had no artistic or scientific aim in view, and letters from Helbig show that, as late as 1895, he did not scruple to let Becchi, the painter, fill in a damaged head from a picture in the Tomba dei Vasi Dipinti after the reproduction in Monumenti, vol. ix (1870). The first copies sent to the Ny Carlsberg Glyptotek were therefore of the same ‘picture-postcard’ colouring as the earlier ones in the Museo Gregoriano, but gradually Carl Jacobsen increased the rigour of his demands for conscientious exactitude, and the facsimiles now on exhibition in the Helbig Museum of the Ny Carlsberg Glyptotek are almost all executed according to the more modern and better principles of copying. To be sure, these copies still leave a great deal to be desired in the way of scientific exactitude; I have been able myself to ascertain this by a careful comparison with notes taken from the originals in the tombs of Corneto, and Weege more especially has pointed out rather grave mistakes in the copies of the paintings from the Tomba delle Bighe. But these may be supplemented by a series of beautiful coloured drawings dating from the last years of Jacobsen’s life: they are framed and constitute a whole picture-book open to the public in the Helbig Collection. A large number of ground plans and decorative details are included in these drawings, in addition to the most important of the paintings, and here the copying has been executed with great accuracy. The Ny Carlsberg Glyptotek, then, thanks to Carl Jacobsen, is the place where investigators can most easily form an idea of the development of Etruscan wall-painting, far more easily than in Florence where the late Director, Milani, ordered new copies which, in my opinion, are considerably inferior to those of Carl Jacobsen. But for all that, the facsimiles of the Ny Carlsberg Glyptotek ought not to be the last word of science on the subject. Mr. Weege proposes, as the method of the future, the taking in the tombs themselves of gigantic photographs on which careful painters might add the colouring; instead of two there will thus only be one possibility of distortion, namely, in the colours themselves. But one might perhaps go still further and take large chromatic photographs which would fix both forms and colours for all time, so that we might view the gradual destruction of the originals with less dismay than at present.

FUTURE REPRODUCTIONS

A detailed estimate of the artistic significance and properties of the Etruscan wall-paintings is not yet possible, if only because no adequate pictures for reproduction exist. What can be done—and what will be attempted in the following pages—is to give an account of the content of the pictures and of the main lines of their development. Even that is not superfluous. Investigators have never really given themselves time to enter deeply into the spirit and content of these pictures, or to ask themselves the question which arises, one may say, with every picture, namely, how far the representation is a loan from Greek art and civilization, and how far it bears the local Etruscan stamp.

Fig. 1. WALL-PAINTING FROM THE TOMBA CAMPANA

Fig. 2. MAIN PICTURE IN THE TOMBA DEI TORI AT CORNETO