Life after death

Posted: 13 Feb 2012  |  By: Joseph Brennan

The Etruscans: A Classical Fantasy
Nicholson Museum, The University of Sydney
Sydney
Until March 2012

In Etruscan Places, D. H. Lawrence wrote, “To the Etruscan all was alive; the whole Universe lived; and the business of man was himself to live amid it.” The Etruscans were an ancient Italian civilisation which emerged around the eighth century BC and were ascendant in the Mediterranean in the sixth (over an area roughly equivalent to the size of modern Tuscany, in particular in ancient Etruria [a region of rich mineral deposits] on the northern part of the Italian peninsula). They declined through the fifth and fourth centuries before being defeated by the Romans and subsequently incorporated into the Roman Empire in the second. They have fascinated ancient authors and scholars from as early as the first century AD and much of this interest is due to the sophistication of their culture — reached so early, their influence (felt long after their demise) and the mystery that followed their fall.

Due to the thoroughness of the Romans (and their destruction of Etruscan architecture, literature and art), much of what we’ve come to learn about them has been from the artefacts found in their tombs, spared only because they were subterranean. “The Etruscans constructed cities of the dead (necropoleis) outside the walls of their cities of the living (poleis),” said exhibition curator Michael Turner. “They were painted and decorated as if houses of the living, filled with the accoutrements of drinking and dining.” Or, as Lawrence worded it, “Death, to the Etruscan, was a pleasant continuance of life, with jewels and wine and flutes playing for the dance. It was neither an ecstasy of bliss, a heaven, nor a purgatory of torment. It was just a natural continuance …”

They had a language that, according to Dionysius of Halicarnassus, “[did not] resemble any other”, and a somewhat progressive approach to gender and sexuality; much of which came through in their art (as seen on Tomba dei Tori, Tarquinia). Considering that by the first century BC their language and culture was virtually extinct (Etruscan literature having disappeared entirely), what remained were the writings of their contemporaries, such as Plato, who described the mysterious people as ‘immoral’. And yet their art also featured strong spiritual imagery that revealed a complex sacred world.

“Their imagery reflected the important rituals of mortal, privileged existence,” Turner said, imagery of “dancing, feasting, games, sex and death; rituals that would become the eternal existence of the hoped for afterlife”. The winged dæmons of Vanth and Charun, for example, often flanked a door painted onto the rock at the end of a tomb; Vanth an angel with a torch to light the way, Charun a frightening doorkeeper with a large hammer to close the crossbeam. “[Their] religion is something more than a sorcery, and something less than a faith,” C. G. Leland wrote in Etruscan Roman Remains. “It consists in remains of a mythology of spirits, the principal of whom preserve the names and attributes of the old Etruscan gods.”

Images from top:

Tomb wall-painting, head of a woman. Detail from the Tomba dell’Orco I. Tarquinia. Mid-fourth century BC.

Impasto, single-handled, biconical funerary urn. From Southern Etruria, possibly Tarquinia or Vulci. 850–800 BC. Nicholson Museum NM 62.684. Photo ©Rowan Conroy 2011.

Tomb wall-painting, dancing man. Detail from the Tomba degli Auguri. Tarquinia. 525–500 BC.

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