ETRUSCAN ART
AND ROMAN ART
FEROCIOUS SHE-WOLF TURNS TOWARD
us with a vicious snarl. Her tense body,
thin flanks, and protruding ribs contrast with
her heavy, milk-filled teats. Incongruously, she suckles two active, chubby little boys. We are looking at the most famous symbol of Rome, the legendary wolf who nourished and saved the
city’s founder, Romulus, and his twin brother, Remus (fig. 6-1).
According to a Roman legend, the twin sons of the god Mars
and a mortal woman were left to die on the banks of the Tiber
River by their wicked uncle. A she-wolf discovered the infants
and nursed them in place of her own pups; the twins were later
raised by a shepherd. When they reached adulthood, the twins
decided to build a city near the spot where the wolf had rescued
them, according to tradition, in the year 753 BCE.
This composite sculptural group of wolf and boys suggests
the complexities of art history on the Italian peninsula. An
early people called Etruscans created the bronze wolf about
500 BCE, and Romans added the sculpture of children to it in
the late fifteenth or early sixteenth century CE. This figure is
thus a fitting image for the way the themes and styles of the
Etruscans and the later Romans combined.
We know that a statue of a wolf—and sometimes even a live
wolf in a cage—stood on the Capitoline Hill, the governmental
and religious center of ancient Rome. But whether the wolf in
figure 6-1 is the same sculpture that Romans saw then is far
from certain. According to tradition, the original bronze wolf
was struck by lightning and buried. The documented history of
this She-Wolf begins in the tenth century CE, when it was rediscovered and placed outside the Lateran Palace, the home of the
pope. At that time, statues of two small men stood under the
wolf, personifying the alliance between the Romans and their
former enemies from central Italy, the Sabines. But in the later
Middle Ages, people mistook the figures for children and identified the sculpture with the founding of Rome. During the Renaissance, Romans wanted more specific imagery and added the
twins we see here. Pope Sixtus IV (papacy 1471–84 CE) had the
sculpture moved from his palace to the Capitoline Hill. Today,
the She-Wolf maintains her wary pose in a museum there.
6-1. She-Wolf. c. 500 BCE. Bronze, glass-paste eyes, height 331冫2 –
(85 cm). Museo Capitolino, Rome.
181
700
▼
500
▼
BCE
300 BCE
▼
BCE
▲ c. 509–27 ROMAN REPUBLIC
▲ c. 700–509 ETRUSCAN SUPREMACY
▲ 264–146 PUNIC WARS
▲ c. 450–320 CLASSICAL GREEK CULTURE
▲ c. 559–331 PERSIAN EMPIRE
TIMELINE 6-1. The Etruscan and Roman Worlds.
The Etruscans controlled the Italian peninsula until the Romans defeated them
in 509 BCE. Roman kings unified Italy during their nearly 500-year reign. The emperors, beginning with Augustus in 27 BCE, first expanded the
Roman Empire until it extended to Britain, then saw it contract until it weakened and was permanently split in 395 CE.
Tiber R.
NORTH
SCOTLAND
OCEAN
SEA
ATLANTIC
Tarquinia Veii
Cerveteri
Ostia
Rome
C
SEA
Pompeii
Mildenhall
TYRRHENIAN
eR
R hi n
English Channel
ne
Paris
Trier
0
50
IONIAN
100 Miles
R
.
.
SEA
Dan
u
FRANCE
Nîmes
Orange
S
L PMilan Venice
Po
R.
100 Kilometers
BLACK SEA
AL
Populonia
50
DACIA
ITALY
RI A
SPAIN
A
0
be R
.
D
Rh
ô
R.
ne
Gard R.
ET R U
PO
RT
UG
AL
SEA
GERMANY
.
Se
i
Loire R
Mt. Vesuvius
Boscoreale
Naples
BA
BRITAIN
SEA
Palestrina
L
TI
Hadrian’s Wall
ADRIATIC
Tivoli
Split M
AT
PerugiaA
IA
Tiber R. DR
IA
T
A L G E R IA
E
Timgad
A
N
CRETE
Knossos
CYPRUS
250
500 Miles
500 Kilometers
Jerusalem
PERSIA
Ni
le
R.
R
ED
S
EA
0
250
R.
SYRIA
Cairo
Fayum
EGYPT
0
MESOP
OTA
Euphra
MI
tes
A
PALESTINE
Canopus
Alexandria
N
Tigr
is
PHOENICIA
S E A
A F R I C A
M I NOR
R.
IC
Rome
Constantinople
SE
ASIA
A MACEDONIA
Naples LATIUM
Nicomedia
Herculaneum CAMPANIA
Thessaloniki
Troy
TURKEY
TYRRHENIAN
GREECE
Pergamon
SEA
M E D
ANATOLIA
I T
Corinth
Miletos
E R
See inset
Athens
Olympia
R
Carthage
A
Sparta
N
Map 6-1. The Roman Republic and Empire.
After defeating the Etruscans in 509 BCE, Rome became a republic. It reached its greatest area by the time of Julius Caesar’s death in
46 BCE. The Roman Empire began in 27 BCE, extended its borders from the Euphrates River to Scotland under Trajan in 106 CE, but
was permanently split into the Eastern and Western Empires in 395 CE.
The boot-shaped Italian peninsula, shielded to the north by
the Alps, juts into the Mediterranean Sea. At the end of the
Bronze Age (about 1000 BCE), a central European people
known as the Villanovans occupied the northern and
western regions of Italy, and central Italy was home to a
variety of people who spoke a closely related group of
Italic languages, Latin among them. Beginning about 750
BCE, Greeks too established colonies in Italy and in Sicily.
Between the seventh and sixth centuries BCE, the people
known as the Etruscans, probably related to the Vil-
ETRUSCAN
CIVILIZATION
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Etruscan Art and Roman Art
lanovans, gained control of northern and much of central Italy, an area known as Etruria (modern Tuscany).
The Etruscans’ wealth came from Etruria’s fertile soil
and abundance of metal ore. Noted as both farmers and
metalworkers, the Etruscans were also sailors and merchants, and they exploited their resources in trade with the
Greeks and with the people of Phoenicia (modern
Lebanon). Although Etruscan artists knew and drew inspiration from Greek and Near Eastern sources, they never
slavishly copied what they admired. Instead, they assimilated these influences and created a distinctive Etruscan
style. Organized into a loose federation of a dozen cities,
ARCH, VAULT, AND DOME
The first true arch used in Western architecture is the
round arch. When extended, the round arch becomes a
barrel vault. The round arch and barrel vault were
known and were put to limited use by Mesopotamians
and Egyptians long before the Etruscans began their experiments. But it was the Romans who realized the potential strength and versatility of these architectural
features and exploited them to the fullest degree.
The round arch displaces most of the weight, or
downward thrust (see arrows on diagrams), of the masonry above it to its curving sides and transmits that
weight to the supporting uprights (door or window
jambs, columns, or piers), and from there to the
ground. Arches may require added support, called
buttressing, from adjacent masonry elements. Brick or
cut-stone arches are formed by fitting together wedgeshaped pieces, called voussoirs, until they meet and are
locked together at the top center by the final piece, called
the keystone. Until the mortar between the bricks or
stones dries, an arch is held in place by wooden scaffolding, called centering. The inside surface of the arch is
called the intrados, the outside curve of the arch the
extrados. The points from which the curves of the arch
rise, called springings, are often reinforced by masonry
imposts. The wall areas adjacent to the curves of the
arch are spandrels. In a succession of arches, called an
arcade, the space encompassed by each arch and its
supports is called a bay.
The barrel vault is constructed in the same manner
as the round arch. The outside pressure exerted by the
curving sides of the barrel vault requires buttressing
within or outside the supporting walls. When two barrelvaulted spaces intersect each other at the same level, the
result is a groin vault. The Romans used the groin vault
to construct some of their grandest interior spaces, and
they made the round arch the basis for their great freestanding triumphal arches.
A third type of vault brought to technical perfection
by the Romans is the hemispheric dome. The rim of the
dome is supported on a circular wall, as in the Pantheon
(see figs. 6-46, 6-47). This wall is called a drum when it
is raised on top of a main structure. Sometimes a circular
opening, called an oculus, is left at the top.
keystone
spandrel
spandrel
extrados
voussoirs
intrados
springing
impost
centering
jamb
piers
bay
round arch
buttress
buttress
barrel vault
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Etruscan Art and Roman Art
space
included
in bay
piers
groin vault
6-28. Atrium, House of the Silver Wedding, Pompeii. Early 1st century CE
Ancient Roman houses excavated at Pompeii and elsewhere are usually simply given numbers by archaeologists or (if known) named after the
families or individuals who once lived in them. This house received its unusual name as a commemorative gesture. It was excavated in 1893,
the year of the silver wedding anniversary of Italy’s King Humbert and his wife, Margaret of Savoy, who had supported archaeological
fieldwork at Pompeii.
mild southern climate permitted gardens to flourish
year-round, the peristyle was often turned into an outdoor living room with painted walls, fountains, and
sculpture, as in the mid-first-century CE House of the
Vettii (fig. 6-29, page 206).
WALL PAINTING
Many fine wall paintings have come to light through excavations, first in Pompeii and other communities surrounding Mount Vesuvius, near Naples, and more
recently in and around Rome. The interior walls of
Roman houses were plain, smooth plaster surfaces with
few architectural features. On these invitingly empty
spaces, artists painted decorations using pigment in a
solution of lime and soap, sometimes with a little wax.
After the painting was finished, they polished it with a
special metal, glass, or stone burnisher and then buffed
the surface with a cloth.
In the earliest paintings (200–80 BCE), artists attempted to produce the illusion of thin slabs of colored marble
covering the walls, which were set off by actual architectural moldings and columns. By about 80 BCE, they
began to extend the space of a room visually with
painted scenes of figures on a shallow “stage” or with a
landscape or cityscape. Architectural details such as
columns were painted rather than made of molded plaster. As time passed, this painted architecture became
increasingly fanciful. Solid-colored walls were decorated with slender, whimsical architectural and floral
details and small, delicate vignettes.
The walls of a room from a villa at Boscoreale near
Pompeii (reconstructed in The Metropolitan Museum, New
York) open onto a fantastic urban panorama (fig. 6-30,
page 206). The wall surfaces seem to dissolve behind
columns and lintels, which frame a maze of floating architectural forms creating purely visual effects, like the
CHAPTER 6
Etruscan Art and Roman Art
205
6-29. Peristyle garden, House of the Vettii, Pompeii. 2nd century BCE, rebuilt 60–79 BCE
6-30. Reconstructed
bedroom, from the
House of Publius
Fannius Synistor,
Boscoreale, near
Pompeii. Late 1st century
CE, with later furnishings.
The Metropolitan Museum
of Art, New York.
Rogers Fund, 1903 (03.14.13)
Although the elements in the
room are from a variety of
places and dates, they give a
sense of how the original
furnished room might have
looked. The floor mosaic,
found near Rome, dates to the
second century CE. At its
center is an image of a priest
offering a basket with a snake
to a cult image of Isis. The
couch and footstool, which
are inlaid with bone and glass,
date from the first century CE.
The wall paintings, original to
the Boscoreale villa, may have
been inspired by theater scene
painting.
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Etruscan Art and Roman Art
THE URBAN GARDEN
The remains of urban gardens preserved in the volcanic fallout at
Pompeii have been the focus of a
decades-long study by archaeologist Wilhelmina Jashemski. Her
work has revealed much about the
layout of ancient Roman gardens
and the plants cultivated in them.
Early archaeologists, searching for
more tangible remains, usually destroyed evidence of gardens, but in
1973 Jashemski and her colleagues
had the opportunity to work on the
previously undisturbed peristyle
garden—a planted interior court enclosed by columns—of the House of
G. Polybius in Pompeii. Workers first
removed layers of debris and volcanic material to expose the level of
the soil as it was before the eruption
in 79 CE. They then collected samples of pollen, seeds, and other organic material and carefully injected
plaster into underground root cavities to make casts for later study.
These materials enabled botanists
to identify the types of plants and
trees cultivated in the garden, to estimate their size, and to determine
where they had been planted.
The evidence from this and other
excavations indicates that most
urban gardens served a practical
function. They were planted with
fruit- and nut-bearing trees and occasionally with olive trees. Only the
great luxury gardens were rigidly
landscaped. Most gardens were randomly planted or, at best, arranged
in irregular rows. Some houses had
both peristyle gardens and separate
vegetable gardens.
The garden in the house of Polybius was surrounded on three sides
by a portico, which protected a
large cistern on one side that supplied the house and garden with
water. Young lemon trees in pots
lined the fourth side of the garden,
and nail holes in the wall above
the pots indicated that the trees
had been espaliered—pruned and
trained to grow flat against a support—a practice still in use today.
Fig, cherry, and pear trees filled the
garden space, and traces of a fruitpicking ladder, wide at the bottom
and narrow at the top to fit among
Wall niche, from a garden in Pompeii Mid-1st century CE. Mosaic,
433冫4 * 311冫2 – (111 * 80 cm). Fitzwilliam Museum, University of Cambridge,
England.
the branches, was found on the site.
This evidence suggests that the garden was a densely planted orchard
similar to the one painted on the
dining-room walls of the villa of
Empress Livia in Primaporta (see
fig. 6-32).
An aqueduct built during the
reign of Augustus had given Pompeii’s residents access to a reliable
and plentiful supply of water, eliminating their dependence on wells
and rainwater basins and allowing
them to add to their gardens pools,
fountains, and flowering plants that
needed heavy watering. In contrast
to the earlier, unordered plantings,
formal gardens with low, clipped
borders and plantings of ivy, orna-
mental boxwood, laurel, myrtle,
acanthus, and rosemary—all mentioned by writers of the time—
became fashionable. There is also
evidence of topiary work, the clipping of shrubs and hedges into fanciful shapes. Sculpture and purely
decorative fountains became popular. The peristyle garden of the
House of the Vettii, for example, had
more than a dozen fountain statues
jetting water into marble basins (see
fig. 6-29). In the most elegant peristyles, mosaic decorations covered
the floors, walls, and even the fountains. Some of the earliest wall mosaics, such as the one illustrated
here, were created as backdrops for
fountains.
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Etruscan Art and Roman Art
207
6-31. Cityscape, detail of a wall painting from a bedroom
in the House of Publius Fannius Synistor, Boscoreale. Late 1st
century CE. The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York.
Rogers Fund, 1903 (03.14.13)
backdrops of a stage. Indeed, the theater may have inspired this kind of decoration, as details in the room
suggest. For example, on the rear wall, next to the window, is a painting of a grotto, the traditional setting for
satyr plays, dramatic interludes about the half-man,
half-goat followers of Bacchus. On the side walls, paintings of theatrical masks hang from the lintels.
One section shows a complex jumble of buildings
with balconies, windows, arcades, and roofs at different
levels, as well as a magnificent colonnade (fig. 6-31).
The artist has used intuitive perspective admirably to
create a general impression of real space. The architectural details follow diagonal lines that the eye interprets
as parallel lines receding into the distance, and objects
meant to be perceived as far away from the surface
plane of the wall are shown slightly smaller than those
intended to appear nearby.
The dining-room walls of the Villa of Livia at Primaporta exemplify yet another approach to creating a
sense of expanded space (fig. 6-32). Instead of rendering
a stage set or a cityscape, the artist “painted away” the
wall surfaces to create the illusion of being on a porch or
pavilion looking out over a low, paneled wall into an orchard of heavily laden fruit trees. These and the flowering shrubs are filled with a variety of wonderfully
observed birds.
During the first century CE, landscape painters became especially accomplished. Pliny the Elder wrote in
Naturalis Historia (35.116–17) of
that most delightful technique of painting walls with
representations of villas, porticoes and landscape
gardens, woods, groves, hills, pools, channels, rivers,
coastlines—in fact, every sort of thing which one
might want, and also various representations of people within them walking or sailing . . . and also fishing, fowling, or hunting or even harvesting the
wine-grapes.
6-32. Garden Scene, detail of a wall painting from the Villa of Livia at Primaporta, near Rome. Late 1st century BCE. Museo
Nazionale Romano, Rome.
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Etruscan Art and Roman Art
6-33. Seascape,
detail of a wall
painting from Villa
Farnesina, Rome.
Late 1st century CE
6-34. Initiation
Rites of the Cult of
Bacchus (?), detail
of a wall painting in
the Villa of the
Mysteries, Pompeii.
c. 50 BCE
In such paintings, the overall effect is one of wonderinvoking nature, an idealized view of the world, rendered with free, fluid brushwork and delicate color. A
painting from the Villa Farnesina, in Rome (fig. 6-33),
depicts the locus amoenus, the “lovely place” extolled by
Roman poets, where people lived effortlessly in union
with the land. Here two conventions create the illusion
of space: distant objects are rendered proportionally
smaller than near objects, and the colors become
slightly grayer near the horizon, an effect called
atmospheric perspective, which reproduces the ten-
dency of distant objects to appear hazy, especially in
seascapes.
In addition to landscapes and city views, other subjects that appeared in Roman art included historical and
mythological scenes, exquisitely rendered still lifes
(compositions of inanimate objects), and portraits. One
of the most famous painted rooms in Roman art is in the
so-called Villa of the Mysteries at Pompeii (fig. 6-34).
The rites of mystery religions were often performed in
private homes as well as in special buildings or temples,
and this room, at the corner of a suburban villa, must
CHAPTER 6
Etruscan Art and Roman Art
209
6-35. Still Life, detail of a wall painting from Herculaneum.
6-36. Young Woman Writing, detail of a wall painting,
c. 62–69 CE. Museo Nazionale, Naples.
from Pompeii. Late 1st century CE. Diameter 145冫8 – (37 cm).
Museo Archeologico Nazionale, Naples.
have been a shrine or meeting place for such a cult. A
reminder of the wide variety of religious practices tolerated by the Romans, the murals depict initiation rites—
probably into the cult of Bacchus, who was the god of
vegetation and fertility as well as wine and was one of
the most important deities in Pompeii. The entirely
painted architectural setting consists of a “marble” dado
(the lower part of a wall) and, around the top of the wall,
an elegant frieze supported by pilasters. The action
takes place on a shallow “stage” along the top of the
dado, with a background of brilliant, deep red (now
known as Pompeian red) that was very popular with
Roman painters. The scene unfolds around the entire
room, depicting a succession of events that culminate in
the acceptance of an initiate into the cult.
In the portion of the room seen here, a priestess (on
the left) prepares to reveal draped cult objects, a female
initiate lies across the lap of another woman, and a
devotee dances with cymbals, perhaps to drown out the
initiate’s cries. A fourth female figure carries a long rod.
According to another interpretation, the dancing figure
is the initiate herself, who has risen to dance with joy at
the conclusion of her trials. The whole scene may show
a purification ritual meant to bring enlightenment and
blissful union with the god.
Wall painting also depicted more mundane subject
matter. A still-life panel from Herculaneum, a community in the vicinity of Mount Vesuvius near Pompeii, depicts everyday domestic objects—still-green peaches
just picked from the tree and a glass jar half filled with
water (fig. 6-35). The items have been carefully arranged
on two shelves to give the composition clarity and balance. A strong, clear light floods the picture from right to
left, casting shadows, picking up highlights, and enhancing the illusion of real objects in real space.
210
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The fashionable young woman seems to be pondering what she will
write about with her stylus on the beribboned writing tablet that she
holds in her other hand. Romans used pointed styluses to engrave
letters on thin, wax-coated ivory or wood tablets in much the way
we might use a hand-held computer; errors could be easily
smoothed over. When a text or letter was considered ready, it was
copied onto expensive papyrus or parchment. Tablets like these
were also used by schoolchildren for their homework.
Portraits, sometimes imaginary ones, also became
popular. A late-first-century CE tondo (circular panel)
from Pompeii contains the portrait Young Woman Writing (fig. 6-36). The sitter has regular features and curly
hair caught in a golden net. As in a modern studio portrait photograph with its careful lighting and retouching,
the young woman may be somewhat idealized. Following a popular convention, she nibbles on the tip of her
stylus. Her sweet mien and clear-eyed but unfocused
and contemplative gaze suggest that she is in the throes
of composition. The paintings in Pompeii reveal much
about the lives of women during this period (see “The
Position of Roman Women,” page 235). Some, like Julia
Felix, were the owners of houses where paintings were
found. Others were the subjects of the paintings, shown
as rich and poor, young and old, employed as business
managers and domestic workers.
Just as architecture became increasingly grand, even
grandiose, during the first 150 years of the Roman Empire, so, too, did the decorative wall painting in houses
become ever more elaborate. In the House of M. Lucretius Fronto in Pompeii, from the mid-first century CE
(fig. 6-37), the artist painted a room with panels of black
and red, bordered with architectural moldings. These architectural elements have no logic, and for all their playing with perspective, they fail to create any significant