mostly square-shaped rooms, with slightly-arched or gabled roofs, excavated in soft sandstone or tufa hillsides. The earlier ones show Egyptian influence in drawing and in composition: they are broadly designed with flat unshaded tints, the faces in profile, except the eyes, which are drawn as if seen in front. Colours, as in Egypt, are used conventionally—male flesh red, white or pale yellow for the females, black for demons. In one respect these paintings differ from those of the Egyptians; few colours are used—red, brown, and yellow ochres, carbon-black, lime or chalk-white, and occasionally blue are the only pigments. The rock-walls are prepared by being covered with a thin skin of lime stucco, and lime or chalk is mixed in small quantities with all the colours; hence the restriction to “earth pigments,” made necessary by the dampness of these subterranean chambers. The process employed was in fact a kind of fresco, though the stucco ground was not applied in small patches only sufficient for the day’s work; the dampness of the rock was enough to keep the stucco skin moist, and so allow the necessary infiltration of colour from the surface. Many of these paintings when first discovered were fresh in tint and uninjured by time, but they are soon dulled by exposure to light. In the course of centuries great changes of style naturally took place; the early Egyptian influence, probably brought to Etruria through the Phoenician traders, was succeeded by an even more strongly-marked Greek influence—at first archaic and stiff, then developing into great beauty of drawing, and finally yielding to the Roman spirit, as the degradation of Greek art advanced under their powerful but inartistic Roman conquerors.
Throughout this succession of styles—Egyptian, Greek and Graeco-Roman—there runs a distinct undercurrent of individuality due to the Etruscans themselves. This appears not only in the drawing but also in the choice of subjects. In addition to pictures of banquets with musicians and dancers, hunting and racing scenes, the workshops of different craftsmen and other domestic subjects, all thoroughly Hellenic in sentiment, other paintings occur which are very un-Greek in feeling. These represent the judgment and punishment of souls in a future life. Mantus, Charun and other infernal deities of the Rasena, hideous in aspect and armed with hammers, or furies depicted as black-bearded demons winged and brandishing live snakes, terrify or torture shrinking human souls. Others, not the earliest in date, represent human sacrifices, such as those at the tomb of Patroclus—a class of subjects which, though Homeric, appears rarely to have been selected by Greek painters. The constant import into Etruria of large quantities of fine Greek painted vases appears to have contributed to keep up the supremacy of Hellenic influence during many centuries, and by their artistic superiority to have prevented the development of a more original and native school of art. Though we now know Etruscan painting only from the tombs, yet Pliny mentions (H. N. xxxv. 3) that fine wall-paintings existed in his time, with colours yet fresh, on the walls of ruined temples at Ardea and Lanuvium, executed, he says, before the founding of Rome. As before mentioned, the actual dates of the existing paintings are uncertain. It cannot therefore be asserted that any existing specimens are much older than 600 B.C., though some, especially at Veii, certainly appear to have the characteristics of more remote antiquity. The most important of these paintings have been discovered in the cemeteries of Veii, Caere, Tarquinii, Vulci, Cervetri and other Etruscan cities.
Even in Egypt the use of colour does not appear to have been more universal than it was among the Greeks (see Greek Art), who applied it freely to their marble statues and reliefs, the whole of their buildings inside and out, as well as for the decoration of flat wall-surfaces. They appear to have cared little for pure form, and not to have Greek Painting.valued the delicate ivory-like tint and beautiful texture of their fine Pentelic and Parian marbles, except as a ground for coloured ornament. A whole class of artists, called ἀγαλμάτων ἐγκαυσταί, were occupied in colouring marble sculpture, and their services were very highly valued.[1] In some cases, probably for the sake of hiding the joints and getting a more absorbent surface, the marble, however pure and fine in texture, was covered with a thin skin of stucco made of mixed lime and powdered marble. An alabaster sarcophagus, found in a tomb near Corneto, and now in the Etruscan museum at Florence, is decorated outside with beautiful purely Greek paintings, executed on a stucco skin as hard and smooth as the alabaster. The pictures represent combats of the Greeks and Amazons. The colouring, though rather brilliant, is simply treated, and the figures are kept strictly to one plane without any attempt at complicated perspective. Other valuable specimens of Greek art, found at Herculaneum and now in the Naples Museum, are some small paintings, one of girls playing with dice, another of Theseus and the Minotaur. These are painted with miniature-like delicacy on the bare surface of marble slabs; they are almost monochromatic, and are of the highest beauty both in drawing and in gradations of shadow—quite unlike any of the Greek vase-paintings. The first-mentioned painting is signed ΑΛΕΞΑΝΔΡΟΣ ΑΘΗΝΑΙΟΣ. It is probable that the strictly archaic paintings of the Greeks, such as those of Polygnotus in the 5th century B.C., executed with few and simple colours, had much resemblance to those on vases, but Pliny is wrong when he asserts that, till the time of Apelles (c. 350–310 B.C.), the Greek painters only used black, white, red and yellow.[2] Judging from the peculiar way in which the Greeks and their imitators the Romans used the names of colours, it appears that they paid more attention to tones and relations of colour than to actual hues. Thus most Greek and Latin colour-names are now untranslatable. Homer’s “wine-like sea” (οἴνοψ), Sophocles’s “wine-coloured ivy” (Œd. Col.), and Horace’s “purpureus olor” probably refer less to what we should call colour than to the chromatic strength of the various objects and their more or less strong powers of reflecting light, either in motion or when at rest. Nor have we any word like Virgil’s “flavus,” which could be applied both to a lady’s hair and to the leaf of an olive-tree.[3]
During the best periods of Greek art the favourite classes of subjects were scenes from poetry, especially Homer and contemporary history. The names πινακοθήκη and στοὰ ποικίλη were given to many public buildings from their walls being covered with paintings. Additional interest was given to the historical subjects by the introduction of portraits; e.g. in the great picture of the battle of Marathon (490 B.C.), on the walls of the στοὰ ποικίλη in Athens, portraits were given of the Greek generals Miltiades, Callimachus, and others. This picture was painted about forty years after the battle by Polygnotus and Micon. One of the earliest pictures recorded by Pliny (xxxv. 8) represented a battle of the Magnesians (c. 716 B.C.); it was painted by Bularchus, a Lydian artist, and bought at a high price by King Candaules. Many other important Greek historical paintings are mentioned by Pausanias and earlier writers. The Pompeian mosaic of the defeat of the Persians by Alexander is probably a Romanized copy from some celebrated Greek painting; it obviously was not designed for mosaic work.
Landscape painting appears to have been unknown among the Greeks, even as a background to figure-subjects. The poems especially of Homer and Sophocles show that this was not through want of appreciation of the beauties of nature, but partly, probably, because the main object of Greek painting was to tell some definite story, and also from their just sense of artistic fitness, which prevented them from attempting in their mural decorations to disguise the flat solidity of the walls by delusive effects of aerial perspective and distance.
It is interesting to note that even in the time of Alexander the Great the somewhat archaic works of the earlier painters were still appreciated. In particular Aristotle praises Polygnotus,
- ↑ This process, circumlitio, is mentioned by Pliny (H. N. xxxv. 40).
- ↑ Pliny’s remarks on subjects such as this should be received with caution. He was neither a scientific archaeologist nor a practical artist.
- ↑ So also a meaning unlike ours is attached to Greek technical words—by τόνος they meant, not “tone,” but the gradations of light and shade, and by ἁρμογἠ the relations of colour. See Pliny, H. N. xxxv. 5; and Ruskin, Mod. Painters, pt. iv. cap. 13.
