Imagining the Etruscans: Modern European Perceptions of an Ancient Italian Civilization

1 Introduction: The Etruscan Paradox

In the region circumscribed by the Arno and Tiber rivers and the Tyrrhenian Sea—with early presences, too, toward the Adriatic Sea and north of the Po and in Campania—the Etruscans were able to produce an extraordinarily evolved urban civilization. According to both Greek and Latin literary sources, they appear to have been true protagonists in the history of the Western Mediterranean between the seventhand third centuries B. C. E., like the Carthaginians, their traditional allies. The Romans, who later achieved hegemony over that sea, recognized a range of distinctively Etruscan ceremonial features and highly specialized technological expertise as a sort of religious and juridical debt. The magnificence of the Etruscan archaeological record, in strong contrast to the difficulty in understanding the language despite an abundant corpus of inscriptions, has commanded the attention of modern scholarship to this civilization, regarded as constitutive (like Rome) of the Italian nation.

In a broad sense, Etruscans have represented a truly remarkable topic in European culture, where the development of modern antiquarianism^[1] into a proper archaeological and historical approach has proven to be unable to dispel their persistent mythical perception. Within the category of the Etruscan myth, I would include all types of depiction of them not produced in accordance with a correct historical methodology, but through a largely symbolic and ideologically oriented imagery. If it is true that any cultural phenomenon may be represented historically or in mythical terms, or by a combination of both, I believe a special feature of the Etruscan case has been the predominance of characteristically mythical aspects, which can be traced to the first archaeological discoveries in 16th-century Tuscany during the time of the Medici.^[2]

An interesting fil rouge, within a propaganda framework, appears to originate with some variation from two basic pseudo-truths: the Etruscan continuity of the Grand Dukedom of Tuscany and the biblical continuity of the Etruscans themselves. The first conviction was based on the idea of some blood and language legacy, preserved in the small territory bordered by the Tiber and the Arno. The second conviction was encouraged by an old Greek tradition about the presumed Oriental origin of the Etruscans, later reshaped in Jewish and Christian terms through a bizarre foundation legend equating Noah to the Roman god Janus.^[3]

One may follow the development of both perspectives from the early modern period to the core of the contemporary age through the evidence provided by a difficult dialectic between a geographical Italian-ness, which allowed a lost literature—written in an unintelligible language—to be converted into the first chapter of a history of Italian literature, and a number of figural monuments—characterized by undoubtedly Greek-like images and styles—into the first chapter of a history of Italian art; and, the other face of such a dilemma, Herodotus’s contention about the Asian provenance of the Etruscans, which seemed to be supported by the fascinating exoticism of a material culture that was progressively revealed through archaeological discoveries.

In fact, whatever discussion might be opened about the Italian-ness (or European-ness) of Etruscan civilization, one must unavoidably start from the centuries-old question of Etruscan origins,^[4] first raised in the Augustan age and solved in terms of autochthony by Dionysius of Halicarnassus in the first book of his Roman Antiquities (I, 20–30). Concerned with offering to a Greek-speaking audience a systematic account of Roman history, he was certainly acquainted with a range of traditional stories (related by Hecataeus, Hellanicus, Herodotus, and others) explaining the Italian settlement of the Tyrrhenians—as the Etruscans were called by the Greeks—through an ancient immigration of people coming from the eastern Mediterranean: the Pelasgians, perhaps, or perhaps the Lydians. This immigration pattern was resolutely rejected by Dionysius, who had some very good arguments but who attached too much importance to giving only the Romans that prestigious link with the most ancient events of Greek history, which had to be assured by the legend of Aeneas. However, the thesis of Herodotus (I, 94), claiming that the early Etruscans came from Anatolia, achieved widespread agreement among many ancient and modern scholars, outliving by some decades even its factual demolition by Massimo Pallottino in his famous 1947 essay, L’origine degli Etruschi.^[5]

At the end of the 19thcentury, the Bologna school was especially engaged in favor of the Oriental theory concerning Etruscan origins: in particular Edoardo Brizio (1846-1907) made a clean distinction between the so-called “Villanovan” culture of the ninth-eighthcenturies B. C. E.—which in his opinion belonged to the Umbrians, another Italian people well known in the literary tradition—and the subsequent, more sophisticated and clearly exotic archaeological evidence.^[6] It is interesting that—as far as the mythical perspective of literature is concerned—we know of an impressively timely poetic translation of the same Brizio’s archaeological arguments in the ode “Fuori alla Certosa di Bologna,”^[7] created by his colleague at the same university, Giosue Carducci, where the coupling of Umbrians and Etruscans is placed at the beginning of an ethnic sequence which continued on with Celts, Romans, and Lombards:

Our Umbrian ancestors are sleeping at the foot of this hill, they who broke firstly

with their axes your sacred silence, Apennine:

the Etruscans, too, are sleeping, come down with their litui and spears

and their staring eyes gazing upwards at the green, mysterious slopes,

and then the tall, reddish Celts, running to wash the blood

in the alpine, cold water which they called the Rhine,

and the noble lineage of Rome, and the long-haired Lombards

who lastly pitched camp on the wooded peaks.^[8]

It is worth stressing that we have today a far more archaeologically documented picture of the remarkable Mediterranean mobility during the Late Bronze Age and a clearer perception of the truly Etruscan character of the language spoken on Lemnos island (to the east of Mount Athos), so that some Aegean connection does not seem to be so implausible, at least from the point of view of language.

What is more relevant in the modern perception of the Etruscan civilization—whether true or incorrect—however, is this traditionally consolidated feature of Etruscans as an “Oriental people,” which in the past could find seemingly conclusive archaeological evidence in the funerary furnishings of princely tombs belonging to the so-called “Orientalizing” phase (between the late eighth and the early sixth century B. C. E.).But the fact is that Orientalizing art is a common phenomenon in Greece, too, and does not imply an ethnic identity: it shows, rather, within a basically inter-ethnic, inter-regional frame, the widespread sharing among Mediterranean élites of a common heritage of valuable and highly representative artifacts and ceremonial practices, regarded as important status symbols.^[9]

In this vein, one would like to bring to mind the impressive case of Orientalizing art in the Etruria of the Po Valley, with its restricted, experimental series of funerary steles, clearly inspired by originally Mesopotamian palatial models, standardized in the Syro-Hittite artistic centers of North Syria and South Anatolia.^[10] In northern Italy, moreover, in Emilia and mostly in the Veneto, another quite lively world of Oriental images developed: the bronze embossed situlae (buckets), which represented nearly until Alexander’s time a peculiar case of diffusion and survival of Orientalizing taste in the very heart of the continent, “from the Po to the Danube.”^[11]

This is an intriguing paradox: a rich imagery shaped on originally Levantine patterns, which developed however within a Middle European context. A paradox or perhaps better, a duality that directly concerns the historical function of Etruscan culture, which was as an intermediary between the Mediterranean world and the continent, geographically deeply rooted in Europe but without ever looking entirely and authentically European.

2 The Etruscans and the Bible

Within this so crucial and delicate relationship with the Orient, there is an aspect which had already a very special emphasis in the debate among the pioneers of Etruscology of the 16th century. Today it would appear quite bizarre or insubstantial, but it deserves, I believe, to be carefully reconsidered and put into its proper historical context. This is the same problem as for other lost peoples, quoted by ancient literary sources or disclosed by some archaeological finding; it also seems to be ideologically parallel to the issues raised by the first discoveries of animal or vegetable fossils: how to harmonize all such surprising evidence of mankind’s (and earth’s) past with the canon of an Ancient Testament, regarded as a literally historical and unquestionably truthful account? In the case of the Etruscans, it was a question of determining on which postdiluvian genealogical ramification their ancestors could belong, and also in which moment of the Sacred History they settled in Tuscany and Latium to the north of the Tiber.

A possible solution was devised in Viterbo, Rome, and Florence, during the half century comprised between 1498, the date of the first edition of the Commentaria written by a Dominican friar named Giovanni Nanni (Annio da Viterbo), and 1551, when the French Jesuit manqué Guillaume Postel published in Florence his essay De Etruriae (...) originibus.^[12] In the middle there was the debate between two Florentine scholars, Giambattista Gelli and Pier Francesco Giambullari, on the question of language, and the Historia by Cardinal Egidio Antonini, another Viterbese who was very close to the Medici pope, Leo X. Etruscan, of which scholars had at that time an extremely meagre knowledge, was presumed to derive from Aramaic, a language possibly not too far from that spoken by Noah himself or the original sacred and perfect language, which had enlivened Jehovah’s and Adam’s conversations. The Etruscans, too, were supposed to have descended, therefore, from the same Noah, who migrated to Italy, having become quite a skilled trans-Mediterranean sailor after his profitable training on the famous Ark. In this way, the Etruscans were finally Semitized and providentially made part of Judeo-Christian salvation history.

In particular, the vision of Postel involved a great and noble ideal of universal tolerance. He identified Noah with Janus and placed his grave on the eponymous Mount Janiculum in Rome, in close proximity to the Vatican. From Noah was derived not only the language, but the religious doctrine of the Etruscans, who in turn were considered the ancestors of the Medici dynasty in Tuscany. The French monarchy, seen through a legacy coming from the Gauls, was considered another branch of the same family tree: all this reasoning was intended to build an articulated ideological justification for a new palingenetic utopia, where relations with the Ottoman Muslims could also be appeased because of a common biblical descent. In Postel’s opinion such a Semitization of the Etruscans was an excellent basis on which to start constructive politics between Christian Europe and the Islamic Orient. We may smile today at such a complicated pseudo-historical construction, but the stakes were very high, and an imaginative scholar such as Postel knew that. At the peak of a true crescendo of picturesque mystical paroxysms, he was finally sentenced to imprisonment in 1555 by Venice’s Inquisition court. We must have respect, I suggest, for these inquirers of history (and nature) who, just as fervent believers, constantly stimulated by insidious comparisons with the biblical text, were forced to appreciably refine their scientific methodology, albeit in heterodox and sometimes erroneous ways.

In 1553, two years after the publication of De Etruriae originibus, an excavation near Arezzo’s walls brought to light the material and monumental evidence of an Etruscan past, which was not abstractly “oriental,” but rooted in the very concrete reality of its territory, today’s Tuscany: that monstrous bronze Chimera, in which Giorgio Vasari was first able to recognize, talking with Francesco de’ Medici in the fictional narrative, but really with Cosimo I, the stylistic contradictions of a non-Greek, indigenous figurative language.^[13] Later, in 1571—when Postel, by that time irremediably mad, had been living for nearly ten years locked up in the Saint-Martin-des-Champs monastery in Paris—any irenic utopia sank into Lepanto’s bloody waters. Fifteen years later, Annio’s forgeries and apocrypha were unmasked, at least for the moment, by Monsignor Vincenzio Borghini's posthumous Discorsi.

3 The Etruscans and Europe in the 18th and 19th Centuries

Was it the end of such a strange idea of Etruria? Not entirely, perhaps.

I propose to change the scenario, jumping forward the 60s-80s of the 18th century, when at Tarquinia—then called Corneto—a Scottish guide and antique dealer named James Byres was far and away the most sought-after cicerone in the circle of the cultured North European tourists on the Roman stay of their Grand Tour. To Byres’s spirit of enterprise we owe a posthumous work,^[14] collected engravings of the Tarquinian funerary paintings discovered up to that time: for instance, the Mercareccia Tomb, the Ceisinie Tomb, and the Tomb of Tapestry. It has been ascertained^[15] that the author of the original drawings was Franciszec Smuglewicz, a Polish painter working at Tarquinia between 1764 and 1766, who transferred such a vivid and polychrome world of images into the frigid black-and-white of his magniloquent, neoclassical language. What is worth emphasizing, within Byres and Smuglewicz’s operation, seems to me a sort of Christian translation—not fully aware and voluntary, but evident—of Etruscan afterlife imagery. I draw attention especially to the engravings of the Tomb of the Cardinal, where a number of Etruscan demons have been iconographically characterized by Smuglewicz in accordance with the stereotypes of angels and devils. Their task of guiding the difficult journey toward the world of the dead has been reconverted into that of good guardians or cruel jailers.

The fact is that such a fascinating restoration of badly preserved images helped to nourish a durable perception of the Etruscan religious culture as an expression of some mysteriously proto-Christian feelings. In particular, the grotesque features of the Etruscan Charons were too confidently compared with Giotto’s or Buffalmacco’s devils, to the point where those of Signorelli and Michelangelo himself seemed to give the presumptive evidence of an ethnico-cultural survival that was supposed to have lasted more than 1700 years.

During the 18th century the unavoidable Etruscan stopovers on the educational journey of the Grand Tour in “the country where the lemons bloom” and where “among green leaves golden oranges glow,”^[16] had been Cortona, because of its Etruscan Academy, and Volterra, because of Monsignor Guarnacci’s library and collection. The new Romantic taste of the 19th-century travellers differed; they showed far greater interest in the rough and desolate landscapes of Maremma’s shores or the rocky and uneven hills around Viterbo: exotic places, in some way, extraordinarily evocative of Nature’s invincible rule over the work of Man. Just as having courageously crossed malarial lands led Winckelmann, Piranesi, Canova, and Goethe to the grandiose and worrying sight of the Doric temples at Paestum, in the same way the archaeological wonders of Tuscia appeared to Northern travellers as the place of a hard but exciting initiation.

This is the feeling that pervades the beautiful watercolors created by Samuel James Ainsley in his Etruscan wandering of 1842-57,^[17] at first in the company of George Dennis, who published in 1848 what is still today the best tour guide to Etruscan antiquities.^[18] The rocky architectural façades of Sovana’s Hellenistic tombs, which became suddenly visible as petrified mirage-like projections from an ungovernable vegetation, are the most pictorial display of such a secret Etruria.

More or less at the same time, a soi-disant Etruscan trend became popular in the classicizing architecture of aristocratic homes. We have to remember that earlier, in the 17th century, any kind of Etruscan revival in architecture was largely based on literary knowledge, originating from the re-examination of Vitruvius’s text; but such a revival promoted, during the whole 18th century and beyond, the immense success of the Tuscan column, which was regarded as a wise, well-balanced aesthetic and a functional compromise between the Doric and Ionic orders.

A more explicit archaeological reference is found in the Etruscan characterization of interiors as, for instance, those planned by Robert Adam between 1773 and 1779 at Derby House in London or at Osterley Park’s villa, or significantly later, in 1834—a slightly out-of-fashion choice of the House of Savoy—the Gabinetto all’etrusca created by Pelagio Palagi for the Racconigi Castle in Piedmont.^[19] But in all these examples, the predominant patterns derive from Pompeian wall decorations and Attic or Italiote painted vases. It is true, however, that on Racconigi’s ceiling Palagi was able to reproduce the paintings of the Tomb of the Baron, which had been discovered at Tarquinia only seven years earlier.

Similarly, the valuable pottery manufactured since 1769 by Josiah Wedgwood in a workshop he called emblematically Etruria was inspired not by models of ascertained Etruscan production but by the plates of Hamilton’s collection of Attic and South Italian vases^[20] and by that quite celebrated Roman cameo glass amphora, the Portland vase, which should have been sold to the same Lord Hamilton—it seems by Byres himself—before it got into Portland’s collection.

This was therefore a largely reinvented Etruria, nourished by nostalgic travel memories and especially by more or less faithful illustrations and copies, and it was inextricably hybridized, moreover, with the imagery of both South-Italian figured vases and Pompeian painting, to build the backcloth of that international, exemplary, stylized antiquity, which the European bourgeois audience could encounter and easily recognize on the opera stage, framing the various Cleopatras, Medeas, or Vestals.^[21]

4 The Mythical Perception of the Etruscans in the 20th Century: From D’Annunzio to Visconti

I have in the past touched on the ideological perception of Etruscan past within the framework of the new unitary Italian state that emerged from the Risorgimento wars, and especially on the amazing Etruscan revival of the 1920 s and 1930 s, between the crucial dates of 1919—when Giulio Quirino Giglioli gave the first account of the discovery of the terracotta acroterial statues from Portonaccio temple—and 1937—when the Mostra Augustea della Romanità opened: the Augustan Exhibition of the Roman World, planned by Giglioli himself. This modern neo-Etruscan ideological construct was taken over by the predominantly Romano-centric strategy of Fascist “imperial” propaganda.^[22]

It is interesting to recognize in its multifaced development the permanence of the dialectic, already highlighted above, between the Italian-ness of Etruria and Herodotus’s postulation of an Asian provenance. These contradictory views, deriving in some cases from preconceptions or true misunderstandings of literary sources and archaeological data, emerged in particular within the perspective of an ideological geography dominated by ferocious racial myths, where eastern Semites and other South Mediterranean peoples were defined in opposition to northern Aryans, and where the Etruscans, too, had to find their place.

Rather than discuss again these political exploitations of the Etruscan past, I would like to illustrate instead the pervasive presence in the 20th century of an ahistorical and basically mythological perception of the Etruscan past using two chronologically distant but ideologically related examples. The first, dating to 1910 when the first edition of Gabriele d’Annunzio’s novel Forse che sì forse che no^[23] was published, and the second to 1965, when Luchino Visconti’s movie Vaghe stelle dell’Orsa^[24] received the Golden Lion award at the Venice film festival.

In D’Annunzio’s case, the Volterra setting of the second part of his narrative, with its most picturesque places (such as the Guarnacci Museum, Inghirami Palace and garden, and the Inghirami tomb), aims at contextualizing the psychological collapse that troubles all the native characters—such as Isabella Inghirami, who returned to the small town of her teens, together with her siblings Aldo and Vana—or the true madness that threatens to overwhelm the newcomer as well—the modern, positive hero, Paolo Tarsis, fearless driver and aircraft pilot. All of this takes place within the framework of a persistent identification of the Etruscan landscape with Dante’s Hell. Such a special point of view was fed by the image (worthy of Doré) of the Balze, with their horrible crumbling mouths, and by the presumed Etruscan lineage of Dante himself, who would contribute, 30 years later, through the very distinctive profile of his well-known nose, to the definition of Eugen Fischer’s “aquiline race.”^[25]

The persistence of antiquity in the landscape is an unavoidable theme, a constant in Italian literature, from Francesco Petrarca onwards. But in D’Annunzio’s narrative it does not inspire any evocation of nostalgic Arcadias: being superseded instead by the aesthetics of Decadentism, it awakens frightening ghosts.

Outside of Italy, Visconti’s movie was deprived of its beautiful, Leopardi-inspired title, and was given instead the banal and winking title of “Sandra of a Thousand Delights,” which emphasized the extraordinary sex-appeal of the leading actress Claudia Cardinale. The subject largely derived from D’Annunzio’s Forse che sì, whence the screenplay, with its characterizing Volterran setting, took the crucial theme of the ambiguous triangle among the two possibly incestuous siblings (Sandra and Gianni) and Sandra’s American husband (Andrew). But the interviews in those days strike us because of the reticence of the director and his team (and the reviewers, too) to acknowledge, although it is so evident, the D’Annunzio calque: one prefers to quote, in fact, Sophocles’s Elektra, because of the monomaniacal obsession of Sandra with her mother’s adultery and the violent death of her father, finally deported by his Nazi-Fascist persecutors—or to underline the thrilling aspect of a detective story, described as an investigation into a probable unpunished crime.

As a matter of fact, Visconti was already making room for his well-known psychological aptitude and his visionary pleasure at the decadent theme of a morbid eroticism, leading to physical and moral perdition. The incest, forgotten by Sandra and then recovered in memory, or only imagined, or desired and still to be consummated—perhaps, yes, perhaps, no— is the very dramaturgical core of this gloomy story, and an Etruscan town, such as Volterra, that is so similar to Dante’s Inferno, proved to be its most appropriate setting.

But in 1960 s Italy, neither Visconti, deceptively hegemonized by the PCI (Italian Communist Party) as the indisputable major proponent of the aesthetics of realism, nor his mostly conformist reviewers were able to quote with impunity the name of D’Annunzio, because of his politically incorrect arsenal of morbidity, plus the aggravating factor of an ideological context that linked nationalism to the Superman utopia.

Therefore, the neo-Etruscan inhabitants of Volterra, as depicted by Visconti and D’Annunzio, are shaped in accordance with a mythical image of existential deformity, nourished by spiritual deviances and hidden truths, frighteningly emerging from the Balze landscape or in front of the reliefs of the Guarnacci urn boxes, which tell some horrible stories of another ancient mythology, that of the Greeks.

In such a depiction, moreover, a second ingredient had its effect, recalling the old stereotype of the Etruscans as a Levantine people and their presumed biblical ancestry. I refer to their possible juxtaposition with the Jews, another small group of people able to preserve their proper linguistic and religious identity in the face of powerful Near Eastern empires, according to a comparative perspective that was outlined in the early 20th century by some interesting pages of a work by a refined Jewish Etruscologist, Alessandro Della Seta.^[26]

The Jewishization of the two Etruscan siblings, totally extraneous to D’Annunzio, was accomplished by Visconti’s screenwriters, Suso Cecchi D’Amico and Enrico Medioli: in fact, as Volterran natives, Sandra and Gianni are Etruscan, but they are also half-Jewish on account of their father, Professor Wald Luzzati. In this way two cases of comparable marginality (being Jewish, being Etruscan) overlap, identifying with each other, and the complicated erotic tangle that links them, broken by the suicide of the young man, emphasizes in turn an extreme, irreparable condition of deviance: depraved people, one should say, who, in the Decadent poetics of Visconti, were not a reason for blame, but rather for an increase of aesthetic appeal.

One cannot help but think about the incest between Siegmund and Sieglind Aarenhold, the Jewish twins in Wälsungenblut, the scandalous short story written by Thomas Mann in 1905; or, with a worrisome play of mirrors, about the perfidious notes by Alfred Rosenberg in 1930 on the deviant sexuality of the Etruscans.^[27]

5 A Possible Conclusion about Etruscology and Etruscologists

It is common knowledge that in Italian universities, Etruscology—a self-referential discipline comparable with Egyptology or Assyriology—has been established as an autonomous topic of academic teaching. This is a very Italian phenomenon, rooted in an ideological tradition derived from the old Risorgimento patriotism, and reinforced by a very solid methodology, where I believe Massimo Pallottino’s neo-Dionysian approach to the question of Etruscan origins is especially significant. There is in fact a clear nationalistic matrix in his autochtonistic view, which acknowledges a prolonged and variously articulated process of ethnogenetic formation on condition that it was firmly enclosed within the geographical container of the Italian Peninsula.^[28]

However, out of the comparatively narrow circle of the Etruscologists—this somewhat anachronistic species of scholars, who even now still look very much like 18th-century antiquarians—it is worth stressing, as we have seen, the great intellectual freedom shown by European culture towards Etruscan civilization.

I suppose that it is just this centuries-old coexistence of history and imagination, of science and myth—in short, of a mythical Etruria beside an archaeological Etruria—that has given to the Etruscan past its peculiar, persistent modernity.