The Romans & the Etruscans.
“When the Emperor Claudius composed his study of the Etruscans, it ran to twenty volumes. But perhaps the fate of Etruria and Etruscan culture in Roman times is encapsulated therein: twenty volumes about the Etruscans became an index of an emperor’s dotage.”[1] Nigel Spivey
Perhaps Claudius as an expert on Etruscan culture may have noted in one of his twenty volumes that the Etruscans were the first kings of Rome, but this was a fact that most Romans were keen to expunge from the historical record. The Romans invented their own foundation myths, mostly famously the suckling of Romulus and Remus by a she-wolf which was put into concrete form with the creation of a bronze wolf suckling two little boys (above), though the story clearly is reflected in Etruscan iconography.[2] However, the Romans complemented the story of Romulus and Remus with another founding myth, that of Aeneas who was thought to be an ancestor of Romulus and Remus. Both myths significantly appear in such famous monuments as the Ara Pacis Augustae (Altar of Augustan Peace) which honoured the Emperor Augustus’s return to Rome from three years in Hispania and Gaul. The front shows a panel with Aeneas sacrificing on first setting foot in Latium (Italy); while another- now almost defaced- shows Romulus and Remus nourished by the wolf. The realistic style present in the Ara Pacis, especially the portraits of Marcus Agrippa and the Imperial family, would develop during the first century B.C. and would owe something to the individualistic portrait style of the Etruscans as present in the so-called “Brutus,” thought to be a portrait of the stern Roman senator.[3] More importantly, the new realistic style would develop with growing interest in “Roman ancestral and funerary practice which was deeply embedded in Etruscan social life.[4]
[1] Nigel Spivey, Etruscan Art, (Thames and Hudson, 1997), 182.
[2] Haskell and Penny, Taste and the Antique, (Yale University Press, 1981) no. 93. First mentioned at the very end of the 10th century. The figures of Romulus and Remus were added in 1509.
[3] Haskell and Penny, Taste and the Antique, no. 14. The identification seems to have originated in the renaissance period in 1556. After describing the bust, Kleiner says (Roman Sculpture, 24): “These features are comparable to those of other Etruscan bronze portraits of the mid-fourth to the mid-third centuries B.C., although the over-life- size scale of the head is inconsistent with Etruscan practice where over-life size dimensions were reserved for images of divinities.” Kleiner concludes:” The Brutus is an excellent example of the confluence of Greek, Etruscan, and Roman features in the art of the early Republic.”
[4] Diana E.E. Kleiner, Roman Sculpture (Yale University Press, 1992), 36. Pliny, Nat, Hist. XXXV, 2: “In the halls of our ancestors, wax models of faces were displayed to furnish likenesses in funeral processions; so that at a funeral the entire clan was present.”
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