ETRUSCAN ART

LONG before giving to the world the spectacle of the splendid development of art and civilization which I have endeavored to describe, Tuscany had been in these respects a very favored land.

More than a thousand years before our era the soil of Tuscany was occupied by the Etruscans, a mysterious people whose origin has never been clearly ascertained by the historian or the archaeologist. Whether, as has been variously argued, Greek, Phoenician, German, Iberian, or Celtic, the race which peopled Etruria, and settled between the Tiber and the Arno in the tenth century B.C., showed a special instinct for art, and left upon all objects of its creation so original a mark that its style is the easiest to identify of all those which the archaeologists have exhumed.

Mommsen, Niebuhr, and Ottfried Muller have each given their views, accepted by some and rejected by others; Michelet says that the "genius of history is dumb," and Sir George Cornewall Lewis comes to the somewhat sweeping conclusion that "all the searching investigations of modern savants as to the primitive history of the Pelasgi, the Siculi, the Thyrrhenians, the Aborigines, the Latins, and other national races are as devoid of any solid foundation as the study of judicial astrology, the discovery of the philosopher's stone, or the elixir of life."

Be this as it may, Etruria was the cradle of Italian art, and a work on the art and civilization of that country which goes back to the earliest times would not be complete without some notice of the first Etruscan monuments. These are believed to date from the close of the tenth century B.C., and the many specimens of them which are to be seen in the different museums have all the conventionality of Egyptian art, a circumstance which may perhaps be accounted for by the trade which Etruria carried on with the East.

Etruscan art, however, was personal, so to speak, while that of Egypt, on the contrary, was immutable, and subject to certain rites, religious prescriptions, laws, and immovable canons. The Etruscan sought to imitate nature, while the Egyptian covered the human anatomy with an inanimate surface of porphyry or granite which gave no clue to the life beneath. The Etruscan was at infinite pains to reproduce the muscles, the veins, the arrangement of the hair, and the folds of the loose draperies.

There are few large monuments left in Etruria, especially of the first period, though some walls of colossal proportions like those at Fiesole, and lofty gates like those of Perugia one of the best preserved monuments in Italy may still be seen, belonging to a period in which Greek influence is very visible. The first Etruscan style lasted until the third century of Rome, after which it underwent a modification and became the Tuscan style, contemporary with that of gina and Greece, while, five centuries after the foundation of Rome, Greek art had acquired so complete a monopoly that it was to be traced in all Etruscan constructions of the time. One of the most important Etruscan towns, Veii, succumbed in the year 396 B.C. to Rome, and in 283 B.C. the battle of Vadimo brought about the complete subjugation of the Etruscan nation by Rome. The superposition of these two civilizations may be seen close to Florence, at Fiesole, on the slope of the mountain upon which the Roman amphitheatre is built, for hard by this building, with its classic lines, is the colossal Etruscan wall, which seems strong enough to prop up the mountain, and whose enormous layers, placed one upon another without mortar, with the edges as square as if it had been built yesterday, tell us of this people whose origin has remained an enigma for scholars of every age.

Etruscan art produced vases, mirrors, jewels, statues of great size and beautiful style, and scarce as they now are, great numbers of sarcophagi, disci, arms, etc., and tables engraved with inscriptions ; and all astonishing number of grotesques are found in the excavations, and are exhibited in the various museums of Europe under the names of "Obesi," and "Pingues Etrusci." The Etruscans excelled in bronze work, and there can be no more admirable specimen of it than the " Chimaera " in the Uffizi Gallery, with an inscription upon its foot. The " She-Wolf" in the Capitol at Rome also shows a complete knowledge of the structure of those animals. Perkins, in his work on "Tuscan Sculptors," attributes this proficiency of the Etruscans to their habit of offering sacrifices, and of seeing animals immolated by the augurs.

It seems incredible that we should not have one of those triumphal bronze statues, which were so numerous that after the capture of Volsinii the Romans carried off two thousand. Some of them were of gigantic size, and a fragment shown by M. Eugene Piot in the retrospective exhibition at Paris in 1878 is believed to belong to what we may call the Etrusco--Greek period.

The Vatican Museum is very rich in objects belonging to this period, and though the Uffizi Gallery has not so many, it contains in addition to the "Chimaera," the " Orator" (Arringatore), which is the most perfect specimen of its kind. The excavations commenced in the sixteenth century, and carried on with varying ardor ever since, have brought to light riches now dispersed throughout Europe, and the supply is still far from being exhausted. The towns of Coreto, Chiusi, Toscanella, Volterra, Veii, Cocre, Castel d'Asso, Norchia, Vulci, Bomarzo, Fie-sole, and Perugia have helped more than any others by the excavations made in them, to make us understand the different phases of this civilization. The first style denotes a tendency to imitate nature which may be regarded as the dawn of art, since, in reproducing what they saw, the Etruscans took only the main lines. Simplifying the shapes, the outlines of figures, the draperies, and the anatomy of men or animals, they gave a really lofty tone to their creations.

The second manner still reveals their want of science, for in their anxiety to express action and motion these primitive artists overdid it, thus hurting the effect. Those writers who have examined with care specimens of Etruscan painting and sculpture ascribe the first style to the influence of Egyptian art, while the second has much in common with the art of the island of gina. Long before the time of our modern arecheologists and the scholars of the seventeenth century, Strabo, who had travelled in Egypt and Etruria, observed these points of similitude, varied, however, by the special characteristics which confer upon the artists of Etruria their unquestionable originality. The Etruscans excelled, moreover, in giving to the objects which they reproduced their natural color. Admirable proofs of this may be seen in many of the museums.

The Greeks, when in the year 212 B.C. they invaded Italy after the capture of Syracuse, found the people of Etruria readily accessible to their ideas in regard to art, and Greek influence is apparent in the works of the gina, period. From this resulted a new and more perfect, but less original style, and the national element soon disappeared altogether.

It is from this Etrusco-Greek period that date the masterpieces in the Gregorian Museum, the Vatican, and most of those in the Uffizi, including the bronze "Cestus" in the Kircher Museum.

Skilful in the manipulation of metals, in the casting of bronze armor, in die-sinking, or in the carving of applied figures upon metals or stuffs, Etruscan artists supplied nations more advanced than their own in civilization, with their works, which were highly appreciated even at Athens. There is one point which has never been cleared up how it was that after becoming the purveyors of nations wealthy enough to indulge in all the refinements of luxury, the Etruscan artists, instead of applying their talents to the production of every kind of plastic work, such as armor, marbles elegant furniture and jewellery, multiplied by some industrial method innumerable specimens of the same object or the same jewel, creating a specialist for each of these departments. Thus was first brought into existence what we now call "art applied to industry," resulting in the production of objects less perfect in taste, but nevertheless imbued with that delicacy of conception common to all the works of art in those days. The foreign influences which are to be traced in Etruscan art are not mere vague resemblances of shape or aspect, for five centuries before Christ, and two hundred and five years after the foundation of Rome, the Etruscans coined gold and silver money after the model of the coins current in Attica and Asia Minor, while a century before, when in constant communication with the inhabitants of Cumae, the Samians, and the Rhodians of Campania, the strange spectacle is to be witnessed (as may be easily seen from an examination of their objects of art) of a whole nation, devoid of any heroic traditions of its own, borrowing those of other peoples, and representing them in her pictures and sculptures. This adoption of foreign myths caused great embarrassment during long centuries to the students of Etruscan lore, who did not, while the science of archeology was still in its infancy, know what to make of finding an episode in the War of the Seven Chiefs, or in the Fall of Troy, in the work of an Etruscan artist.

What gives art so important a place in the history of civilization, and causes it to have such a hold upon the popular imagination, is, that it is almost inseparable from history. If Herodotus, writing a century before the foundation of Rome, is to be believed, the Greeks knew nothing of Italy, but soon afterwards Sicily was colonized by Greeks, Naxos being the first Greek settlement in the island. The influence of Greece gradually extended, but Etruria retained her special characteristics until she became fused in the Roman Empire. Then a fresh civilization engrafted itself upon the older one, as we have seen in the case of Fiesole, Perugia, and other towns.

While Rome had to fight for her own independence and existence, art was confined to the turning of the potter's wheel, or to making a basket out of the osiers by the riverside. As Cicero says, "Art was left to the strangers, in order that their bondage might sit lighter upon them." The Temple of the Gods was not yet built ; but as the instinct of man impelled him to offer sacrifice to the tutelary divinities, he sought out a spot devoted to prayer to which he might repair only for devotional purposes. The Etruscans taught those who were about to become their masters and eliminate their nationality altogether, how to build the Cella of a temple, and to replace their rustic dwellings, roofed with green boughs, by those water-tight houses which ultimately became the palace and the villa. The Etruscan artist taught his conqueror, who had no idea of what architecture meant, the graces of the full arch, and the expression "Tuscan architecture " became a familiar one in Rome, prevailing there until the Greek colonists of Sicily introduced their purely Greek decoration in the Temple of Ceres (496 B.C.).