Fig. 20. PART OF THE TOMBA DELLA SCIMMIA AT CHIUSI
After the preparations comes the ceremonial parade of the racing chariots past the stands; three chariots are seen in a row ([fig. 15]): the first has not yet begun to move, the horses are pawing the ground impatiently, and the groom is standing at their heads trying to pacify them; the second chariot has already started, and the team of the third chariot is going a little faster, a fine crescendo which reminds one of good Greek art rather than of Etruscan. To the left are the stands for the spectators, which are continued on the back wall; similar stands are seen in the corner where back wall and left main wall adjoin. We give, after Stackelberg’s drawing, the two parts from the first-mentioned corner ([fig. 19]). On elevated platforms, bounded above by lines evidently meant to indicate curtains which might be drawn before the ‘box’ against sun or heavy showers, men and women are seated and show their absorption in the games by their eager gestures. The foremost woman to the right actually greets the procession of chariots with her raised hand. She is a matron wearing a shawl (epiblema) over the arms, and the back of her head, and under that a tutulus. Next to her sits a young girl with a tutulus, noble in bearing and gesture like a young goddess. Then follows a varied company of youths, women, and a bearded man. The young man, who is represented partly frontal with his chin resting on his hand and the head and left leg frontal, is of special interest. The problem of foreshortening has been very neatly solved. Under the wooden floor of the stands the common folk are disporting themselves, some of them engrossed in anything but the games.
THE AUDIENCE
In order to understand the significance of this representation one has to realize that such detailed pictures of spectators at athletic games are unknown in Greek art. The nearest parallel is the assembly of the gods, the Olympian spectators, in the frieze of the Treasury of the Siphnians at Delphi,[34] and in the Parthenon frieze, between which the Tomba delle Bighe chronologically occupies an intermediate position, about twenty-five years later than the former, and about fifty years earlier than the latter. At the same time we learn that female spectators were also present; this was not so at the Olympic games, but seems to have been a common Italic custom. The stands, too, appear typically Italic; on such ἴκρια the spectators were seated at those athletic games and contests which in earlier times, according to Vitruvius (v. 1), were held in the market-places of Italian towns. Amphitheatres were not known till the first century B.C., but if one imagines these market-places on festival days with such wooden stands built up on all four sides, and these stands curved round at the corners in order that the spectators might see better, one can understand how the shape of the amphitheatre originated.[35]
TOMBA DELLA SCIMMIA AT CHIUSI
Within the sphere of Etruscan painting also, this is the only large representation of an audience. Elsewhere the artist limited himself to the individual figure as representative of the spectators; thus in the Tomba della Scimmia (the Monkey Tomb) at Chiusi, the only spectator is a lady dressed in black and sheltered by a sunshade; she is seated on a high chair without a back (diphros), her feet on a footstool ([fig. 20]). The tomb was discovered in 1846 by François. The pictures are executed in a thin colour, probably a sort of water-colour, applied directly to the stone without an intermediate layer of stucco; a similar technique is employed in the other and larger tomb at Chiusi, the Tomba Casuccini. The four walls are decorated with scenes from the race-course and the palaestra. Behind the lady on the wall which is reproduced, we see two men in rapid motion and with ample gestures probably intended to render the bustle and hurry at the funeral, which is also represented, as we have seen, by one of the figures in the Augur tomb (cp. [fig. 4]). The sunshade carried by the ‘widow’ was an Oriental fashion, but in the fifth century B.C. the women of Greece had adopted it, as is shown by the Knights of Aristophanes (l. 1348 σκιάδειον). To the left the usual flute-player is standing, and the round dais in front of him is not an altar, but, as Milani was the first to point out, the small table on which prizes were placed.[36] Next comes a girl with a censer on her head. She is generally taken to be a female juggler, but carrying a tall object on one’s head is still a common practice with the women of the South, and censers (thymiateria), as we learn from Dionysius of Halicarnassus, were always carried at the ‘pompae’ in early Rome; at the high festivals they were placed in front of the Roman doorways.[37] They were sometimes of costly material.[38] But our woman seems to be standing on a platform, and the near presence of the flute-player, and the turning of her body and position of her arms, seem to indicate some difficult dance performed with the big object borne on her head in a small, limited space; hence a kind of old Etruscan dervish-dance of which we have no other knowledge. The two figures next to her are a big and a small man who are cooling their bleeding noses with sponges: the artist gives the atmosphere of the scene after the fight. On one of the other walls in this tomb the boxers are ready for action, raising their cestus-bound fists against each other, one hand closed for attack, the other open for defence, as frequently described in the ancient authors.[39] Cicero tells us that boxers sighed and groaned, in order to increase the force of the blow.[40] These cestus fights must have been terrible. The guard, nowadays less, was then more important than the blow, for it was too dangerous to take the risk of being hit by one’s opponent when attacking him, even if one was confident that one’s own blow would be the harder; one had to play for an opening, at the same time guarding against the single blow which was sufficient to knock a man out. Finally, on the extreme left of the picture ([fig. 20]) we meet with a scene which is repeated in another picture in the same tomb, as well as in the Tomba del Triclinio: a rider seated sideways and at the same time leading another horse. The race with a led horse was an Oriental custom, and appears for the first time on the Phoenician metal bowls of the eighth and seventh centuries B.C. This seat, sideways on the horse, is of Scythian origin, and in Greek art usually characterizes the Amazons. The Etruscans, with their passion for difficult games, evidently combined the two in order to make the races as exciting as possible.
