Art: Treasures of Etruria

When Rome was little more than a cluster of hill villages and the Forum a swampy marketplace, the proud and pleasure-loving Etruscans ruled Italy from the Tiber to the Po. In the end, the Roman legions crushed the loose confederation of Etruscan city-states and razed their walls. Etruria’s bizarre hobgoblin world of superstition, ritual and magic provided the folk mythology from which poets from Virgil to Dante evoked their images of Hades and Hell; its art was buried in underground tombs to await latter-day grave robbers.

Even today, Romans prefer to dwell on the grandeur of classic Rome rather than recall the Etruscan kings, who, as Livy reminded them, could once make the Roman Senate tremble. But tucked away in a corner of Rome’s Villa Borghese park is one of the world’s richest collections of Etruscan art, which each year is drawing increasing numbers of visitors. Housed in the massive Villa Giulia, built in 1555 as a papal summer resort, the collection today numbers bronzes, terra-cotta sculptures and artifacts in the tens of thousands, displays its choicest treasures in two floors of one wing that is a model of museum showmanship.

One of the Villa Giulia’s unquestioned Etruscan masterpieces is the Sarcophagus of the Spouses (above-), found in the ancient Etruscan city of Caere (now the small town of Cerveteri, some 25 miles outside Rome) and recently reassembled. Molded from terra cotta in the 6th century B.C., it is a key to the culture of the Etruscans, who, haunted in life by a host of demons and ogres, prepared optimistically for a life after death that would be an unending feast. Their vision of paradise is vividly shown on the walls of the underground tombs—a world in which dancers, lute players, animals abound, and all that was most transitory in life could be relished for eternity.

Quick-witted and active, the Etruscans loved motion in their art, depicted goats bounding, dancers leaping, warriors with lances poised. Mortuary figures gesture and smile; even the sticklike figures (see opposite), which ancient Romans hoarded by the thousands, stride and posture in space like the armature-thin figures of present-day Paris Sculptor Alberto Giacometti. Sorceress with Snake becomes almost as thin as her emblem and as attenuated as a figure by El Greco.

The Greeks strove to hold a timeless image up to man. The Romans grew to love the grandiose and the particular. The Etruscans, who insisted that art must above all else be expressive, and who felt free to warp and distort their images to infuse them with energy, are equally the ancestors of Western art.