Art History Today

The Etruscans 5

Last Phase: Assimilation by the Romans.

With the Roman annexation of Etruscan society, the civilisation virtually comes to an end. Rome “with a capital R” in the words of D.H. Lawrence assimilated Etruscan art into its own systems of representation with the result that the art became vitiated and deprived of its pure spirit. In fact Roman ascendancy had been established over the Etruscans in 300, at least two centuries before their extermination, or assimilation depending on how one looks at it. However, despite the destruction of Etruscan cities Like Veii, others like Tarquinia, Chiusi, and Volterra continued to thrive. Upper-class tombs in these cities continue to display wealth and the trappings of power, though the combined lord and lady on a single couch disappears to be replaced by single figures occupying their own tombs. There are good examples of both types in the Guarnacci Museum in Volterra. At Perugia we have the splendid tomb of the Volumni with their elaborate banqueting couches; there were also good examples at Chiusi like the sarcophagus of a Hellenistic lady, possibly based on the iconography of the goddess Hera, now re-located to the British Museum. To represent free-standing sculpture we have the statue of an orator (above ) found at Lake Trasimene, now in Florence. Though this originated in the Etruscan-Hellenistic era, this statue unmistakeably has a “Roman face.” And though the toga is Roman and he wears the boots of a Roman magistrate, there are Etruscan letters on the hem of the garment. As the roman art scholar Diana E. E. Kleiner says, the arm takes on a life of its own, which has invited the term “the appendage aesthetic.”[1] And in the words of Brendel, the Arringatore shows that “Roman verism” had reached Etruria when this bronze was cast. Finally, painting is well-served in the Etruscan-Hellenistic period with such sites as the murals from the François Tomb, excavated at Vulci in 1857, and now installed in the Villa Albani, Rome.

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[1] Kleiner, Roman Sculpture, 1992, (Yale 1992), 34.

The Etruscans 4

Classical period (500-300 B.C.)

Painting.

The use of the term classical to describe this era which runs from the fifth century to the fourth century suggests correspondences with a similar Classical period in Greek art. The firth-century produced many interesting types of painting, if not the equal stylistically of the Tarquinia paintings, nonetheless still noteworthy. In Northern Etruria wall painting flourished with impressive examples at Chiusi which had rapidly become a thriving artistic centre. Wall painting is scarce in the north, but there are splendid exceptions like the Tomb of the Monkey with its figured friezes (which bring to mind Matisse!) decorating rooms in a tomb carved into the natural tufa (porous limestone). There are similarities with Tarquinia: the walls below the friezes are painted in blackish green, thus giving the effect of a dado. Athletic events are shown as continuous action; traditional games were held in honour of the dead and athletics was more of a spectator sport to the Etruscans unlike the Greeks. The Chiusi boxers are Etruscan, but the spear-thrower has an Attic Greek look about him. Also in the region is the Tomb of the Hill where some fine chariot races are depicted; this is the work of a varied school of painters, and the colourist of the chariot race looks back to the Paris painter with his amphora showing the Judgement of Paris.

Sculpture.

The Etruscan interest in the upright figure continues, particularly in the Etruscan-Umbrian borderland of which Perugia was the cultural centre. Works like the statue of a striding hoplite probably launched this new phase of sculpture which was to evolve into what Brendel calls the “eccentric stance.”[1] Mention should also be made of work in terracotta like the bearded heads of probably the god Tinia (the Etruscan equivalent of Zeus) which are Hellenistic in nature. The most significant development in fifth-century Etruscan sculpture was the anthropomorphic treatment of cinerary urns to hold the ashes of the deceased which fall into two categories. Firstly, seated figures, mainly women on robustly built thrones, sometimes with sphinxes, like the monumental Mother and Child at Florence which some scholars have compared to Michelangelo’s Bruges Madonna. Then there are the so-called banqueting urns which have the deceased (sometimes with his wife or bride) sitting on top of the lid. There are fine examples of these in Florence, Rome and Paris: the banqueter and his wife from Città della Pieve which dates from near the end of the fifth-century. Certain problems are raised with these figures on sarcophagi. Firstly, the meaning of their iconography and secondly, wether they are true portraits. The first is easily dealt with as the question of iconographical change is bound up with stylistic development. To the Greeks, Hypnos and Thanatos (Sleep and Death) were shown carrying a figure, but this symbolism changed as we see with an earlier Etruscan “medieval” type gisant figure that is sleeping and holding a banqueting dish on top of a sarcophagus. Greater sophistication led to the reclining banqueters, sometimes even shown with the winged Vanth, a demonic symbol. The issue of portraiture is not easily resolved as it is not known what these individuals actually looked like; but they may have some stylistic linkage with independent portraits like the Head of a Boy (Florence) and the bearded man, the so-called Brutus. Bronze came into its own in the fourth century, but unfortunately most of it was destroyed. The magnificent wounded Chimera at Arezzo is a survivor of this kind of art; it has been seen as Greek in style, but the “pseudo-naturalism” (Brendel) of its anatomy doesn’t fit the Greek model. The Chimera invites comparison with the Capitoline Wolf from the archaic stage; the children have nothing to do with Etruscan culture; they were a later addition by Antonio Pollaiulo.

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[1] Brendel, Etruscan Art, 315.

The Etruscans 3.

Early & Late Archaic periods (650- 500 B.C;

During this period more interest is shown in Etruria in mythological subjects. As to placement of figure and the interaction between them, we have left the introspective early age and entered into a more conversational one: figures face each other and interact more easily. The second period of Etruscan art is marked by the growth of painting and reliefs; this was in contrast to the Greek where statuary continued to develop. However, Etruscan art does borrow from the Greeks with the first painter’s atelier at Vulci where Pontic vases (in the Greek Archaic manner) have been discovered. The Pontic amphora with the story of the Judgment of Paris (Munich) (above) is a good example of this, and it influenced painters in the later classical era. We also see the growth of painted wall decorations; the Boccanera slabs from Cerveteri (British Museum). Mention should be made of tombs in Umbria which have yielded examples of metallic reliefs such as bronze sheetings from a chariot (found at Castel San Mariano) along with a relief of Herakles fighting opponents. Unsurprisingly, Chuisi continued to retain its reputation as an art centre in the north-west, though the town seems to have been concerned more with metalwork and stone sculpture rather than painting which barely existed in this region. Importantly, for the history of art in this period are the cippi in the form of rectangular bases which are framed like pictures; these resemble the painting found on Pontic vases too. While painting is to be found down south in the celebrated tombs at Tarquinia, Etruscan art in the north continues to concentrate on stone, though sticking to the rectangular format.

The Etruscans 2.

“Orientalising” period (800-650 B.C.)

Types of art during this period can be subdivided into the following: ceramics, animal art, tomb sculpture, figurative and non-figurative art, both relief sculpture and statuettes. Most figurative (and animal) is generic: that is to say it shows types like soldiers, horsemen, and in the case of animals, bulls, lions, sphinxes and so on. As Otto Brendel explains, the generalization of forms is a stylistic trait of this first orientalising period which as the civilization evolves will be exchanged for art with a more individual character.[1] This is to be contrasted with Greek art which became “less decorative” and more human in this period. The lack of individualisation probably reflects (unlike the Greeks) an absence of literary narratives presenting the deeds and exploits of heroes. There was no Homer nor did Etruscans personalise their gods; their deities remained impersonal and abstract, indefinable demons rather than gods with a range of emotions. Things changed with the arrival of Greek literary culture in Italy at the end of the seventh-century; hereafter Etruscan art tells Greek stories. A good example of this is the situla (boxes) from the Pania tomb, found in Chuisi, but now in the Florentine archaeological museum, which shows the flight of Ulysses and his comrades from the cave of the Cyclops. Mention should be made of the evolution of statuary including statuettes and busts. There are fine examples of the latter produced by the School of Chiusi, the xoana, (above) the predecessors of Roman portrait busts.

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[1] Brendel, Etruscan Art, 63.

The Etruscans 1

“The Etruscans, as everybody knows, were the people who occupied the middle of Italy in early Roman days and whom the Romans, in their neighbourly fashion, wiped out entirely in order to make room for Rome with a very big R. They couldn’t have wiped them all out, there were too many of them. But they did wipe out the Etruscan existence as a nation and as a people. However, this seems to be the inevitable result of expansion with a big E, which is the sole raison d’etre of people like the Romans.” D.H. Lawrence.

Archaeological Timeline of Etruscan Art.

1723- publication of T. Dempster’s posthumous “De Etruria regali libri septem”

1739- campaign of excavations opened in Volterra.

1761- Museo Guarnacci founded in Volterra.

1827 onwards- excavations of tombs of Tarquinia

1828-9. Finds at Orvieto, Cerveteri, Chiusi, Veii, and others.

1828-9- Alexandre François discovered the “Monkey Tomb” at Chiusi.

1857- Francois tomb discovered at Vulci.

1870. Museo Archeologico in Florence inaugurated.

1881 onwards- Exploration of necropolis of Tarquinia by G. Ghirardini.

1932- D. H. Lawrence’s Etruscan Places published.

Types of Etruscan Art.

A. Sculpture: Stone; Bronze; Terracotta; Hellenistic Ash Urns

B. Painting: Wall Painting; Vase Painting.

C. Pottery: urns, askoi, amphorae.

Religion & The Etruscan Way of Dying.

In order to understand Etruscan art, it is necessary to know something about their religion. It differed from the beliefs of the Greeks and Romans, and in some ways approached the religion of the East in spirit.[1] Etruscan culture suffered much neglect at the hands of Greek and Roman authors because “they found them disturbing.”[2] And if the Etruscan ritual was alluded to it would be under the rubric “disciplina etrusca, ”a wholly inadequate description of their religions and customs. The disciplina etrusca seems to have comprised three categories of books of fate. The first was that of the libri haruspicini, which dealt with divination from the livers of sacrificed animals; the second, the libri fulgurates, on the interpretation of thunder and lightning; the third, the libri rituales, which covered a variety of matters. They contained, as Festus says, "prescriptions concerning the founding of cities, the consecration of altars and temples, the inviolability of ramparts, the laws relating to city gates, the division into tribes, curiae and centuriae, the constitution and organization of armies, and all other things of this nature concerning war and peace. Among the libri rituales were also three further categories: the libri fatales, on the division of time and the life-span of individuals and peoples; the libri Acherontici, on the world beyond the grave and the rituals for salvation; and finally, the ostentaria, which gave rules for interpreting signs and portents and laid down the propitiatory and expiatory acts needed to obviate disaster and to placate the gods. What is known from their writings and iconography is that the Etruscans practiced divination; they were skilled in haruspicy, or examination of the liver- the “seat of life.” Like Eastern faiths they were fatalistic in nature, which permeated every aspect of daily life. Though Etruscan deities corresponded to the Greek and Roman pantheon, they were more abstract rather than individualised; this is true of art of the earlier “Orientalising” period- see below. The world of the gods was made up of Tinia (lord of the thunder, and hence similar to Zeus, Una (Juno) and Minerva (Athena). The Etruscan people were especially concerned with the afterlife, affirming their belief that the spirit of the dead man lived on in the tomb and hence required clothing, food, utensils and furniture. There is no other civilisation that really made the idea of death into a work of art. From the sixth-century B.C., the Etruscan’s conception of survival after death became more pessimistic and the modern fear of death “sets the seal” on their painting.

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[1] Tony Spiteris, Greek and Etruscan Painting, (Heron Books, 1965), 81.

[2] Spiteris, Greek and Etruscan Painting, 81.

Along the Road in Tuscany- slides

Link with week 1 of Art of Tuscany course.

Tales from the I Player: A Bowie Miscellany

 

Watched a few programmes, collectively “The Genius of Bowie” from the BBC IPlayer on Bowie last night. The first was just obtuse: a 30 minute tribute quickly thrown up with disposable presenters, fans in various conditions of grief and adulation, and no real content overall.

The second had more depth: a doc from 2013 looking at five key years in DB's life Telling footage in this programme such as Bowie posing for a Warhol movie portrait at the Factory. He’d written a song about Warhol of course (which AW hated) and would play the pop artist, presumably with a touch of parody, in Julian Schnabel’s biopic of the doomed graffiti artist Basquiat.

The last was best, a programme on Ziggy Stardust with contributions from august rock stars like Elton John, jaded journos like Charles Shaar Murray, and members of the Great One's entourage. John was good on the arty side of Bowie, and it put me in mind of my encounter with the Man on one of his tours. Rock and roll aggression, Berlin cabaret, mime troup, Japanese kabuki, New York bohemia. I was lucky enough to see some of these shows, and shows of later performers like Kate Bush who had much the same kind of blend of theatre, art and music. All of this 70s kind of pop concert was derivative of Bowie. In fact as one author said, you can track the pop of the 70s and other decades all the way from 72 and the Ziggy Stardust era. I bailed out after "Scary Monsters" in the 80s, just after the Tories won and a new cultural ice age settled over everything. Modern culture has never seemed so cold with art schools dying out, museums turning into commercial emporiums, university art departments under threat. I won’t go on, just say that Bowie’s death makes it seem even chillier. When I heard about his death on Monday, I had his music on continuous play which was a kind of mourning for a time and spirit that is irremediably lost. 

What is sometimes forgotten are the years of travail, the pre-history of Ziggy Stardust: Bowie tried everything from Simon and Garfunkel pop folk to Anthony Newlyisms before launching "Space Oddity." And even that and the album “Hunky Dory” wasn't the breakthrough, not until some kind of will to power propelled Bowie to America with the goal of kidding the yanks he was a huge star before he was. All this ending in a pragmatic kind of tribal sacrifice to appease the gods of reinvention and fashion, so Ziggy was killed off on tour. One of the greatest self-cancellations of the 70s, but it turned out to be a gesture of affirmation, defining the self by denying it. Well, he was into Buddhism initially. Listen to the song “Quicksand” on “Hunky Dory.” Doubtless there will be other tributes and even post-mortems of the post-mortems when the cultural surveyors tire of this apotheosis and media after-life.  There was an interesting and contentious Guardian  article by a C of E minister who is incurring a lot of flak for his apostasy. You’d better believe it: most pop music has a quasi-religious function.

For some reason Bowie’s death got crossed in my mind with the Etruscans who also knew a thing or two about turning death into a work of art. In their late archaic period they start to appear, almost as free-standing sculptures, rearing up on the lids of their cinerary urns. It worked! Lords and ladies of Chiusi and Tarquinia are still there smiling and even gesturing to the beholder from the receptacles that hold their remains, or what’s left of them. Rarely has death been so successful, in artistic terms. Death as the engine of stylistic growth since the art of death drove the culture forward. Look out for a series of posts on Etruscan art on this blog soon.

Along the Road in Tuscany (5)

A Note on Etruscan Art.

“You leave the Rome-Pisa train at Cecina, and slowly wind up the valley of the stream of that name, a green, romantic, forgotten sort of valley, in spite of all the come-and- go of ancient Etruscans and Romans, medieval Voltterans and Pisans, and modern traffic. But the traffic is not heavy. Volterra is a sort of inland island, still curiously isolated, and grim.” D. H. Lawrence.[1]

Tuscany is named after the Etruscan race, so no survey of art in region is complete without reference to that ancient civilisation, which is something that the Baedeker editors realised since they included it. Etruscan art dates from the 9^th and 2^nd centuries A.D. It can be crudely divided into the following timeline: (1) an “Orientalising” period (800-650 B.C.); (2) an Archaic period dependent on Ionic and Corinthian influences (650- 500 B.C; (3) Classical period (500-300 B.C.), the peak of the civilisation; (4), a final late phase, where Etruscan style is absorbed into Roman culture.[2] Today Etruscan art is distributed throughout the region, so you could visit the tombs of the Velimnas in Perugiaan (above) excellent example of funerary sculpture from the late period;[3] then you could travel to Arezzo to see the magnificent wounded Chimera from the Classical era;[4] after that you could spend hours in the Archaeological Museum in Florence and choose from a variety of Etruscan artifacts from all periods of the civilisation. But then you might want to continue your Etruscan journey northwards, maybe following in D. H. Lawrence’s footsteps, a tourist who got “more pleasure out of the Voltteran ash chests than…the Parthenon frieze.”[5] In Volterra, you could pay a visit to the Etruscan Guarnacci Museum, founded in 1761 by the abbot Mario Guarnacci (1701-85) and containing over thirty rooms. It is thanks to Guarnacci that a lot of Voltteran antiquities were prevented from being scattered across the region with the exception of the Inghirami Tomb which was moved and re-constituted in Florence. In the Guarnacci you are privileged to see such realistic portraits as the married couple on the burial lid of a tomb, from the Classical period and stelae from the Archaic period amongst others. Most Etruscan painting is to be found in southern Italy, but in the art museum at Volterra you can still find painting such as Rosso Fiorentino’s fascinating Descent from the Cross, a startling example of Florentine mannerism in the north, in Freedberg’s words displaying “disquieting spidery elegance.”[6] In fact as any art historian will tell you, you’re never far from developments in Central Italian painting in Volterra or other northern centres. Such wonderful works as Piero’s commemorative portraits of the Duke of Urbino and his wife Battista Sforza date from the time of Volterra’s revolt against Medician Florence in 1472 over the exploitation of mines in the region and resistance to Florentine rule.[7] Federico dell Montrefeltro, one of the leading condottieri in Italy, was called in by the Medici to quell the riot and break the ramparts of Volterra; but sadly Battista died giving birth to his heir Guidobaldo on Federico’s return. Piero’s diptych or double portrait pays tribute to the Duke and his widow, certainly stylistically different from the Etruscans, but none the less a funereal tribute since Battista’s features are probably based on a death mask and the inscription on the back of her portrait is in the past tense.

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[1] D.H. Lawrence, Mornings in Mexico/Etruscan Places, 1927, this edition, Penguin, 1971.

[2] For a detailed explanation of the timeline of Etruscan civilisation, see Otto Brendel, Etruscan Art, Pelican History of Art, (Yale University Press, 1978, rep. 1995).

[3] Brendel, Etruscan Art, 420f.

[4] Brendel, Etruscan Art, 327.

[5] D.H. Lawrence, Mornings in Mexico/Etruscan Places, 206.

[6] S. J. Freedberg, Painting in Italy 1500-1600, Pelican History of Art, (Yale, 1971, rep. 1993), 194. Thought to be based on a 13^th century Deposition in Volterra Cathedral, Elisabetta Marchetti Letta, Pontormo and Rosso Fiorentino, Scala, 1994, 62.

[7] James R. Banker, Piero della Francesca: Artist and Man (OUP, 2014), 147.

Along the Road in Tuscany (4)

The Tuscan Landscape

“The view thence of Florence is most beautiful--far better than the hackneyed view of Fiesole. It is the view that Alessio Baldovinetti is fond of introducing into his pictures. That man had a decided feeling for landscape. Decidedly. But who looks at it to-day? Ah, the world is too much for us."

E. M. Forster, A Room with a View

Perhaps we could identify with a figure looking out across the Tuscany landscape in one of Baldovinetti’s paintings, the Nativity. We can follow this figure’s gaze out over the valley patterned by snaking paths and rivers that wind with a mazy motion under bridges, until our eyes reach further to the distant mountains. Baldovinetti’s painting opens up to the spectator with the result that the pleasure of looking is transmuted into potential. The promise of a better world becomes visible, made manifest through Baldovinetti’s naturalistic skill and his poetic evocation of the Tuscan countryside: Tuscany. The word itself when applied to the problem of defining the terrain geographically raises certain problems. More of a region than a specific province, state or principality, Tuscany can mean many things to many people depending on their interests, outlook and experience. The mention of Tuscany to an educated person with knowledge of the classics might suggest myths of origin in Virgil’s Aeneid; whilist to the modern mind, more immersed in current affairs and popular culture, Tuscany may evoke thoughts of holiday villas for famous and wealthy politicians and musicians like Tony Blair and Sting. Geographically Tuscany could be described, in the words of one commentator, as follows: “that roughly triangular portion of Italian territory located between the upper Tyrrhenian, the central Apennines and the conventional border with the old papal State.”[1] Containing both mountainous regions, rolling fecund countryside and coastal plains, the terrain is of paramount importance in visualising Tuscany as a place in real life, and as a backdrop to many paintings in its centres such as Baldovinetti, Botticini’s Assumption (above) the Lorenzetti’s frescoes in Siena and Benozzo Gozzoli’s histories of St Francis at Montefalco, to mention just a few out of hundreds. And in the sphere of literature, perhaps it is this evocation of a “landscape” through such novels as Forster’s Room with a View (1908), more recently, John Mortimer’s Summer’s Lease (1988), that noticeably makes use of the “Piero della Francesca trail” in the region: it is therefore no surprise to learn that attempts have been made to preserve parts of the Tuscan countryside for present and future generations, both native and foreign to enjoy.

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[1] Moro, quoted in Silvia Ross, Tuscany: Literary Constructions of Place, (University of Toronto, 2010), 4.

Along the Road in Tuscany (3)

Travels in Tuscan Art.

“The best picture, one learned, was in a dusty little Tuscan town that few people took the trouble to visit named Borgo San Sepolcro. It was difficult to get there. From Urbino it took Huxley seven hours by bus. There must be some exaggeration there. I did the journey by bus a number of times in the 1930s, and then it took only three. Anyway, the point is quite a simple one. The best picture, a fresco of the Resurrection, and its painter, Piero della Francesca, were so little known to Anglo-Saxon visitors as to constitute a private cult.”[1]

Something of the relationship between art, space and style is conveyed in Ambrogio Lorenzetti’s mammoth fresco cycle Good and Bad Government, originally titled “Peace and War.”[2] A member of the Nine governors of Siena facing this fresco would see the extent of the area controlled by Siena, stretching from the town itself to the shores of the Tyrhennian Sea. Lorenzetti even created a mappamondo (deteriorated and taken down in the early nineteenth-century), which could be manipulated to show Siena’s relationship to the rest of Italy, and indeed the world. Though maps were scarce, there were exceptions however, like the Veduta della Catena, the so-called “Chain Map” of Florence made in 1470, which offered a picturesque view of the city’s buildings and surroundings. There were certainly no art guide books in the late-medieval and early renaissance period, not until Giorgio Vasari’s canonical account of the lives of painters and their accomplishments, Vite, which appeared in 1560, long after the waxing and waning of the renaissance. One would have to wait until the days of Baron Baedeker and Pampaloni’s Road Book of Tuscany, both mentioned by Aldous Huxley in 1925, before serviceable guides pointing out art treasures appeared.[3] One of the sights on Huxley’s Tuscan itinerary would have been Piero della Francesca’s celebrated Resurrection, on which he wrote an essay which inspired art historians like John Pope-Hennessy and Kenneth Clark to study this enigmatic painter from Borgo San Sepolcro. In Huxley’s day travel to Sansepolcro (79 miles from Florence, 169 miles from Rome) would have taken over seven hours by bus, though for Pope-Hennessy making the journey later in the 1930s, it took just three hours, leading to claims that Huxley was exaggerating about the travel time. The key point is that travel in the early twentieth-century in Italy would have taken longer, much longer than the present; but this is as nothing compared to the experience of travel back in Lorenzetti’s era. Imagine how long it would have taken the painter to travel across the Tuscan countryside to Florence? Many painters had to do this if they wanted the commissions and work!

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[1] John Pope-Hennessy, The Piero della Francesca Trail, (Thames and Hudson, 1993). 7.

[2] Joseph Polzer, “Ambrogio Lorenzetti’s “War and Peace” Murals Revisited”: Contributions to the Meaning of the “Good Government” Allegory, Artibus et Historiae, Vo. 23, No. 45, 2002, 63-105.

[3] A series of small burgundy-coloured travel guides published by Verlag Karl Baedeker in Germany, and in English from 1870 to 1918; the name became synonymous with a guidebook of any kind.