“Colori degli Etruschi” is exhibited at the Centrale Montemartini Museum (Via Ostiense 106–00154 Roma) from 11 July 2019– 2 February 2020. Entrance ticket is € 11,00 for full price, € 10,00 for reduced (a city museum, so more expensive), including the two exhibitions (“Volti di Roma alla Centrale Montemartini” e “Colori degli Etruschi”) and the actual museum. Opening times: Tuesday to Sunday 9.00–19.00; closed Monday. Closest metro stop: Garbatella. Highly recommended!
When I first noticed this exhibition’s title, as I was riding on an ATAC bus from the Circus Maximus towards the Pantheon to take a friend around Rome, I thought to myself
not another exhibition on Roman wall painting.
(Maybe what you’re thinking about this Ostraka article)
In fairness, there have been many in recent years and most have been rather narrowly-focused, zooming onto the universal aesthetic qualities with less attention to academic detail. There is a wide range of reasons for this: some would argue it is a product of today’s fascination with materialistic consumption. Most of these exhibitions rarely took into account the works behind the exhibition and artefacts, such as the context, display and museology. This is perhaps best exemplified by the Rome — Paintings of an Empire exhibition at the Scuderie del Quirinale in 2009. There is no doubt it was an excellent and carefully thought-out collection of art. Fundamentally, however, it was missing a point — best captured in the curator’s, La Rocca, own comment: “This is not an exhibition of archaeology. It’s an exhibition of paintings”.
It is the deliberate divorce of these artworks from their archaeological contexts and the suppression of the work behind the scenes that is frustrating. Sure, you can get an idea of what an ancient Roman household would have looked like by the omnipresent polychromy in the museum. But it’s a very narrow view conditioned by modern conceptions of aesthetics; there’s so much more to them. How can you understand the paintings without understanding where they were found, how they were found, what they reveal about their archaeological context, and, what interests me the most, how they ended up in that exhibition — that is, how are they displayed and how modern culture has interacted with them so that they ended up here. These questions are often ignored at the expense of attracting the millions of blurry-eyed tourists relishing the colour. And yet there’s so much more that we could be learning from these exhibitions and that these exhibitions could be doing to present information on how we view these artefacts today and how different it is from the ancient context.
For all its innovations and fascinating rationale, this problem was also acute, I thought, in the recent exhibition Ovid: Love, Myths, and Other Stories last winter (of which I also wrote a review). This is, of course, not to say the exhibition was terrible — quite the opposite, it was one of the best I have been to due to the synoptic, cross-cultural and classical reception approach, which has often been neglected and not done on this scale before. However, placing artwork produced in contexts of nearly 2000-years apart side-by-side largely divorces them from their original contexts at the expense of prioritising a diachronic interpretation. The potentiality to observe other interpretations is suppressed.
When I went to go and see this exhibition, however, on the first Sunday of the month of September 2019, when all the city-run museums in Italy are open for free (well, at least for Roman residents, but you can get away with it most of the time), I was quite taken aback.
Apart from showing some amazingly preserved painted wall frescoes, panels, and architectonic decoration in polychromatic terracotta mainly from around Caere, modern-day Cerveteri, the exhibition is remarkable for being the first to display almost all such known decorated terracotta in one exhibition and back in its “home country”. This is a big achievement and a great tool for modern scholarship — you can go and study this corpus at your leisure, all in a relatively accessible place (of Rome, at least). Moreover, many of the artefacts were cleverly displayed in the exhibition so that they highlighted different accounts of well-known myths, thus giving voice to the other side of the story that is so often dominated by literature. Finally, although seemingly trivial, this is one of the few exhibitions I have been to that was actually a reasonable length, whilst still imparting new and valuable knowledge. (The Ovid exhibition did drag on for a bit towards the end).
But this exhibition is so much more than that.
What made it so intriguing is that it is also very much a product (and a positive one at that) of its time. It uses the displays of the artefacts to raise awareness of and highlight the increasing opposition against illegal antiquities trafficking and encouraging international cultural cooperation.
Driven by today’s increasing awareness of illegal antiquity trading, repatriation of monuments, and “Cultural Diplomacy”, the exhibition brings a refreshing perspective on an endemic problem that has most recently been foregrounded in the increasingly urgent and hostile debate over the Elgin Marbles by the Greek government. On the other hand, positive collaborations are also dominating the news — on 3 September, France vowed to send its Parthenon marbles back to Athens. These topics lie the core of this exhibition — many of the artefacts were confiscated by Carabinieri raids in 2016 at Geneva, taking some artefacts which date back to the extraordinary scaled looting of the Cerveteri necropolises between 1950–1980. Many artefacts have likewise been repatriated after long talks between foreign museums since 2000, especially the Ny Carlsberg Glyptotek Museum in Copenhagen and the J. Paul Getty Museum in Malibu, California.
Moreover, the exhibition explicitly sets out its aim to challenge the spectator to consider questions about the effects of illegal antiquity trafficking: verifying the authenticity of ancient artefacts, our and museums’ activities in funding societally detrimental activities, the limitations of it to potential archaeological data, and much more.
In this light, the exhibition also aimed at informing the audience of the current push against the illicit trade of antiquities. Beyond simply telling you, it tried specifically to show you through photographs and a movie of the entire process of the tracking, capturing, and the ethics behind clandestine antiquities trade — it even had some display cases showing the artefacts in the state of their confiscation. By doing so, the exhibition effectively argued that such artefacts should belong in a museum where everyone can visit them, not just serving as a collector’s paraphernalia.
This refreshing new take thrust into the spotlight the universal theme of cultural heritage and questions about the preservation of our past. To these ends, the exhibition encouraged the audience to engage in debates on the importance of finding artefacts in context, the painstakingly effort to put them back together. Most importantly, it unapologetically showed the other side of illegal trafficking and discussed ways forward to combat it. The opportunity cost of illegally excavating artefacts for local money channelled into often illegal hands, over preserving them in a museum for everyone and finding them in context to gain valuable archaeological data, is a discussion we all need to have — it affects us and our discipline, invisibly but immeasurably. Indeed, a similar, more diachronic exhibition Refound Art (L’Arte Ritrovata, ranging from the Greek to the Renaissance and Baroque eras) is being held at the Capitoline Museums to mark the 50th Anniversary of the establishment of the Carabinieri unit for protecting cultural heritage. Recently at Durham Classics, Professor Eleanor Robson (UCL) gave an inspiring Research Seminar on her work with the Nahrain Project, which strives to work with Iraqi academics, who have been deprived of resources during the decades of conflict, to develop useful and appropriate skills specifically by listening to what they need and want (not what international governments so often think they need). This positive cross-cultural cooperation on cultural heritage is a major leap in developing truly positive solutions for future academics on the ground and tackling the issue of illegal antiquities trafficking by engaging with locals.
It is this revealing light, this foreground to these fine artefacts, that makes this exhibition so unique and a rare forum to explore these issues rarely covered in academic courses. It is because of this innovative but much-needed approach that I am writing here to contribute to raising awareness of these problems and discussing ways forward.
Proem: Centrale Montemartini — the best museum in Rome (to hold an exhibition on cultural diplomacy)?
The Centrale Montemartini is arguably the best museum in Rome.
Now that’s a big claim to make (Rome has a grand total of 83).
But here’s why, and why this fact and the unique setting of the museum excellently enhances what the exhibition is trying to say about our modern relationship with these antiquities. In other words, for what symbolic or ideological reason did the directors decide to host the exhibition in the Centrale Montemartini as opposed to another museum, beyond available space and convenience? How does this fit in with the overarching theme of ongoing illicit antiquities trafficking and the positive aspects of repatriation and cultural diplomacy?
As much or little as we want to accept it, setting and landscape are key to how a place or monument is perceived, understood, and digested.
The very structure of the Museum is curious — due to the lack of large spaces in Rome, the authorities chose to deposit these ancient sculptures among the old Thermoelectric centre of Rome, filled with 1910s machinery. This creates a stunning contrast between the huge, bulky, black machines as the stolid backdrop for the delicate, voluptuous, white busts in the foreground. It’s quite an experience — it forces you to reflect on the ancient settings of these monuments by creating an entirely new one, even to our standards.
Second, believe it or not, it’s the storehouse of the much more famous Capitoline Museums. Real estate in Rome is more expensive than Crassus’ interest — but it is precisely this that makes the Centrale so good. Hardly anyone knows about it. This means that at any given time you visit the museum there will hardly be anyone else there — it’s entirely yours to experience. Arguably this divorces you from the ancient context, where many of these sculptures would have been seen in public spaces; but the ability to appreciate them and make them your own is invaluable. It brings out a whole new range of meanings.
Given its condemnation as the neglected “storehouse” of the more famous Capitoline Museums, it houses many remains from significant Republican public monuments in Rome. This ranges from monuments the Temple of Fortuna, one of the three early Republican temples near the Theatre of Pompey where Julius Caesar was murdered, to the Temple of Apollo Sosianus, one of the last public monuments built by an individual not related to the imperial family during the time of Augustus, and all the way to sanctuaries on famous roads, like the Temple of Hercules on Via Tiburtina.
And finally, just for my love for Greek things, it is one of the few museums in Rome that has Greek inscriptions and one of the few bilingual inscriptions in Rome, namely from the altar of the Asian Kings on the hill of Capitoline Jove.
This philosophising is all good and well. But it is precisely this context that helps bring out the exhibition’s message about cultural cooperation and against illegal human trafficking.
The exhibition strives to underscore what lies behind the art in its glass case. The strange environment of the thermoelectric machines shoves this starkly in our faces, trying to make us realise how much our perception of the Classics is conditioned by our preconceived notions about the values behind a Classical artefact. It is precisely by removing this preconceived notion that we open our minds to what lies behind the artefact, how it was acquired, and how it ended up here. Moreover, it raises questions about where exactly these pieces belong, where “home” is for them and whether they can be truly repatriated in their original contexts. Finally, it also raises the question, as I will bring up in the conclusion, of whether these artefacts should become “moving artefacts” and continue to travel as artefacts that belong to the general public and not just its “homeland”, whatever that is. This question is an implication that goes beyond what the exhibition states, but I think it is a worthwhile consideration. Should they be confined to their original homes, or, like this completely neutral context that divorces us from our preconceptions, should it be travelling around and made visible for everyone?
This is, of course, dependent on current and museum politics of the time, but it is still a worthwhile endeavour to talk about. Now that they have been “rescued” for the prime purpose that everyone can see them, should they be taken an extra step further and be displayed constantly, although this conflicts with the very conceptual nature of their “repatriation”?
With these guiding ideas, let’s look at what the different parts of the exhibition have to say about them.
Part 1: Introduction to the Exhibition — Illegal Antiquities Trafficking, Cultural Diplomacy, and Repatriation
As the title of the exhibition highlights, the three main base colours used in these terracotta decorations are related to clay: brown, red and pink. The exhibition starts by giving a concise background to the manufacture and characteristics of Etruscan wall terracotta painting, before going on to explain how the artefacts were acquired, and the monumental occasion and necessity of an exhibition like this in increasing awareness today. I will focus mainly on the latter.
The exhibition immediately sets out its agenda on focusing on the backstories. Instead of focusing on the subject matter, the introductory panels mainly explore the fact that these artefacts are reclaimed antiquities and the subsequential methodological issues concerning the authenticity of these objects. Indeed, the first panel discusses the authenticity of these remains found “outside their context”. The problem of finding objects from unknown archaeological contexts with unknown conservation histories is intimately tied to the lucrative illegal trades market, in the proliferation of the phenomenon of fakes. Potentially worse than “fake” information, the sustained presence of illegal excavations has had incredibly detrimental effects for our archaeological knowledge, most evident in the fact that, in many cases, there are too few comparisons from reliable contexts that the authenticity of similar objects cannot surely be deemed as authentic or not.
Nevertheless, in all this negativity, there are positive ways to determine whether an artefact is authentic or not, based on scientific techniques. Beyond the lucky times when we find objects in their original stratigraphical layers, certain testings of the chemical composition of the paints can help determine age, wear, and thereby authenticity. For example, the fact that the coloured panels were baked using the technique of single firing allows us to determine the authenticity of these artefacts by sampling the presence of certain secondary materials or other marks produced during this process. The most important techniques used in this display include thermoluminescence testing, which detects the heat and light signals to verify the dating, and the characterisation of pigments, which analyses the materials used and products formed during the terracotta firing.
On the other hand, there are secondary indirect ways to determine their authenticity, namely through establishing the degree of deterioration of the actual original pigments: if the deterioration caused by microorganisms is to the appropriate extent for panels kept underground for a long period of time, it is compelling evidence corroborating authenticity. These are nice examples that show the long, interdisciplinary and indeed complicated work that goes into affirming what we get as dictum in our textbooks and is an alternative way of thinking about and dealing with the corrosive obsession of modern society on possessing these artefacts.
Sometimes, it’s difficult to ascertain what have been reworkings from the original context and later antiquarians’ hands. The first Etruscan plaque in the exhibition, apart from showing a fantastic creature with camel’s hooves and a swishy horse’s tail dating to the end of the 6th century BCE, has signs of later reworking after firing — a vertical line, created by a chisel, on the left that traces the length of the plaque before it is broken off by a sharp stroke (sadly this cannot be seen in the image below). How can one determine this derives from original intentions? This is beyond my depth, but it is worthwhile to observe that this later retouching could have aimed to remove some defects during the firing process (as appears to be the case with an incised level line on a lower part of the plaque), or an attempt to adapt the plaque to a space that fit the room’s other decoration (which we do not have), or even potentially serve as an incision to enhance the artistic quality. The line between original and later intervention is blurry — but these are exactly the (new) sort of questions that are raised by these such confiscated artefacts and so aimed exhibitions. These questions can be a useful opportunity in opening up new ways of thinking about these ancient artefacts.
This example of uncertain chronistic identifications nicely leads into the other process of identifying constituent fragments of the same original plaque. Often there are too few fragments to identify the subject fully. What are the criteria therefore that constitute how such artefacts are put together? Artistic and stylistic similarities are often the answer, potentially deriving from the same workshop (which is often determined through comparisons with similar artefacts in other museums, especially the Louvre and BM); but this method this is naturally limited.
Complementing these methodological points, and as a transition between this section to the description of the manufacturing technique, the exhibition next explores the reason why these artefacts are in this exhibition and why they were dispersed in the first place: the “great sacking” of Cerveteri.
Clandestine excavations have, unfortunately for our common historical knowledge, been an endemic tradition ever since excavations started in Caere. To make matters worse, they skyrocketed during the 1950s to the 80s when foreign markets expanded for privately collectable antiquities. It had a doubly negative effect, with a big opportunity cost: state museums also participated in this buying spree to prevent prized objects falling into private hands and to be accessible to the many, but thereby nourishing that very process. They tried to solve the problem in the short run but ignored the core of the long-term problem. Most devastatingly, this vicious cycle led to the irreparable loss of valuable archaeological data that could have helped us reconstruct the past. Although this process has happened throughout history, is incredibly difficult to stop, and has a whole ethical debate attached to it, it needs to stop: such artefacts fell into the hands of private individuals who often value them for their aesthetics or the intangible value they add to their owners much more than reconstructing the past for everyone, as academics’ primary aim is (should) be. It’s unfortunate and endemic, but that doesn’t mean it can’t be stopped by us.
On a more hopeful note, there has been an increasingly strong backlash against such clandestine excavations recently. As the next panel discusses, focusing on the juridical aspects of “Cultural Diplomacy”, countries and museums have increasingly engaged in cooperative talks regarding the return of artefacts to their original countries. The success of this is conditioned by a balance of steering between local laws where the object is kept and was stolen, and international regulations such as the UNESCO Convention of 1970 and the Unidroit Convention of 1995. Driving this initiative forwards, local police forces, in Italy the Command of the Carabinieri for the Protection of Cultural Heritage, has been active in “evaluating and regulating the initiatives of cultural diplomacy”. One of its biggest rescues of illicit antiquities, and the occasion for this exhibition, lies in the 2016 raid in Geneva of artefacts that had been stolen in Southern Etruria. All this cooperation has been increasing since 2000, when several protocols were agreed by states including the USA, Swiss Federation, and the People’s Republic of China. Most impressively, individual museums like the Ny Carlsberg Glyptotek of Copenhagen have spearheaded this movement through its “Cultural Cooperation Agreement”. This cooperation attests to the strength of our commitment to preserving cultural heritage and opposing illegal antiquities trafficking. Combined, this has had unexpectedly positive — the 2016 recovery and the closely-dated Agreement with the Glyptotek turned out to possess very similar fragments as those excavated at Cerveteri, and therefore have been fundamental in creating a coherent context. These actions prompted excavations at the ancient town of Ceri in 2017, which amazingly also unearthed more similar fragments. These three momentous and well-timed interlinked findings have contributed immensely to the furthering reconstruction of the history of Etruscan painting by recent scholarship, which had for a time seemed dead.
This sets a useful and refreshing context to view these artefacts. And this is not the only new aspect of this exhibition — as we will soon see, many of these artefacts depict new versions of traditional myths we so often believe are the only ones from ancient literature. Let’s move to the actual artefacts.
Part 2— “Mythology in colours: narrating through images”; old and new, stories and forms.
In striving to highlight the novel data that would otherwise have been lost had they not been recovered from illegal excavations and museum collaborations, the exhibition starts off with presenting first the benefits of hosting a large group of similar objects together to observe synoptic trends and, second, the new information this gives: here, specifically relating to the different interpretations of myths.
The first “new” bit of information displayed is common myths presented in unusual art forms. This is perhaps best exemplified by the Heracles statue group with the Lernaean hydra.
Around the central exhibit, with this unusual depiction, are typical Attic black-figure pots that depict the standard version of the myth — Heracles stabs the nine heads of the Lernaean Hydra with his companion Iolaus, whilst burning the severed heads so that they don’t grow back. This is the standard version most people know — you’ll find it in most accounts, especially the Library of Pseudo-Apollodorus.
Indeed, the first element of this unusual form you see is easily identifiable and a fun game of “who’s who” in art history — a fragment of Heracles’ torso identifiable through the knot of the Nemean lion’s feet.
And then the novel (and to be perfectly honest rather comical) form appears — the (only six now remaining) heads of the Lernaean hydra itself.
It’s not that the new form departs from this well-known version. Quite the contrary — it’s the very ordinariness of the myth which makes the identification of the form rather intriguing.
Free-standing 3D depictions of the Lernaean hydra in the round in terracotta have rarely survived today. You can see each coil of the body leads up to each head; some colour remains. Beyond the completely serious frowns (or smiles?) of the snakes and their wide incised eyes, this example nicely makes you reflect on both your own knowledge of the corpus of Hydra images, while also making us think about how the ancients conceived of the Hydra. Since it is notably different from other depictions, it may suggest potential experimentation in a different media to depict and/or reconceive such images. The resulting product, in my opinion, is valuable because it looks much more vivid and imaginable than the images of the Hydra on vases. In other words, it gives you an idea of what the snake looked like and what Heracles was facing.
Likewise, expanding on this theme of showing new versions of myths in art, the exhibition next highlights two well-preserved panels (from the end of the 6th century BCE). Alongside their intricate decoration, of interest is their method of narrating usual myths of Heracles in new forms, while also depicting lesser-known or suppressed myths.
The first (above) depicts six scenes from the Dodekathlon (twelve labours) of Heracles. The furthest left panel depicts the legs of a man standing before the four legs of a horse, the front two raised — scholars argue this depicts Heracles taming the man-eating horses of Diomedes. The panel to the right completes this scene: there are the legs of a male person wearing greaves, potentially Diomedes himself, between two horses. The next panel to the right is very fragmentary and depicts only the two feet that are oriented so that the person stands in profile, and a solid object in the left field. Scholars argue this is the scene where Heracles shows the Erymanthean boar to Eurystheus at Mycenae; although the information board on the side does not mention it, the black figure to the left could represent the base of the pithos in which Eurystheus hid when Heracles presented the boar.
The panel next to the right depicts two men on either side of a fruit-bearing plant (that looks suspiciously like a grape-vine). The sign assigns this to the scene in the garden of the Hesperides: while Hercules holds the sky, unburdened Atlas picks the apples. This detail can be nicely observed in the contrast between the two pairs of feet: while the lifted right sole of the man on the left suggests he is tip-toeing, both feet of the figure on the right are firmly embedded on the ground. This is the element that could have potentially led to the identification of this (unusual, see below) scene as the Apple of the Hesperides scene: the tip-toeing might show the strenuous effort put on Heracles as he takes the sky from Atlas, while Atlas contrastingly calmly picks the fruit from the tree. Next is another mysterious scene: there are two legs. Given the spots on the skin and the characteristic hooves, this seems to represent the bottom half of a satyr. What do satyrs have to do with Heracles, if not sometimes being his companions when he becomes drunk. Here again, we have a rare depiction (as the sign highlights) of the rare (in the literature, at least) Satyromachy of Heracles, where he intervenes to defend Hera from an attacking group of Satyrs. Finally, the right-most panel depicts the two legs of a horse (creating a nice frame with the left-most panels). Instead of depicting Diomedes’ horses, the short tunic of the standing man suggests it is a man leading horses as typically found in depictions of the apotheosis of Heracles.
How are these new forms of usual myths or unusual myths? First to note is the sheer scale of the depiction (which the image does not do justice to). More importantly, however, it shows different representations from the literature. Although one would need a deeper knowledge of comparanda, what immediately stands out is the grape-looking fruit on the so-called Tree that bore the apples of the Hesperides. My reading of the two characters, namely that the tip-toeing figure is Heracles because it depicts his struggle to hold up the sky, could equally be the other personage, Atlas. Maybe he is tip-toeing to reach the fruit of the tree, while Heracles’ feet are firmly planted in the ground by the weight of the sky. What makes me favour my original interpretation, however, are the practical aspects: the Titan Atlas was renowned to be tall since he carried the sky at its original height (so would not need to tiptoe), and the man on the right seems to be incrementally bigger, an effect that is heightened by the use of darker pigment for his skin (however is this the state of preservation?). Whatever the identification is, it shows that there is a different and original version of the myth of the Apple of the Hesperides episode that we rarely get in the ancient literature. Our ability to hypothesise different interpretations makes it a valuable source for furthering our understanding of Etruscan wall painting. The Satyromachy is especially interesting because it suggests some sort of positive relationship between Heracles and Hera, who is universally seen as his arch-nemesis. Moreover, it rarely appears in literature and art (only the cup of Brygos from Capua comes to mind). We could confirm this identification if we had the panel next to it, which has however unfortunately been lost.
The other big panel depicts three scenes from the same labours of Heracles. To the left is the typical scene of his fight with the Nemean lion. To the far right is Heracles’ capture of the Ceryneian Hind, with the spots and slender legs shown in vivid detail. Most interestingly, however, in the centre, is the same fight against the Lernaean hydra we saw earlier. Apart from presenting a different reimagination of the scene on a 2D medium, interesting to note is the way the hydra is depicted here. It is both similar and different. While it has one body from which the nine heads emerge, all the heads are mixed up and entangled in this depiction, while before they were individual heads each staring straight into your soul.
This museological technique is also evident in the myth about Perseus and Medusa. In this case, it is the artwork that follows and was potentially inspired to a remarkable degree by the literary accounts. But we do not have space to explore this here.
Second, the exhibition’s other take on the value of these objects, taken from rescue operations and international agreements, to furthering our knowledge lies in its focus on new versions of myth that are not often focused on due to their obscurity (or lack) in the literature. This is best exemplified by the panel depicting the lesser-known version of the Actaeon-Artemis myth and that actually conflicts with other literary accounts: that of Tiresias and Athena.
This time, this panel comes from the Ny Carlsberg Glyptotek Museum at Copenhagen. The directors here, however, give a different interpretation. Before we discuss it, it is worthwhile to step back and note another benefit of this project: the movement of artefacts facilitates the debate and formulation of different (and hopefully improved) interpretations of art. It is living success of the intended aims: studying these artefacts together reveals patterns and stylistic choices that improve scholarly study. Furthermore, this panel has been able to gain a potential date due to comparanda with similar panels (530–520BCE).
The curators at the Glyptotek interpreted this artefact as representing the Judgement of Paris, here choosing Aphrodite as the most beautiful. This identification lay on the comparison with a similar depiction in the British Museum, the Boccanera panels. However, more recent study by the directors of this exhibition has identified it as depicting the myth between Athena and Tiresias. On what grounds, unfortunately, they do not say — it would be interesting to inquire further. The sign’s description of the physical parts of the three characters would suggest an aesthetic take, but I do not know.
Equally importantly, and fulfilling another goal of the exhibition, this interpretation of Athena and Tiresias gives voice to a little heard myth that is almost ubiquitously subsumed by a much more famous version: Actaeon’s death at the hands of Artemis after he saw her bathing naked. In the Athena-Tiresias myth, Tiresias is going through the woods before he unexpectedly sees Athena bathing. She is therefore depicted as nude, clothed only in a transparent veil and diadem; behind her, a woman holds a rolled-up piece of robe. It was this second woman facing behind which made the curators believe it represented the motif of two out of three women walking towards Paris in the Judgement; however, the fact that a fully nude Aphrodite has appeared nowhere before the 4th century BCE problematises this. The scene, however, also alludes to the subsequent actions. To punish him, Athena blinds him (instead of turning him into a stag and having his own dogs maul him). The start of this action can be seen in her touching his shoulder with her right arm. Tiresias holds a spear and has a large black dog next to him, indicating his current hunting endeavour. However, moved to pity (which Artemis is not) by his mother Chariclo, Athena gives him the gift of prophecy to compensate for his loss. The most-elaborated literary work (out of three in total) in which this version of the myth crops up is in the Hellenistic poet Callimachus (Hymn 5 = “The Bathing of Pallas”, quoted in Pherecydes). It is also mentioned as a lesser-known version of the cause for Tiresias’ prophecy in Pseudo-Apollodorus, Library 3.69; but Apollodorus here claims that Athena cleaned out his ears so that he could hear birds and therefore engage in augury, ignoring his restored sight.
Finally, this representation is especially interesting because it offers an almost entirely different artistic interpretation to the standard literary explanation for the reason behind Tiresias’ blinding. The original story of a naked goddess seen by a mortal and therefore punishing him, is the same. It is the famous consequence, Tiresias’ blinding, which differs from the Actaeon paradigm. Usually, accounts as to why Tiresias was blinded are varied, though many focus on his impiety of confessing that male sexual intercourse is more pleasurable than female to Hera (Pseudo-Apollodorus, Bibliotheke 3.6.7). Here, however, the image sets a causal relationship between his viewing of Athena naked and his subsequential lost sight.
Therefore, a wealth of new information about Classical mythography, how it is depicted in art, and the stylistic and conceptual parametres of Etruscan art, can be studied thanks to the assemblage of these artefacts in one place. They can be read separately and, more fruitfully, together — to give a better impression of the nature and characterisation of Etruscan wall painting. Most importantly, it is not just something for scholars — everyone and anyone with whatever knowledge of Classical myths can come in and appreciate the different versions. It’s a unique opportunity for all, as the exhibition sets out.
Part 3: Parties and dancing, sports and music
The next section focuses on entertainment in the Etruscan world and its depiction in art. I will spend less time here, but point out a few relevant examples that relate to the aims of the exhibition, the restoration of these artefacts, and the new information from their being rescued and assembled together that would otherwise have been lost.
The first example serves as a nice case study of the benefits of museum collaboration and new finds for academics — namely restoring and realigning panels that originally were placed next to each other, determined by stylistic details and the subject. This is the lucky result of both the agreement between the J. Paul Getty Museum in Malibu and the Italian museum authorities, MiBACT, and the 2016 Geneva Carabinieri rescue operations.
It is important to note that these two panels were originally found in different locations: it is only through the efforts of this exhibition that they have been brought back to their original context (520–500BCE), side by side. This has been determined mainly by the unique upper cornice with a frieze of a double chain of buds and lotuses, and the symmetrical facing stances of the two figures. This has allowed comparative studies of the spatial arrangement of such individual frames. The Getty panel shows an agonoteta, a referee or coach. He is identifiable by the short curved stick he holds. The figure on the left, the one confiscated in Geneva customs, depicts an athlete with short blond hair in a headband holding a disc close to his chest, with other arm outstretched towards the agonoteta. Without this realignment, we would have had difficulty knowing that the figure on the left, whomever it may be, was associated in some way to the agonoteta and the athletics of the Etruscan world. It tells us more about the social conditions, operations and customs behind athletics, how it was taught, and its manifestation in public festivals. Agonotetas mainly operated in Geek public games — this raises the question to what extent Etruscan festival practices were influenced by the Greeks, and what wider-scale processes likewise have engaged in this interaction. By placing them back into their original context for us, we can gain evidence for questions that we would otherwise have had difficulty to conceive of.
It is also important to note, however, that there are limits to these museum collaborations. The panel from the Getty museum is a photographic reproduction. Nevertheless, when you look it at from close it still looks original and most importantly, it still advances the academic aims.
Similarly, such restorations can happen on a much smaller scale with individual fragments, but with equally significant results. This has occurred in the fragment that serves as the backdrop for the main advertising poster.
Again, the main fragment from this, depicting a warrior with crested helmet in a duel, was confiscated at Geneva in 2016. However, a smaller fragment that contains the upper cornice from the National Museum of Cerite at Cerveteri, dating to 490BCE, was able to be restored to its original place in this larger artwork. Apart from being aesthetically pleasing, it also gives more complete information on the unique Italic armour and battle practices. Moreover, it serves as useful comparanda to similar depictions found at Quartaccio di Ceri near Cerveteri which do have a firm archaeological context — from a large cistern relating to a sacred area. Those excavations, like these, were prompted by the rescue of several fragments of a painted plaque from the antiquity market. These widespread initiatives are having positive benefits by broadening our corpus, specifically in deepening our understanding, affirming old identifications, and discovering new ideas from new evidence.
There are other pieces in this section with similar felicitous stories about restorations from rescues from the antiquities market and museum cooperations, especially the frontal decoration of rooves and sima of a major building at Cerveteri. Indeed, Pliny the Elder (Natural History, 35.6.5) actually noted the great abundance of paintings “of a still higher antiquity” at Cerveteri. It is his statement that “whoever carefully examines them, will be forced to admit that no art has arrived more speedily at perfection” that further justifies the purpose of bringing these works all into one place. This becomes most pronounced in the final and most encapsulating room: “Terracottas in context”.
Part 4: New finds at Cera, confiscated 2016 Geneva, international museum cooperations — combined
The final room of the exhibition arguably leaves the greatest impact regarding the success of these three forms of collaboration for academic scholarship — it shows first how this opposition to clandestine excavations and museum collaborations have spurred on new excavations in 2017 to enhance the academic record, and second how the artefacts uncovered are actually very similar to those from the previous two categories. That is, the materials in context have completed the triad and, together, have revealed valuable information about the origins of Cerveteri. Most of these artefacts from the 2017 excavations were found in the ancient city and not the tombs of Cerveteri. The argument that the panel makes here is that while these artefacts originally used to belong to aristocratic private households in the 6th century BCE, social change meant they eventually decorated public buildings, both sacred and civil. In other words, there is reuse of the panels in urban buildings. Later, however, they were also used in tombs, which many of the tomb robbers raided. They have given us useful information about the early stages and society of Cerveteri that has been slowly eroded away by the clandestine excavations. It is a testament against antiquities trafficking.
In doing so, this room helps us understand how some of the identifications of the artefacts taken from illegal excavations were made and allows us synoptically to compare similar fragments gained from each initiative to advance our knowledge — a much more beneficial use than confinement to a private collectors’ paraphernalia.
The first is a terracotta base of a louterion (Latin labrum), a shallow basin resting on a large pedestal, usually used as a washbasin. On it are dolphins diving between brown and black waves. It was found during the 2017 excavations in the Manganello di Cerveteri in the aim to contextualise the rescued artefacts from the 2016 Geneva raids. The interesting thing about this artefact is that it does not have a comparison with other known artefacts; it is a unique example of a louterion base. For a while it was a mystery — however, by associating it with other archaeological evidence found in the same context, they were able to link its function to water. These new excavations, therefore, beyond bringing to light new objects that we can study further and providing useful archaeological contexts to decipher these new pieces, add new information that we can compare with other artefacts found and thereby completing our corpus better.
The second artefact is, again from the 2017 excavations, a fragment of a painted panel with the figure of a Silenus, as can be deciphered from the long donkey’s ears. The interesting thing here is that between the blue and red bands, the painter has incised the graffito “In the house of Sathara, I Mur… (made this)”. This gives us a whole range of socio-economic evidence: the owner of the house, a Sathara, can be used in nomenclature studies, and gives evidence of patron-artist relationships within the Etruscan household and its decoration. It seems that this ‘Mur…’ artist was working for Sathara the owner. These will hopefully be useful in deciphering other anomalies in evidence garnered from rescue operations and thereby enhance our academic understanding of Etruscan culture.
Finally, the third artefact shows a naked young man in profile with rich curling hair. His bent arms suggest he is either dancing or engaging in a sport activity such as running or disc throwing. Not much can be gained from this image, but given that it was found in aristocratic evidence, it tells us that it likely belonged to the original city and its aristocratic households, and potentially reused in the tombs. This intricate relationship and reuse shows the importance of engaging in professional archaeological excavations over clandestine ones — this panel would be devoid of context; any other information would be lost when illegal traffickers took it.
Therefore, after showing how detrimental illegal excavations are for our knowledge of Etruscan art in the previous rooms, the exhibition nicely ends on the positive note of the rich information we can gain from uncovering artefacts in a known archaeological context. It is a final testament to the positive effects of what we could do, for academic knowledge, public appreciation, and enforcing proper ethics. It’s a message that was born from and is about today. It is in this too often sidelined light that we should reconsider our relationship with these artefacts.
Conclusion — some awkward questions, and beyond
My main aim in this article is, first, to get you to visit exhibitions more and then to think about them outside the box. Specifically to this case, how can we think of the process behind the exhibition, our human interaction with the artefacts before they are displayed, and our concern with preserving these great and marvellous deeds of men so that they are not left without renown?
And of course, to visit Rome more often!
My title has aimed to bring in one final controversial question. The fact that the exhibition prided itself on painstakingly collecting, bringing and exhibiting together all the wall architectural elements from the site of Cerveteri (and beyond) in one single space raises two questions, one existential and another awkward.
This is an exhibition. That means it’s temporary. Where will the monuments go after this? Will they be kept together? Will they be transported to where they were originally excavated, given the exhibition’s emphasis on repatriation — namely the tiny archaeological museum at Cerveteri (which could sorely do with some more artefacts in it — hardly anyone ever visits it)?
This question was conceived by a statement in one of the information panels that I did not entirely agree with. When responding to the ways to tackle illicit excavations, the exhibition claims that “To rescue a cultural object implies not only returning it to the heritage of its original homeland, but also….” (Italics my own). The following clause, that opposing illegal excavations prevents further damage to archaeological deposits, is perfectly agreeable. Likewise, preventing an object from falling into a private collector’s hands does imply restoring it to its heritage. However, the act of “rescuing” is not necessarily synonymous with, and does not have to imply, restoring it to the heritage of a single nation, or its ‘homeland’, at the expense or exclusion of others. In the English language, the transfer from one party is implied in “rescuing”, but not exclusivity to another (however widely defined). Maybe the phrase implies this; maybe I am reading too much into it; maybe the word “homeland” is dangerously nationalistic and comes into conflict too closely with the international, public-accessibility of the exhibition. What if other cultures have an equally important relationship with these artefacts? These seminal artefacts, which defined not just the culture of Etruria, but also countless later cultures from many different eras and places that participated in classical reception (including ancient Greece and Rome), should be the property of everyone, of the general public — as the exhibition has been at pains to emphasise was the original purpose of these Carbinieri back in 2016. This is the first clause in the core aims of the fundamental UNESCO World Heritage Convention in its Operational Guidelines: “The cultural and natural heritage is among the priceless and irreplaceable assets, not only of each nation, but of humanity as a whole.” (I.B.4, Page 9, 2017).
These objects were found in Italy, and most at Cerveteri, but why should that mean it should be limited there forever? I’m not arguing that everyone cannot access them at Cerveteri, but in the world of connectivity and shared cultural heritage, do these objects really implicitly belong there? Whatever the contemporary agenda, politics, or perhaps simple mistranslation from the Italian (Riacquisire un bene culturale illecitamente sottratto significa non solo restituirlo al patrimonio nella comunità di appartenenza, ma, sopratutto…) behind this statement, my argument is that they belong to everyone as objects of international cultural significance and thereby should be accessible to the international public, not just the Italian populace.
This leads onto my final rather paradoxical question. Let’s assume they are all kept together, so that not only can they be understood in their original context, but can become a convenient tool for scholarly research into Etruscan art. Will this collection of artefacts be rooted in one place, or travel around the world as a now strongly-synced, well-defined identity? In my view, the fact that many different individual artefacts have been taken, and in many cases kindly repatriated, to Italy from foreign museums should at least give the opportunity of having that entire collection visit their previous homes. The distinction here is between the groupings in “bringing for the first time back together” — I agree that the artefacts should be brought together, but for whom precisely constitutes together and where precisely is back? This fits into the theme of disseminating the information as widely as possible and having as wide an audience as possible access and appreciate them.
They might become travelling monuments, stones that speak not just of Etruria but also our era’s concern with preserving cultural heritage. It’s not unprecedented — think of the other “speaking statues” in Rome: one a copy of Odysseus, they hold letters with opinions of modern Romans about politics, culture and much more. What new perceptions, connotations and meanings will these artefacts gain now that they have been grouped together, but without their original content having been changed? It’s an exciting and unpredictable future. Most intriguingly, it is sort of ironic — in that the whole purpose was to bring them back home. But should this be the right outlook?
So the fundamental question and way forward for these artefacts and exhibition, regarding their repatriation and “return to their heritage of the original homeland”, are two words:
At last?
The ‘Colori degli Etruschi’ official website can be found at: http://www.centralemontemartini.org/it/mostra-evento/colori-degli-etruschi.
Do you have a suggestion for a future topic? Do you have an idea to share with your friends? Send us a message and follow the Durham University Classics Society on Twitter (@DUClassSoc) and Facebook (@DUClassics Society) to keep up with this blog and our other adventures!
