Page:Encyclopædia Britannica, Ninth Edition, v. 17.djvu/50

Rh 40 MURAL DECORATION admitted into Egyptian buildings, and those outside were subdued by contrast with the brilliant blue sky and glowing sunshine under which they were always seen. 1 Etruscan Painting. The rock -cut sepulchres of the Etrurians (see ETRURIA, vol. viii. p. 645) supply the only existing specimens of their mural painting ; and, un like the tombs of Egypt, only a STnall proportion appear to have been decorated in this way. The actual dates of these paintings are very uncertain, but they range possibly from about the 8th century B.C. down to almost the Christian era. The tombs which possess these paintings are mostly square-shaped rooms, with slightly-arched or gabled roofs, excavated in soft sandstone or tufa hillsides. The earlier ones show distinct Egyptian influence alike in drawing and in composition : they are very broadly designed with flat unshaded tints, the faces in profile, except the eyes, which are drawn as if seen in front. Colours, as in Egypt, are used conventionally male flesh red, white or pale yellow for the females, black for demons. In one respect these paintings differ from those of the Egyptians ; very few colours are used red, brown, and yellow ochres, carbon -black, lime or chalk -white, and occasionally blue are the only pigments. The rock -walls are prepared by being covered with a thin skin of lime stucco, and lime or chalk is mixed in small quantities with all the colours; hence the restriction to &quot;earth pigments,&quot; made doubly necessary by the constant dampness of these sub terranean chambers. The process employed was in fact a kind of fresco, though the stucco ground was not applied in small patches only sufficient for the day s work; the dampness of the rock was enough to keep the stucco skin moist, and so allow the necessary infiltration of colour from the surface. Many of these paintings when first dis covered were quite fresh in tint and uninjured by time, but they are soon dulled by exposure to light. In the course of centuries great changes of style naturally took place ; the early Egyptian influence, probably brought to Etruria through the Phoenician traders, was succeeded by an even more strongly -marked Greek influence at first archaic and stiff, then developing into great beauty of drawing, and finally yielding to the Roman spirit, as the degradation of Greek art advanced under their powerful but inartistic Roman conquerors. Throughout this succession of styles Egyptian, Greek, and Graeco- Roman there runs a distinct undercurrent of individuality due to the Etruscans themselves. This appears not only in the drawing but also in the choice of subjects. In addition to pictures of banquets with musicians and dancers, hunting and racing scenes, the workshops of different craftsmen and other domestic sub jects, all thoroughly Hellenic in sentiment, other paintings occur which are very un-Greek in feeling. These repre sent the judgment and punishment of souls in a future life. Mantus, Charun, and other infernal deities of the Rasena, hideous in aspect and armed with hammers, or furies, depicted as black bearded demons winged and brandishing live snakes, terrify or torture shrinking human souls. Others, and not the earliest in date, represent human sacrifices, such as those at the tomb of Patroclus a class of subjects which, though Homeric, appears but rarely to have been selected by Greek painters. The con stant import into Etruria of large quantities of fine Greek painted vases appears to have largely contributed to keep up the supremacy of Hellenic influence during many cen- 1 See Champollion, Pantheon Egyptien (1825) ; De Joannis, Pein- tures murales. . . des Egyptiens Biechy, La Peinture chez les Egi/ptiens (1868) ; Lenormant, Antiques Egyptiennes ; Lepsius, J&amp;gt;enkmaler aus Aegypten ; Wilkinson, Anc. Egypt. ; Descr. de VEgypte (Paris, 1821, &c.) ; Perrot et Chipiez, L Art d Egypte (1880), and other works on Egypt. turies, and by their artistic superiority to have prevented the development of a more original and native school of art. Though we now know Etruscan painting only from the tombs, yet Pliny mentions (H. N., xxxv. 3) that fine wall-paintings existed in his time, with colours yet fresh, on the walls of ruined temples at Ardea and Lanuvium, executed, he says, before the founding of Rome. As before mentioned, the actual dates of the existing paint ings are very uncertain. It cannot therefore be positively asserted that any existing specimens are much older than 600 B.C., though some, especially at Veii, certainly appear to have the characteristics of more remote antiquity. The most important of these paintings have been discovered in the cemeteries of Veii, Caere, Tarquinii, Vulci, Cervetri, and other Etruscan cities. 2 Greek Painting. This is a very obscure subject, for, although Strabo, Pliny, Pausanias, and others have left us minute descriptions of Greek paintings and ample accounts of painters and styles, yet of the pictures themselves almost nothing now remains. Even in Egypt the use of colour does not appear to have been more universal than it was among the Greeks, who applied it freely to their marble statues and reliefs, the whole of their buildings inside and out, as well as for the decoration of flat wall-surfaces. They appear to have cared but little for pure form, and not to have valued the delicate ivory-like tint and beautiful texture of their fine Pentelic and Parian marbles, except as a ground for coloured ornament. A whole class of artists, called ayatyiarwv eyKcu crrat, were occupied in colouring marble sculpture, and their services were very highly valued. 3 In some cases, probably for the sake of hiding the joints and getting a more absorbent surface, the marble, however pure and fine in texture, was covered with a thin skin of stucco made of mixed lime and pow dered marble. Among the extremely rare specimens of Greek painting still existing, the most important is an alabaster sarcophagus, found in a tomb near Corneto, and now in the Etruscan museum at Florence. 4 This is decorated outside with very beautiful and purely Greek paintings, executed on a stucco skin as hard and smooth as the alabaster itself. The pictures represent combats of the Greeks and Amazons, drawn with marvellous beauty of outline and grace of movement and composition. The colouring, though rather brilliant, is very simply treated, and the figures are kept strictly to one plane without any attempt at complicated perspective. Other most valuable specimens of Greek art, found at Herculaneum and now in the Naples museum, are some small paintings, one of girls playing with dice, another of Theseus and the Minotaur. These are painted with miniature-like delicacy on the bare surface of marble slabs ; they are almost mono chromatic, and are of the highest beauty both in drawing and in their skilfully -modelled gradations of shadow quite unlike any of the Greek vase-paintings. The first-men tioned painting is signed AAE&AXAP02 A0HNAI02. It is probable that the strictly archaic paintings of the Greeks, such as those of Polygnotus in the 5th century B.C., executed with few and simple colours, had much resemblance to those on vases, but Pliny is certainly wrong when he asserts that, till the time of Apelles (c. 350-310 B.C.), the Greek painters only used black, white, red, and 2 See Dennis, Cities and Cemeteries of Etruria (1878) ; Golini, Pitture murali EtruscJie; Micali, Man. inediti; Mon. and Ann. d. Inst. Arch. (Rome, various years) ; Canina, L c.ntica Etruria (1846, et sq.) ; Bartoli, Sepolchri Rom. ed Etrus. (1727) ; Miiller, Etrusk/ r, and other works ; Helbig, Pitture Cornetane (1863) ; Inghirami, Mon. Etruschi (1821-26) ; Byres, Sepulchral Caverns of Tarquinia (1842) ; and Raoul Rochette, Mon. d Antiquite Grecque, Etrusque, et Romaine (1833). 3 This process, circumlitio, is mentioned by Pliny (H. N., xxxv. 40). 4 See Mon. Inst. Arch., Rome, ix. plate 60.