by Peter Watson
The Dominican friar Antonio da Viterbo wrote of “Truscomania,” but it was the German art historian Johann Joachim Winckelman who paid several visits to Pompeii and Herculaneum in the 1760s and helped establish what became known as the Greek revival in a book that took eighteenth-century Europe by storm, The History of the Art of Antiquity. In the text he said that the allure of Greek art, its defining characteristic, was its “noble simplicity and calm grandeur,” a phrase that became famous, and is indeed still famous. Generations of Germans and others, such people as Herder, Goethe, and Byron, became obsessed with ancient Greek culture. During Goethe’s Italian journey in 1787, he observed, “One now pays a lot of money for Etruscan vases, and certainly one finds beautiful and exquisite pieces among them. Every traveller wants one.” There was an early collection of vases in the Vatican. Initially, they were regarded as Etruscan and played a role in establishing the view that a large and sovereign Etruria was the basis of Western civilization. Winckelman, however, argued for their predominantly Greek origin. Laws to control their export were introduced as early as 1624 and again in 1755.
The Etruscans were in fact a rather mysterious people, but they were important because they composed the earliest urban civilization in the north Mediterranean, flourishing sometime between the ninth and first centuries BC, being most dominant in the sixth to third centuries. Much of what we know about them comes from the early writings of the ancient Greeks and Romans. According to the Greek historian Herodotus, for example, they originally occupied the land of Lydia—what is now western Turkey—but were compelled to disperse after a great famine, when half the nation moved on and half remained behind. Their leader at the time was Tyrrhenos, from whom they adopted the name Tyrrhenians (and hence the Tyrrhenian Sea, along the western coast of Italy). Another theory is that they left Turkey after the fall of Troy, but the most recent archaeology suggests that the Etruscans were actually descendants of the Villanovans, people who thrived in central Italy in the ninth and eighth centuries BC and had an active artistic tradition, especially in bronze jewelry and glass-paste beads. Etruscan cities began to arise in the seventh century BC where Villanovan villages had once been. During the 700s BC, the Etruscans developed into a series of autonomous city-states: Arretium (Arezzo), Caisra (Caere, or modern Cerveteri), Veii, Tarchna (Tarquinii, or modern Tarquinia), and Velch (Volci, or modern Vulci).
The first Etruscan pieces to be discovered were two bronzes, found as long ago as 1553 and 1556, that is, during the Renaissance. Etruscan excavations proper began in the late eighteenth century, and in the nineteenth century, major archaeological discoveries were made at several sites, including Tarquinia, Ceveteri, and Vulci, all cultures that feature in the discoveries made in the Medici warehouse at Geneva.
To date, some 6,000 grave sites have been examined by professional, authorized archaeologists. The Italian archaeologists who examined the objects in Medici’s Geneva warehouse calculate that “thousands” of tombs must have been desecrated to provide his “inventory,” suggesting that illicit digs have ruined as many tombs as have been excavated legally and scientifically. In other words, as much has been lost to looters as has been found by reputable archaeologists.
No Etruscan literary works or historical accounts have been found, but there are about 9,000 inscriptions in Etruscan writing carved mainly on tombs. The first to be found were the bilingual Phoenician-Etruscan Pyrgi Tablets, found at the port of Caere in 1964. They showed that the Etruscan writing system is unique in that its letters come from the Greek alphabet, yet its grammatical structure is unlike any other European language. What can be discerned from the records is that religion was at the heart of Etruscan culture. The Romans themselves depended on some Etruscan books of divination. It appears that the Etruscans followed three sacred books for predicting the will of the gods: One book was devoted to reading the entrails of animals, another interpreted the meaning of lightning, and a third dealt with the flight patterns of birds. The Etruscan myths were heavily influenced by the Greeks, mainly in the fact that their gods possessed human attributes and dispositions. In Etruscan religion, on the other hand, the realms occupied by humans and by the gods were very specific, and their ritual followed very exact procedures to avoid the ill will of the gods. The Etruscan religion was based on more or less complete submission to their deities—one had to watch out for signs as to how to behave. A number of divinities were borrowed from Hellenic culture, including Aplu (Apollo), Artumes (Artemis), Maris (Mars), and Hercle (Hercules). Unlike many ancient civilizations, there does not appear to have been a great deal of difference in Etruria between the status of men and women.
The Etruscans were farmers, but they had a militaristic side and fortified their cities. They were also great seafarers and had active trading links to Phoenicians and to Carthage, long before Rome did; and they were active miners of iron, copper, tin, lead, and silver—and these sources of wealth contributed to the success of their civilization between the eighth and sixth centuries BC. Their decline began in the fifth century, then accelerated in the fourth. The main weakness was the inability of Etruscan city-states to unite against Roman aggression, and in the third century they were taken over by Rome. Their language, practices, and culture were suppressed, and they disappeared as a civilization.
The Etruscans were very advanced in science, technology, and art. Much of what we consider as typically Roman technology was in fact Etruscan: such things as stone arches, paved streets, aqueducts, and sewers. They had their own strong tradition of painting and sculpture, and they are as much the founders of Western culture as the Greeks and Romans. They had what has been described as an “ephemeral” attitude toward life on earth, which led them to build their homes of wood or clay, whereas their tombs were built to last forever. This attitude comes home most clearly at Cerveteri, where the cemetery is also a real town with streets and squares, with massive tumuli and rectangular tombs cut into the rock. This city, in fact, shows in a funerary context the same town planning and architectural schemes used in a living ancient city—if it were not for Cerveteri, we wouldn’t know what ancient architecture was like. The tombe a camera (room tombs) were for entire families and were used for generations. These tombs were furnished lavishly, with stucco and terra-cotta sculptures, bronze models of sheep’s livers (for divination), frescoes, vases, reliefs, arms such as spears and swords, household utensils, and, because tomb contents reflected a family’s wealth or social status, gold jewelry.
Cerveteri is massive, but there is an entire city, Tarquinia (further north still, and more inland near Lake Bracciano), that is much more fanciful. A thriving center of business and trade, it also housed 6,000 tombs reached by elaborate underground staircases. Two hundred of the 6,000 are particularly famous for being painted, the earliest of which dates from the seventh century BC. Officially, they are opened in rotation, so that the delicate wall paintings that adorn them will be better preserved. Without Tarquinia and its wall paintings, we wouldn’t know what ancient Etruscan daily life was like.
Vulci is about twenty miles away, near Canino. This has more tombs but is better known for its ancient castle and its bridge, one of the first examples of the arch. Active as early as the eighth century BC, Vulci was famous in antiquity for its production of handicrafts and for its agriculture. Strengthened by the presence of Greek labor, Vulci became equally famous for its ceramics, sculpture, and objects in bronze, and for the quality of its workmanship, which reached markets throughout the Mediterranean. At least four necropolises were built at Vulci, where there was a practice of placing statues of imaginary animals to guard the tombs. Immensely rich burial treasures have been found in these tombs, in particular a large number of ceramics of Greek production and bronze objects of local production. Other tombs had paintings showing the Greek myths intermingled with Etruscan myths.
There are several reasons Greek vases are as esteemed as they are. In the first place, the making of ceramics—objects made of clay by firing
in an oven—is one of the defining practices of civilization. In the Middle East, the first pots were produced around 6700 BC. They were simple at first, and undecorated, but they enabled dry goods like grain and other seeds to be stored away from rats or birds; they allowed liquids to be stored with a minimum of evaporation, encouraging the development of beer and wine; and they made the transport of goods easier, encouraging trade. As the centuries passed, ceramics grew ever more elaborate, in shape, function, and decoration. And it was in Greece in classical times that this area of human activity culminated.
Our word “ceramic” comes from the Greek keramikos, meaning clay. The area of Athens where the ceramies, or community of potters, lived was known as Ceramicus, occupying an area bordering the Agora, along the banks of the Eridanos River. The fine clay of Ceramicus, combined with the brilliant technique of many Greek potters, resulted in the creation of multifarious shapes for vases, according to their function. Scholars and collectors who share a passion for Greek vases now recognize about a hundred different shapes for them, each of which has its own name. An amphora, for instance, is a two-handled vase used for storage and transport. The word krater, meaning “mixing bowl,” describes a large vase. An oinochoe is a small pitcher used for dipping into the krater and pouring the (watered) wine into a drinking cup, or kylix. The kylix is sometimes called a “symposium-vase” because it is often shown in the paintings on vases, being widely used in the evening dinner parties in classical Athens, where serious conversations were the main attraction. Other common names for Greek vases are hydria, which are three-handled vases that had a variety of uses: for drawing water, as ballot boxes in votes for the Assembly, and to hold the ashes of the dead. The word psykter means “cooler,” and this vase, filled with water and wine mixed, would be placed in a krater that had been filled with cool water, thus cooling the wine in turn. A lekythos is a flask that was used for toilet oils, perfumes, or condiments. It was also used in a funerary context, to pour libations over the dead. An aryballos, a small circular flask with a narrow neck, was used to hold and pour oil. It is often shown in Attic vase painting as suspended from the wrist of an athlete. An alabastron is a small, ovoid jar for perfumes, no more than four to six inches high. Although about a hundred types of vase are known, in practice only about twenty were in constant use.
The third—and crowning—aspect of Greek vases is their decoration. Many archaeologists and art historians believe that after the very beautiful but very mysterious cave paintings produced by early man, mainly in Europe about 30,000 years ago, Greek vase paintings are the highest achievement of human art until at least the great cathedrals of the High Middle Ages more than a millennium later. It is one of the reasons the ancient Greeks are held in such esteem. As Sir Peter Hall puts it in his book Cities in Civilisation (1998), in a chapter on ancient Athens that he calls “The Fountainhead”:The crucial point about Athens is that it was first. And first in no small sense: first in so many of the things that have mattered, ever since, to western civilisation and its meaning. Athens in the fifth century BC gave us democracy, in a form as pure as we are likely to see.... It gave us philosophy, including political philosophy, in a form so rounded, so complete, that hardly anyone added anything of moment to it for well over a millennium. It gave us the world’s first systematic written history. It systematized medical and scientific knowledge, and for the first time began to base them on generalisations from empirical observation. It gave us the first lyric poetry and then comedy and tragedy, all again at so completely an extraordinary pitch of sophistication and maturity, such that they might have been germinating under the Greek sun for hundreds of years. It left us the first naturalistic art; for the first time, human beings caught and registered for ever the breath of a wind, the quality of a smile.
This is what evokes a passion for Greek vases in so many people.
Painted Greek vases are known from the second millennium BC until almost the end of the first century BC. In the beginning of the period there were many local styles, but by the middle of the sixth century the vases of Attica, in particular its capital Athens, exceeded in quantity and quality those of its nearest rival, Corinth. This Attic supremacy was never surpassed and lasted until the disastrous Peloponnesian War ended in 404 BC, which robbed Athens of its profitable markets. After this, Attic vase painting went into decline, though it survived in other parts of the Greek world, especially Sicily and southern Italy.
At first, the main motifs were taken from sea life. These works were followed by a period when orderly patterns were drawn on the surface of the vases with a compass or ruler (the “geometric” style). Human figures appear in the eighth century BC, together with ideas from the East—floral ornaments, exotic beasts, and monsters. At this time, however, in Corinth, a decisive breakthrough was made, in the establishment of the so-called black-figure technique, often enhanced with incised lines in red and white. In the second half of the seventh century, this style spread to Athens, where from the very beginning the skill demanded by the engraving encouraged artists to develop their own styles. It is from this period on that the personal variation of the artists marks their creativity and individuality and an emphasis on human figures becomes the overriding principle that governs vase painting in its highest stage.
Many of the scenes on these vases come from Greek mythology, though they are not “book illustrations” in the modern sense of that term—the artist was left free to create as he wished, and in this way the first of the really great painters emerged. Nearly 900 vase painters are recognized through connoisseurship, accounting for about half the surviving vases, but only forty have left us their real names, with the rest being identified by a particular masterpiece. Among the great masters of Attic black-figure vases were Sophilos, Kleitias, Nearchos, Lydos, Exekias, and the Amasis Painter.
It is at this point that the scenes on Greek vases begin to achieve the special quality of personal experience, which makes them so easy for us, 2,500 years later, to relate to. The painting on Greek vases is naturalistic. The individuals are dressed as ancient Greeks, they do the things that ancient Greeks did, but we recognize ourselves in them: They gossip at the well, their dogs are a nuisance, they smack recalcitrant children, old men lust after young women, young women smile shyly as young athletes pass by. These are real people, with their character showing in their expressions—slyness, embarrassment, sarcasm, disgust. We feel for the somber mourners at a funeral. The vases are often incomparably beautiful, but they are also documents, showing ancient life in all its glory but without pulling any punches. This is why these vases are important, and why it is important that we know where they were when they were found.
Toward the end of the sixth century, the limitations of the black-figure technique, with its unrealistic color scheme, began to circumscribe artists and the new technique of red-figure vases emerged: the figures were left the color of the clay (and so turned red when the vase was fired), and detail was indicated by fine lines drawn in black glaze or in lines of diluted glaze, which fired as dark brown or translucent yellow. The entire background was a luminous black. This gave the figures much the same appearance as if lit by modern theatrical lighting, making them more dramatic and far more realistic.
And it was now that the truly fine artists began to produce the really great masterpieces, with new subjects matching closely the contours of the vases, which themselves were developing new shapes as well, to match the sophisticated life that then obtained in Periclean Athens—its golden age under its great general and leader, Pericles (c. 495–429). The greatest generation of vase painters was known as the Pioneers (because they experimented with new techniques), and the three greatest names among them were Euphronios, Euthymides, and Phintias. Euphronios (fl. c. 520–c. 500 BC) signed eight Attic vases as painter and, later in his life, signed twelve cups as potter, decorated by other artists. He was particularly interested in showing the human body and experimented with foreshortening to give his compositions greater de
pth. He also produced a pillar monument on the Athenian Acropolis. Euthymides (fl. c. 515–c. 500 BC) signed eight Athenian vases, six as painter, the other two as potter. There is an inscription on an amphora by him in Munich that reads: “Euphronios never did anything this good,” generally interpreted as a playful challenge to the younger artist rather than a taunt. But it shows that artists were aware of each other’s work. Phintias (fl. 520–500 BC) signed six vases as painter and three as potter. The spelling of his names varies, as he was not especially literate.
This period has been described as a primavera (a springtime) that painting would not see again until the Italian Renaissance. In other words, Euphronios, Euthymides, and Phintias are rightly to be regarded as the equivalent of Raphael, Michelangelo, and Leonardo da Vinci: They established the definition of excellence.
The next phase of Attic red-figure painters opened with the Berlin Painter and the Kleophrades Painter. The Berlin Painter is named after a large amphora in the Anitkensammlung (the Museum for Classical Antiquities) in Berlin. His figures so carefully match the shape of his vases that many scholars believe he must have been the potter as well as the painter. Moreover, these figures have that clean simplicity and grace that we now call “classical.” The Kleophrades Painter (fl. c. 505–c. 475 BC) is named after the potter Kleophrades, son of (the black-figure painter) Amasis, whose signature appears on a large red-figure cup now in the Bibliothèque Nationale in Paris. In this period, scenes are lightened in style, with playful borders, and there are fewer figures. It was also about now that cup painters begin to be distinguished from pot painters. Cup, or kylix, painting was perhaps the most intimate of all forms, given the vessel’s use in symposia. The great cup painters were Onesimos, Douris (who produced 280 vases, signing forty), and the Brygos Painter.
