Here should be mentioned the bronze utensils ornamented by drawings—sgraffiti—particularly the mirrors, generally in the form of plates, one side of which had a polished surface, while the other was engraved. The handles upon these either represented figures like caryatides, or, more commonly, ended in a deer’s head. Toilet cistas, a further variety of these works, were of cylindrical form, usually with the claws of animals for feet, and a group of human figures upon the cover as a handle; but these, on account of their engravings, should rather be considered in the section upon painting, and are mentioned here merely because of the accompanying castings. Only a small part of them belongs to the archaic period.
About 300 B.C. the art of Etruria appears to have reached its highest point of independence and perfection, which, in sculpture, is illustrated by the terra-cotta sarcophagus of Cære in the Louvre, and by the Capitoline Wolf. The old ignorance of proportions had disappeared, and a tolerable correctness was attained; the realistic tendency no longer struggled with unpliant forms, as in the former period, when it might have been likened to the lisping and stammering of children. Yet the Etruscan artists never succeeded in harmonious combinations, or in mastery and surety of form. The stream of Grecian art, long restrained, or, so far as possible, turned aside, at length overcame all obstacles. Up to this time the taste of the Etruscans for the archaic and the archaistic, aided by the importations of that character, had given to their art an antiquity of aspect in form and in painting far beyond its true age. But when political Etruria ceased to exist, as its walls were destroyed at the opening of the cities by the Romans, Grecian art, of the period of the Diadochi, entered from the coasts of Magna Græcia.
This is first noticeable in the sculptured lids of the sarcophagi of this Hellenistic period. That of Cære, mentioned above, was executed in almost entire independence of the influence of Greece: a copy was made directly from life, with a prosaic realism which, without restraint or culture, and with no feeling for the beautiful, was still fascinating from its naturalness. In later times this unpoetical sobriety and truthfulness to individual peculiarities still existed; but they were affected by Hellenic forms and formulas, which, being without organic unity or intrinsic significance, and void of capacity for development, were merely an exterior varnish. This period is most clearly represented by the lids of three sarcophagi carved in alabaster and a soft stone. Of these, one bears a reclining image with five statues in the full round at the head and feet (Fig. 261); the two others, from Vulci, represent a man and woman upon the marriage bed, wrought in high-relief. The portraiture of the chief personages is by no means limited to the heads. Apart from the accessories, chosen from the purely human sphere of daily existence, the position and modelling of the nude portions of the body were evidently taken from living models. The secondary figures and the drapery show a decided Grecian influence, in visible contrast to the inherent realism. Organic connection and unity of style are wanting, and this want leaves it to be regretted that Greek forms should ever have found admission into Etruria, for by them the native tendency towards the realistic was checked, while the originality sacrificed was not compensated by a merely external Greek formalism, never essentially understood.
This condition of things is most strikingly exemplified by the reliefs upon the two sarcophagi of Vulci, the lids of which have been referred to above. Upon the front of one is shown a wedding procession, and upon the end a funeral chariot drawn by mules, with the married pair seated under a canopy. In the arrangement and drapery they somewhat resemble Grecian sculptures, but the heads, especially of the important figures, are portraits, with traits of realistic coarseness in all the nude parts. Even in subject, as Brunn remarks, this naturalism is apparent. While the Greeks would have chosen to represent a mythological wedding like that of Heracles, Peleus, or Cadmus, and the Romans would have illustrated the bridal pair—in a conception more theological than mythological—by Victory, Juno, and Venus, with the Graces in their train, the Etruscans show the marriage in a literal manner, the united pair being followed by servants, with couch, sun-shade, wash-basin, crook, horn, flutes, and harp. In the reliefs upon the other sarcophagus the subjects selected offered no opportunity for purely Etruscan motives; battles of the Amazons, and heroic encounters of naked youths, on foot and upon horse, gave no scope to realistic treatment. They consequently appear almost entirely Greek, but clumsy and superficial, justifying, by the slavishness of their imitation and the weakness of their composition, the suggestion of Brunn, that the Etruscan artists not only made use of Hellenic designs as a kind of pattern-book, but, when they would illustrate some scene for which they had no complete guide, combined separate groups from different examples. In the steer seized by lions, and the horse lacerated by griffins, upon the small sides of the same sarcophagus, may be recognized not only Oriental conceptions, but an Asiatic treatment.
The terra-cotta sculptures of this period show the same Hellenic tendency, with, the same superficiality and relation to the late Greek degeneracy. Examples of this are to be found in the antefixes of a sarcophagus from Vulci, and some fine urns belonging particularly to Northern Etruria—Volterra, Clusium, and Perugia—which appear in tufa and travertine, and represent the latest period—150 to 100 B.C. Grecian legendary scenes have been observed upon earlier works, and afterwards they became more general; but a certain preference for particular and better known fables is evident, and native additions are easily recognized.
Not to speak of later examples in bronze, and the engraved drawings upon cistas and mirrors, which will be treated of below, the most important statue is the so-called Mars from Todi, now in the Vatican museum. According to its inscription, it is Umbrian, but it is properly to be considered here, because for the too limited term Etruscan art might well be substituted Italian, or at least Central Italian. Vigorous in all its details, and betraying throughout the later Hellenic style, the Mars is yet stiff, heavy, and without organic understanding. Similar to it are other figures of warriors; but the Boy with the Duck, in the museum at Leyden, in spite of the stiff and hard features, would, perhaps, not be recognized as Etruscan at all, were it not for the inscription upon his right leg, and the bulla upon his neck-band. The life-like statue of an orator in Florence might, in like manner, pass for Roman, were there not something in the head, and in the lame position of the legs, particularly hard and commonplace, a quality which, in the Roman works of this kind, is always tempered by some degree of heroic conception. The difference is less evident because the primitive art of the Romans and Etruscans was much the same, and the Greek influence the same in both, though this was earlier and more active in Rome.
