Etruscan Paintings
In his celebrated "Guide to Greece", the ancient author Pausanias lists not only the famous buildings and statues to be found the length and breadth of Greece, but also the famous paintings that decorated walls in many of the public buildings. Unfortunately, although the ruins of the buildings survive and the statues are frequently still to be found (albeit sometimes in the form of later Roman copies), not a single one of the paintings has come down to us.
The result is that many have the vague idea that the ancients didn't paint. We picture the Parthenon as pure dazzling white, surrounded by plain white statues, when in reality both the building and the statues were a riot of colours. Statues wore coloured robes, had finely painted faces with hair, beard and eyebrows, eyes had pupils and lips were ruby red.
Surprisingly, it is from the very oldest era that we have a few paintings that hint at the riches that have been lost. When Sir Arthur Evans excavated at Knossoss in northern Crete he uncovered yards of frescoed walls and although his reconstructions tend to consist of one or two tiny fragments set in vast swathes of imaginative (and frequently wrong) "reconstruction", we nonetheless can appreciate the elaborate decorations that adorned Minoan palaces.
From there, however, there is a huge gap in time until the next substantial painted remains appear. Around 650 BC the Etruscans began to decorate the underground chambers of their tombs with brightly coloured paintings that depicts gods, heroes, mythical scenes and all-too-human celebrations.
The first of these tombs of which we have any record was discovered in 1699 and further discoveries followed during the subsequent centuries as peasants working in their fields accidentally uncovered long-forgotten tombs. However in 1950 the Foundation Lerici of Milan began a systematic search for tombs using the most up-to-date technology of their day and nearly quadrupled the number of tombs known.
The majority of the known tombs are found in the necropolis of Tarquinia, some 45 miles north-west of Rome. Others are to be found at Veii, Cerveteri, Vulci, Orvieto and Chiusi.
The visitor to the tombs is overwhelmed by the skill of the ancient artists, for all the figures are finely drawn and very realistic. Even the griffins and sphinxes look as though they were drawn from life! Clearly the ancient artists were combining acute observation with vivid imaginations.
I remember some years ago a theatrical promoter describing how a famous medium, whose show had appeared in her theatre, came prancing onto the stage with one hand clutching his forehead as he loudly announced "I am getting a message coming through. Is there someone here called Jones?" The lady's scorn had been immense: "When someone clutches their forehead like that, all it says to me is, 'I have a headache'," she said.
Amusingly, one of the tombs at Tarquinia, known as the "Tomb of the Augurs", shows two ancient seers clutching their foreheads in precisely the manner popularised by Derek Accorah, the medium in question.
There is evidence that Etruscan paintings were known before the Renaissance and some have speculated that mediaeval depictions of hell owe a lot to Etruscan concepts of the perils that awaited the unwary in the afterlife. For example, the "Tomb of the Blue Demons" shows blue demons armed with serpents stalking menacingly across a rocky landscape.
Unfortunately many of the tombs that were discovered before the Twentieth Century have suffered from the effects of visitors - why is it that people cannot see without touching? - and the primitive lamps and candles used to light them. As a result the colours have faded or been physically damaged. We can be thankful, therefore, that many of them were copied, either by artists sitting and sketching or, best of all, by the means of tracing paper laid over the paintings. Although such methods would be deplored today, we are very grateful for the care and accuracy with which the paintings have been preserved for us.
© Kendall K. Down 2007
