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Tomba del Colle Casuccini(Permanently Closed)
It lies "a short mile" to the east of Chiusi. It is hollowed in the side of a hill, and is entered by a level passage cut in the slope. At Chiusi, indeed, almost all the tombs now open are entered in this manner, instead of by a descending flight of steps, as at Corneto, Vulci, and Cervetri.
The marvels of this tomb meet you on its threshold. p362 The entrance is closed with folding-doors, each flap being a single slab of travertine. You are startled at this unusual sort of door — still more, when you hear, what your eyes confirm, that these ponderous doors are the original doors of the tomb, still working on their hinges as when they were first raised, some twenty and odd centuries since. Hinges, strictly speaking, there are none; for the doors have one side lengthened into a pivot above and below, which pivots work in sockets made in the stone lintel and threshold; just as in the early gateways of Etruscan cities,1 and as doors were hung in the middle ages — those of the Alhambra for instance. There can be no doubt of the antiquity of these doors; it is manifest in their very arrangement; for the lintel is a huge mass of rock buried beneath a weight of superincumbent earth; and must have been laid after the slabs were in their places; and it is obvious that none but those who committed their treasures to this sepulchre, would have taken so much labour to preserve them.2 This was not a common mode of closing the tomb, which was generally done with one or more slabs of rock, often fitted to the doorway, and sometimes highly adorned with reliefs, as in the Grotta delle Iscrizioni at Tarquinii.3
Just outside the door a small chamber opens on either hand, probably for the freedmen or slaves of the family. The tomb itself has three chambers, two only decorated with paintings, the third unfinished. The first is the largest,4 and has a doorway in the centre of two of its p363 walls, opening into the other chambers; but on the third wall is a false door painted to correspond, as in the tomb of Tarquinii just mentioned. All the doors, true or false, narrow upwards, and have the usual Etruscan mouldings. The ceilings are not carved, as usual on other sites, into rafters, but coffered, as in the Grotta Cardinale at Tarquinii, in concentric squares and oblongs recessed, and painted black and red.
The paintings do not stand out forcibly, though on a white ground.5 Beyond this, the walls have undergone no other preparation than smoothing. The rock is a sort of sandstone, which will not take a very fine surface, and therefore hardly allows of a high finish or of much force of colour.
The figures are in a band •about twenty-two or three inches deep, which surrounds the chamber as a frieze. They are twenty-six in number, and are divided into two subjects, banquets and games, both having a funereal reference. On the portion of the frieze facing you as you enter, are the palaestric games. To the right of the central door is a race of three bigae. The charioteers are dressed in white scull-caps and tunics, and the reins are as usual passed round their bodies. Each pair of horses is black and red, and red and black, alternately.6 By the side of each chariot is a tree, or what in the conventional system of the Etruscans was intended to represent such, though to our eyes it is more like a tall bullrush, or a paddle stuck into the ground, the stick being painted red, and the blade bright blue. Such trees may be intended for p364 cypresses — cupressus funebres. The action of both men and horses is natural and easy; the latter especially, though with native peculiarities, have more spirit and freedom than any of those in the painted tombs of Tarquinii.7
To the left of the central door, are represented the games on foot. First is a pair of wrestlers, or it may be tumblers, for one is inverted with his heels in the air and his body resting on the shoulders of the other, who is kneeling.8 They strongly resemble certain figures in the painted tombs of Egypt. An agonothete in blue pallium, and holding a wand, stands by to direct the sport. Next, a naked man, whose attitude may remind you of the celebrated dancing faun at Naples, is boxing with an imaginary opponent, to the sound of the double-pipes.9 A female follows, dancing to the same music, and to the castanets which she rattles herself. She is draped with boddice and light transparent gown, and a chlamys or scarf on her shoulders; and in attitude as well as costume she is very like the dancing-girls in the tombs of Tarquinii.10 Next to this group is a naked man, with crested helmet, round shield, and long wavy spear, running as if to charge the foe; or he may be practising an armed dance, such as the ancients were wont to perform.11 The last figure is a naked p365 man, exercising himself with halteres, or in plain English, using the dumb-bells, which, with the ancients, served the same purpose as with us.12
Half of the frieze in this chamber being devoted to games, the other half is pictured with the banquet. Here are five couches, each bearing a pair of figures, all males, young and beardless, half-draped, and crowned with blue chaplets. The absence of the fair sex shows this to be a symposium. Their gestures, animated and varied, betray the exhilarating influence of the rosy god. One holds a chaplet, another a flower, a third a branch, apparently of myrtle, and several have paterae, which the slaves are hastening to replenish. The whole goes forward to the music of the double-pipes. At one end of the scene stands a tripod with a large triple basin, either a wine-cooler or containing the beverage, mixed to the palates of the revellers;13 and a slave is busied at it, replenishing wine-jugs. A second figure, who, with arm uplifted, is giving p366 the slave directions — "Deprome, o Thaliarche, merum diotā!" — is evidently the butler; and the patera suspended on the wall marks this corner as his pantry. Should curiosity be excited as to the costume of butlers in Italy some two or three-and twenty centuries since, I must reply that this Etruscan worthy is "in leathers," as the Spaniards say, though not in buff, chamois, or cordovan.
[image ALT: An engraving of a ladle. It is a depiction of an Etruscan ladle or simpulum, possibly for religious use.]
One of the slaves in this scene holds a long ladle — simpulum, or capidula — with a handle bent into a hook, for the purpose of suspension on the rim of the wine-vessel. Such simpula, in bronze, shown in the annexed woodcut, are occasionally found in Etruscan tombs.
The inner chamber is of smaller dimensions,14 surrounded by a bench of rock. It has also a frieze of figures, here only •fourteen inches high — a chorus of youths; one with a patera, another with a chaplet, a third with the double-pipes, and a fourth a lyre, by which they regulate the dance. All are naked, with the exception of a light chlamys on their shoulders.15
The natural interpretation of these scenes is that they represent the funeral rites of the Etruscans. Though antiquaries of great renown have attached a symbolical meaning to them, I see no reason why they should not p367 represent the feasting, music, dances, and palaestric games, actually held in honour of the dead.16 It is possible that they may be at once descriptive and symbolical. This is a point on which every one is at liberty to hold his own opinion.
The figures in these paintings are generally outlined with black. The colours are hardly so well preserved as in those of Tarquinii; the blues and whites are the most vivid. Yet all have been seriously injured. Let the visitor have a care as he moves through these tombs. The medium, whatever it were, with which the colours were laid on, having perished after so many ages, they now remain in mere powder on the walls, and might be effaced by a touch of the finger, or by the sweeping of a garment.
These paintings have no chiaro-scuro, no perspective, no foreshortening; the faces are always in profile; the figures sometimes unnaturally elongated; the limbs clumsy; the attitudes rigid; the drapery arranged in stiff, regular folds — all features of archaic character. Yet there are more p368 ease and power than are usually found in connection with such signs of antiquity. They seem the work of a man who could do better things, but who either felt tomb-painting to be a degradation of his talents, or was restrained by conventionalities from the free exercise of them. These are of later date than most of the paintings of Tarquinii, yet must be of Etruscan times; they can hardly belong to the period of Roman domination, still less, as Inghirami opines, to the decadence of art.17
This tomb was discovered in May 1833, by accident, while making "bonifications" to the soil. It must have been rifled in past ages, for nothing but fragments of pottery and urns was found within it.18
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