THE LATE-CLASSICAL RENAISSANCE IN GREEK ARTS

THE LATE-CLASSICAL RENAISSANCE IN GREEK ARTS

Piecing together the development of Etruscan art in the first three-quarters of the fourth century BC is a real challenge for modern critics, even more difficult than that posed by the last three-quarters of the previous century. From the end of the fifth century and throughout the fourth century, the revival of the art and craft tradition (initially more quantitative than qualitative) took place against the background of an Etruria already shorn of extensive territories in Campania and soon to lose those in the Po valley. Thus the path taken by this revival was far from simple or easily discernible.

The political revival on which the new social order and the recovery of the local artisanal tradition depended proved slow; the directions it took were tortuous and remain unclear. In many respects, it was the nobility, in search of self—glorification, that led the recovery in commissions for works of art, either in the private sphere of tombs, which were becoming increasingly complex in style and were sometimes richly decorated with paintings and sculptures, or in the public sphere. After a long period of inactivity that had lasted almost a century, building began again in the cities of southern Etruria, which encouraged the development of terracotta sculpture. The economic recovery of the fourth century helped to restore favourable conditions, not unlike those of the sixth century, and led to the emergence of a stratified society and of a middle class interested in consuming art. The process of revival was thus a complex one that cannot he reduced to a single unified phenomenon.

The city of Volsinii-Orvieto played an important role in this process. It was the site of the Fanum (shrine) of Voltumnae, a deity common to all Etruscans, and of important annual ceremonies that served to legitimate the quasi—political, quasi—religious primacy of one city over the others, and that of the priuceps of that city over those in all Etruria. Volsinii’s position as Etruriar caput — “the moral capital of Etruria” as Livy described it comparable - with that of Olympia or Delphi in the Greek world, led to the development of a great deal of artistic activity around the city, notably the production of sumptuous bronze votive sculptures. According to cine Greek source that tells of the sacking of the city by the Romans in 265 BC, there were more than two thousand such sculptures. It is no accident that the Mars from Todi, which we have already described as a transitional work pointing the way towards the renaissance of the fourth century, has been attributed to the Volsinii workshop. Nor is at a coincidence that the sanctuaries of that city, where the Etruscan aristocracies battled for prestige and dedacated their votive offerings, were repaired, rebuilt and even extended from the end of the fifth century BC onwards.

The art of terracotta sculpture in Volsinii, which produced the splendid architectonic terracottas that adorned at least two temples in the city (Via S. Leonardo and Belvedere) and two extramural ones (Cannicella and Campo della Fiera), clearly reflects the formal and cultural contradictions that characterized the end of the fifth century and the early decades of the fourth century. The oldest and most highly developed of these terracotta sculptures are those from the temple in the Via S. Leonardo, which date from the end of the fifth century. The very beautiful head of Zeus-Tinia, and the equally beautiful one of the female deity that belongs with it, undoubtedly seek to arouse feelings of pietas and reverentia:

they draw upon models from the earliest Classical period, both in the conception of the face, which is very close to the Severe style, and in the stylized, not truly Classical rendering, of the hair and beard. However, the other pieces in the pediment group, such as the torso of a young man wearing a bracelet adorned with bullae, with its extremely delicate modelling, show that the decoration was conceived towards the cud of the fifth century and that the archaisms apparent in the treatment of the figures of the deities were introduced deliberately for subtle ideological ends.

The rear pediment of the Belvedere of Orvieto (late fifth—early fourth century BC), the decorations of which depict a recently identified Homeric theme, was also made up of traditional elements of the Severe style combined with new features characteristic of the late fifth century. The scene is the drawing of lots for the Achaean hero to face Hector, the Trojan champion, and is certainly an allusion to the annual investiture of the Etruscan princeps held at Volsinii. Here, however, the elements of the Severe style are not consciously employed as stylistic devices, but reflect rather the enduring qualities of a living past that shows through the incompletely assimilated Classical form. Although they are squat and some of their gestures are inelegant, the bodies conform to the Classical canon. But the treatment of the hair, draperies and various facial detail, redolent of the Severe style, does not add any particular note of solemnity and is, on the contrary, rather expressionistic. Thus the persistence of the older Severe style influenced two works produced at the same time and in the same place in two entirely different ways and to two entirely different ends.

The abundance of artistic material and evidence means that careful examination of the work produced in Volsinii clearly reveals the path taken by Etruscan figurative culture during this period of renaissance, when the focus of attention was on the acquisition of Classical forms. The Mars from Todi, already mentioned above, exemplifies the deliberate attempts by sculptors at Volsinii to assimilate elements of the Classical style at a relatively early stage. The bronze head from Bolsena, often dated from the first half of the fourth century but belonging in fact to the fifth century BC, demonstrates the profound allegiance of the Etruscan aristocracy to the Severe style, which was left almost untouched by the early incursions of the softer Classical style. Thus the Bolsena head represents the beginning of this slow process of formal change, while the Cagli head, which ‘was undoubtedly produced in a Volsinii workshop and subsequently transferred, like the Mars from Todi, to the adjoining region of Picenum, is an exceptional piece, in which the ascendant Classical forms have been fully assimilated, making it representative of the culmination of this process between the first and second quarters of the fourth century. It is the work produced at Volsinii that most clearly illustrates how Etruscan figurative culture was able to free itself from the Severe style. A substantial number of high-quality items has come down to us, mainly public commissions produced at a time when the city was developing rapidly, or votive offerings, made of metal, from the highest strata of society. In other eases, by contrast, evidence available is only episodic; the works that have survived seem isolated and difficult to place in context. As far as sculpting in bronze is concerned, the extraordinary votive statue of the Chimaera foreshadows, as early as the first decades of the fourth century, the key role in the metalworking industry that the more northerly city of Arezzo was to acquire during the Hellenistic period. The design of the piece is very eclectic, with Severe or even Archaic elements, such as the lion mask, the highly stylized mane and the schematic appearance of the rib cage, combining with purely Classical elements, such as the fluid treatment of the surfaces, which are delicately animated by bulging veins and tightly tensed muscles.

The Chimaera is not an isolated case. Throughout the first half of the fourth century BC, smaller votive bronzes from northern Etruria and utilitarian items, found mainly in the plain of the Po, were still heavily influenced by the Severe style, which sculptors frequently and not unsuccessfully combined with elements of the Classical style. This reflects the persistent fondness of local craftsmen for the prestigious international style widespread in all Greek or Hellenized regions in the previous century. Thus in a society still governed by the rigid norms of a very closed aristocracy, such as the cities in the heart of northern Etruria during the first half of the fourth century BC, funerary sculpture, the only form of the art practised in these conservative zones, still oscillated between traditional allegiance to the almost “courtly” taste for the Severe style and the attraction of the new Classical style. This. is shown in certain traditional products, such as the cinerary statues from Chiusi ,carved in limestone, that were made in provincial workshops. They tended, as we have already seen with the terracottas from the Via S. Leonardo in Orvieto, to retain the old formulae fur those parts that carried meaning (face, hair, general anatomy) while reserving the new elements for details such as draperies that had less influence on the effect of august majesty that it was the statue’s ideological purpose to convey. The same process is also apparent in larger—scale bronze works, probably produced in workshops in7the same Chiusi region, such as the cover of the cinerary urn with a reclining figure from Perugia. It is a refined piece, though mannered in some respects, particularly in the rendering of the anatomy, which is relatively unstructured and located precisely halfway between the two artistic languages.

However, the workshops of the Orvieto region were not alone in the difficulties they had experienced at the end of the fifth century BC. Workshops in the cities of southern Etruria were beginning to awaken from the torpor into which the oligarchic austerity of the fifth century had plunged them, and were encountering even greater difficulties than their northern counterparts because of the greater economic and cultural disruptions they had been forced to undergo. While there seemed to be no revival in public commissions in the northern cities, at Tarquinia (the sanctuary of the “Ara della Regina”) and at Cerveteri (sanctuary of Pyrgi), architectonic terracottas of very high quality have been found that date from the middle of the fourth century or shortly afterwards (thus slightly after the flowering of terracotta modelling at Volsinii) and follow the canons of Classical Greek sculpture in its late phase.

In these southern cities, there were not enough private commissions to fill the gap between the end of the fifth and the middle of the fourth centuries BC, and little votive sculpture of high quality was produced during this period. However, as the intermediate social classes gradually reconstituted themselves, an opening developed for medium—sized and large—scale votive sculpture in terracotta (usually produced by moulding) that was to constitute most of what we know about votive sculpture in the following period. Production of funerary sculpture (which had never ceased in the northern city of Chiusi) slowly recommenced, taking as its point of departure the constantly repeated and renewed theme of the figure reclining on the lid of a sarcophagus This typology was possibly inspired by the prestige of the Chiusi aristocracy, and was to enjoy considerable success in the centuries to come. However, the first steps down the road to recovery were hesitant, as is demonstrated, for example, by the flat, poorly delineated figures on the sarcophagus from the “Tomb of the Sarcophagi” at Cerveteri, which dates from the end of the fifth or the beginning of the fourth century. Some twenty years later, however, the two sarcophagi for the “Tomb of the Tetnies” were made at Vulci, probably under the influence of the more active artistic environment in neighbouring Volsinsii. The conjugal couple on each lid, as well as the sculptures on the sarcophagus itself, depicting both mythological and “real- life” scenes, are wholly Classical in the rendering of the anatomy and the drape of the garments, although here and there, in the faces of the deceased and the draperies, there are glimpses of the style of the previous century. The sarcophagus at Tarquinia known as the “Tomb of the Magnate”, which dates from the third quarter of the fourth century, represents the culmination of the process. Here, the earlier tradition is no longer represented by deliberate repetitions of significant details but rather by conventional borrowings of marginal elements, such as the sphinx and lion cubs placed as akroteria at the ends of the sarcophagus. Henceforth, on the eve of the great Hellenistic transformation, the Classical style became a common heritage for all Etruria.