How Art Made the World

by Nigel Spivey

  Infantry soldiers, neatly lined up according to the prevalent rules of regimental formation; cavalry, with their ponies, chariots and stablehands; possibly, too, the elite force of the emperor’s own bodyguard: all were shaped in clay, baked, painted and issued with fully functional bronze weapons and accoutrements. Moulds were used for certain sections of the figures, but none is exactly like any other: care was taken to individualize each member of this mighty royal garrison. If the emperor’s own tomb mound constituted his private palace or ‘forbidden city’, then these chambers served as satellite army camps or barracks.

  127 The Terracotta Army, China – a view of some of the figures excavated so far.

  128 Boys diving from multi-coloured cliffs – detail of paintings in the Tomb of Hunting and Fishing at Tarquinia, c. 500 BC.

  To muster this force of earthenware warriors was a logistical, as well as an artistic, triumph, involving an estimated half a million craftsmen and labourers.We today are amazed to see the result. But what is more amazing is the fact that not one of these figures was created for public view. Lifelike they certainly were, and all for the sake of reassuring one man who was profoundly afraid of death.

  THE ETRUSCANS AND THE MAKING OF THE UNDERWORLD

  The sheer extravagance with which Qin Shihuang budgeted for his departure from the world is foreign to us, as are many past testimonies of burial involving precious goods or sacrifice. As the English poet W.H. Auden mordantly observed (in 1962):

  Nobody I know would like to be buried

  with a silver cocktail shaker,

  a transistor radio and a strangled

  daily help …

  We have abandoned such observances. Archaeologists of the future will find it very difficult to deduce from our tombs what social rank we occupied when alive. Furthermore, it is said (by social scientists) that nowadays only a very small proportion of people maintain any traditional beliefs about the afterlife.The Christian notions of heaven and hell, for example, are reckoned largely to have disappeared from collective consciousness. So what use is there in pursuing a final case study of the ancient imagining of death from a famously enigmatic people, the Etruscans? The answer is that although these long-buried inhabitants of pre-Roman Italy knew a world very different from our own, a study of their view of death directly illuminates our own ambivalent attitude.Why do we persist in the paradox of wanting to sanitize death out of existence, while bombarding ourselves with images of its proximity? Because we are locked into juggling the balance between fear and reassurance. This is a psychological necessity that the Etruscans discovered over 2000 years ago.

  In 1837 arguably the world’s first virtual reality experience of the ancient world was installed in a house in London’s Pall Mall. A dozen rooms at one genteel address were temporarily transformed into Etruscan tombs. Some were painted chambers, minutely reproduced from tombs at Tarquinia, a major Etruscan city to the north of Rome; others contained authentic sarcophagi and various funerary relics – armour, mirrors, utensils, jewels and skeletal remains – excavated from various Etruscan sites. The lighting, designed to simulate that used for entering some subterranean site, was provided by blazing torches.Visitors were encouraged to believe that they were descending into a netherworld of Etruscan ghosts.

  But this show was not set up as a gloomy or forbidding experience. One of the first exhibits was a mocked-up tomb, the painted walls of which showed Etruscans happily at ease on banqueting couches, making music and dancing ecstatically in open countryside. As the accompanying catalogue commented, much of the decoration of Etruscan tombs seemed intended ‘to remove from death every idea of horror’. Death, to the Etruscans, seemed ‘to be nothing less than the approach and passage to a new life in the Elysian fields; where, in union with their deceased kinsmen and friends, they were to live in perpetual enjoyment and pleasure, feasting and dancing’.

  The Pall Mall exhibition was a marked success, adding to the romantic dream of Italy as an age-old sanctuary of warmth and light. Almost a century later, the tuberculosis-ridden D.H. Lawrence made a pilgrimage to Etruscan tombs in situ, seeking among these places of death the vitality he deemed lost by industrialized society. Clambering down into the various painted tombs concealed in hillsides above the town of Tarquinia, Lawrence was not disappointed. Surrounded by images of merriment and simple, even puerile, delights, such as those to be seen in the Tomb of Hunting and Fishing (Fig. 128), the ailing writer was enraptured by the manifest ‘throes of wonder and vivid feeling throbbing over death’; the ‘quick ripple of life’ that animated these ancient Etruscans who, Lawrence supposed, ‘must have lived with real fullness’.

  Since virtually nothing survives of Etruscan literature, it is easy to speculate about their systems of belief: there are no Etruscan voices to contradict us. But from the archaeological record it becomes clear that the Etruscan concept of death was much more complex than its rosy representation first to a Victorian public and then to the ardent D.H. Lawrence.

  Etruscan tomb design was inspired by the notion that the dead should be given accommodation that was familiar – that is, resembling the houses of the living. Early Etruscan ‘hut urns’, made of clay or bronze to contain an individual’s cremated remains, attest to this ideal. It is also evident at a number of Etruscan cemeteries, where the presence of soft volcanic stone facilitated the carving of commodious chambers from solid rock.When creating such tombs, Etruscan masons might replicate in stone not only timber architectural features, such as windows, doorways, roofing, pillars and joists – all to no structural purpose underground – but also domestic furniture, such as chairs and couches, plus sundry household fixtures and fittings, and armour or ornaments (Fig. 129).

  129 The interior of the Tomb of the Reliefs, Cerveteri, c.350 BC.

  130 A view of the Banditaccia ‘necropolis’, Cerveteri.

  131 A hook-nosed demon on a painted wall in the Tomb of the Blue Demons at Tarquinia, c.420 BC.

  Even humble burials were equipped with grave goods drawn from the domestic sphere – fire tongs, loomweights, and so on; not to mention plates, cups and victuals for taking sustenance below. So the Etruscan dead formed communities of ancestors, and each elaborate burial ground – rather more than a cemetery – was known as a necropolis, or ‘city of the dead’.The most substantial expression of this is to be found at Cerveteri, between Rome and Tarquinia, where an entire plateau still retains the air of a pseudo-urban centre. Its tombs, set out on streets and thoroughfares, even in terraced rows, are like so many desirable residences for eternity (Fig. 130). ‘So easy and friendly,’ commented Lawrence when he paid Cerveteri a springtime visit in 1927, finding again a ‘free-breasted naturalness and spontaneity … that at once reassures the spirit’. In such tranquil and cosy surroundings death could seem a positively enticing prospect.

  Yet there was a dark side to this Etruscan construction of the afterlife: a vision of death that brought with it hideous demons and ghastly torments. It was an aspect of Etruscan imagery that was given little prominence in the Pall Mall exhibition, and dismissed by D.H. Lawrence as a regrettable corrosion of the free Etruscan spirit by Roman influence. However, it now appears that this dark aspect was independently created by the Etruscans themselves – as if to counter any complacent assumption that death might be simply the merry continuance of life.

  In 1985 engineers plotting the path of a new water pipeline to supply modern Tarquinia were forced to stop and summon archaeologists when they sounded hollow space below.The archaeologists drilled down and peered into the hollow space with an inverted periscope. Sure enough, it was an Etruscan tomb, and a painted tomb at that: not surprising, since other painted tombs were located in the area. But as the periscope swivelled to survey the painted walls of the tomb, images were glimpsed that were truly alarming.

  One side of the tomb was decorated with conventional scenes of delight – music, dancing, quaffing wine.The other side, by contrast, featured pale figures beset by a gaggle of hook-n
osed, groping demons (Fig. 131).To call this the ‘Tomb of the Blue Demons’ does not quite convey the quality of the blue pigment used here: it is the queasy, electric blue of flies that cluster over putrefying flesh.These images were not intended to reassure: quite the opposite.

  Are these the oldest surviving images of hell? Possibly.They are certainly the first sign of a major shift in Etruscan iconography, as their tombs become ever more dominated by pictures and statues of hideous demons, the staff of the underworld. Led by Charun, the beaky, livid green ferryman of the dead, who in Etruscan art carries a large mallet with which to hurry his charges, these demons are often shown as unwelcome winged messengers, sent to claim yet another soul from the sunlight and enforce the final farewell. So what was it that brought about such a shift in the Etruscan world view regarding the afterlife – from happy to hellish?

  Lawrence was half-right about the Roman factor. By the time the Tomb of the Blue Demons was painted, in the late fifth century BC, Etruscan political fortunes were spiralling into decline. A century earlier the Etruscan king, known to the Romans as Tarquinius Superbus (Tarquin the Proud) had monumentalized what was little more than a shanty town spread over several hills by the banks of the River Tiber, building palaces, paving the forum (market) area, and laying down massive drainage channels. Then, c. 510 BC, the Etruscan kings were expelled from Rome, and the citizen farmers who established the Roman Republic formed a military-based state, whose experiments in aggressive expansion took them directly into the fertile heartlands of Etruria.The Etruscan cities, though confederated, did not combine effectively to resist the Roman advance. By 396 BC, one of the major Etruscan centres, the city of Veii, had fallen to the Romans. Others, including Cerveteri and Tarquinia, followed one by one. By the late first century BC – the time of the emperor Augustus and his pre-eminent poet, Virgil – Etruscan culture, along with the Etruscan language, was no more than an antiquarian curiosity.

  Etruscan soothsayers, priests of a deeply fatalistic religion, predicted an ‘end of time’ as a destiny for their own people.This may be one reason why the Etruscan cities failed to mount an effective resistance to the process of Roman conquest. On an individual level, however, it is apparent that measures were taken to adapt the imagery of death. Banquets still await the fortunate in the next world, but these are now the stuff of hope, not expectation.The demons will allocate doom to those who deserve it.

  Etruscan civilization disappeared, but the Etruscan dead stayed on, discreetly, in their underground tombs.We do not know just how much Virgil drew upon Etruscan notions of the afterlife when, in Book VI of his Aeneid, he gave the first detailed description of the underworld in Western literature. Nor can we be sure how far Dante, Virgil’s self-confessed medieval successor, incorporated folk knowledge of Etruscan tomb imagery into his poetic picture of the Inferno, a patent amalgamation of the Hebrew–Christian hell and the pagan Hades.

  132 The Damned by Luca Signorelli, Orvieto, 1499–1502.

  Did images of the Etruscan underworld filter into the Christian repertoire? If not, there are some surprising coincidences. In the late fourteenth century, an Italian painter was commissioned to decorate church walls with ‘Scenes from the End of Time’ – the Last Judgement, the day of reckoning, when the evil would be consigned to torment amid sulphurous flames, and the righteous escorted to heaven’s golden bliss. Apocalyptic passages from the New Testament Book of Revelation gave limited graphic guidance for the frescoes produced by Luca Signorelli in the San Brizio chapel of Orvieto Cathedral. Orvieto was once a significant Etruscan city; orderly rows of Etruscan tombs may still be seen at the foot of the hill where Orvieto rises, and the cathedral itself probably lies on top of an Etruscan temple.Was it direct access to an Etruscan tomb, or some distant local memory, that caused Signorelli to show ‘The Punishment of the Damned’ supervised by teams of greyish-blue demons (Fig. 132)?

  ‘IN THE END … ’

  The paintings in Orvieto Cathedral offered worshippers a cautionary choice with regard to the afterlife: to be saved or damned; to spend eternity in bliss or torment. On one side, heartening reassurance for the event of death; on the other, sheer terror.

  As noted earlier, church attendance is not what it was, and fears of hell have faded. But even in secular Western society, the tendency persists to visualize the end. It may be in a gallery or on the stage; on celluloid or video screen; or, perhaps most tellingly, as an essential element in the colour supplement of weekend newspapers. Lifestyle features dominate the pages of such magazines: food, wine, health, beauty, fashion, travel. But, almost de rigueur, there will be an essay concerned with death, probably a photo-journalistic spread showing humans in some part of the world beset by war, famine, disease or other agony (Fig. 133).

  It will not put us off our lunch. But this, now, is how we manage the terror of death. Extended as our lives may be, we mortals are still mortal. Images help us sometimes to remember that.

  133 A dead North Vietnamese soldier and his plundered belongings, Hue, 1968 by Don McCullin.

  SELECTED FURTHER READING

  1 THE HUMAN ARTIST

  A number of books germane to the general enterprise of this project may be tallied here, beginning with two studies of the human instinct for art as a means of ‘making special’ by the anthropologist Ellen Dissanyake: What Is Art For? (Washington 1988), and Homo Aestheticus: Where Art Comes From and Why (Washington 1995). M. Greenhalgh and V. Megaw, Art in Society (London 1978) contains various case-studies mixing ‘art and anthropology’; theory and practice are nicely combined in R. Layton, The Anthropology of Art (2nd ed., Cambridge 1991). W. Noble and I. Davison, Human Evolution, Language and Mind (Cambridge 1996), gives an overview of the evidence for the early development of symbolic capacity in the human species; as for historical instances of how humans respond to art, D. Freedberg’s The Power of Images (Chicago 1989) remains essential reading. On how children make art, see N.H. Freeman and M.V. Cox, Visual Order: The Nature and Development of Pictorial Representation (Cambridge 1985).The mistake of equating the term ‘primitive’ with ‘simple’ was definitively exposed by Franz Boas in his 1927 study, Primitive Art; but reconciling ancient and non-Western art with the traditional ‘story of art’ has proved a challenge, as shown by S. Price, Primitive Art in Civilized Places (Chicago 1989).

  2 THE BIRTH OF THE IMAGINATION

  No apologies for using, like others before me, the story of the Spanish nobleman and his daughter at Altamira as an historical epitome: it is still a telling story. For details I have relied upon B. Madariaga de la Campa, Sanz de Sautuola and the Discovery of the Caves of Altamira (Santander 2001). For the momentous ‘recantation’ essay of Emile Cartailhac, ‘Mea culpa d’un sceptique’, see L’Anthropologie 13 (1902), 348–54.There are good surveys of the ensuing debate in P.J. Ucko and A. Rosenfeld, Palaeolithic Cave Art (London 1967); P. G. Bahn, Prehistoric Art (Cambridge 1998), and M. Lorblanchet, La Naissance de l’Art (Paris 1999). The ‘art for art’s sake’ case is made by J. Halverson in Current Anthropology 28 (1987), 63–89. No hopes of visiting Chauvet, but for good pictures see J-M. Chauvet et al., Chauvet Cave: The Discovery of the World’s Oldest Paintings (London 1996). For the latest on Lascaux: N. Aujoulet, The Glory of Lascaux (London 2005). For more on the ‘cultural explosion’, diet and other factors of Stone Age archaeology, C. Gamble, The Palaeolithic Societies of Europe (Cambridge 1999).The ‘shamanistic’ interpretation of cave-paintings, no longer eccentric, is argued with patience and elegance by David Lewis-Williams, The Mind in the Cave (London 2002). My citation of a Bushman shaman becoming a lion is drawn from B. Keeney ed., Ropes to God: Experiencing the Bushman Spiritual Universe (Philadelphia 2003), 53. Interim results of excavation at Göbekli Tepe are published in Palèorient 26 (2001), 45–54; see also J. Peters and K. Schmidt,‘Animals in the Symbolic World of Pre-Pottery Neolithic Göbekli Tepe’, in Anthropozoologica 39 (2004), 179–218. A wider archaeological context of Göbekli is given by J. Cauvin, The Birth of the Gods an
d the Origins of Agriculture (Cambridge 2000), and S. Mithen, After the Ice (London 2003).

  3 MORE HUMAN THAN HUMAN

  Still to be treasured for its elegant range across the Western tradition of bodily representation is Kenneth Clark’s The Nude (London 1956). G.L. Hersey, The Evolution of Allure (Cambridge, Mass. 1996) adds further insights. On the story of the Venus of Willendorf:W. Angeli, Die Venus von Willendorf (Vienna 1998). V.S. Ramachandran’s application of ‘peak shift’ theory to figurative art is expounded in an article co-authored by W. Hirstein,‘The Science of Art’, in Journal of Consciousness Studies 6 (1999), 15–41 (with comment and debate in subsequent numbers of the same journal); also in Ch. 4 of his 2003 Reith lectures, The Emerging Mind (London 2004). A book entitled The Artful Brain is promised for late 2005. For gull-chick research: N.Tinbergen, The Herring Gull’s World (London 1953). On the Egyptian canonical tradition, see E. Iversen, Canon and Proportions in Egyptian Art (2nd ed.,Warminster 1975), and G. Robins, Proportion and Style in Ancient Egyptian Art (London 1994). I have explored the notion of ‘the Greek Revolution’ elsewhere: N.J. Spivey, Understanding Greek Sculpture (London 1996); on how the Greeks shaped up in sculpture, see also A.F. Stewart, Art, Desire and the Body in Ancient Greece (Cambridge 1997), and W.G. Moon ed., Polykleitos, the Doryphoros and Tradition (Wisconsin 1995).

  4 ONCE UPON A TIME

  A genial history of Hollywood storytelling is given by T. Shone, Blockbuster (London 2004).The more forbidding academic study of stories is represented by M. Bal, Narratology: Introduction to the Theory of the Narrative (Toronto 1985); and in the realms of psychology, by J. Bruner, Making Stories (Harvard 2002). My citation from Roland Barthes is translated from his ‘Introduction à l’analyse structurale des récits’ – the theoretical manifesto for a collection of influential ‘semiological’ essays entitled L’analyse structurale du récit (‘Communications’, 8: Paris [1966] 1981). On storytelling in ancient art: P. J. Holliday ed., Narrative and Event in Ancient Art (Cambridge 1993) does not render obsolete a symposium on ‘Narration in Ancient Art’, published in Vol. 61 of the American Journal of Archaeology (1957). A. George, The Epic of Gilgamesh:A New Translation (London 1999) is an accessible version of the same author’s work towards a ‘definitive’ text; J. Maier, Gilgamesh: A Reader (Wauconda 1997) collects a useful range of essays, articles and literary echoes relating to the Gilgamesh epic. For more on Mesopotamian literacy, J. Bottéro, Mesopotamia:Writing, Reasoning and the Gods (Chicago 1991). My account of the finding of the lion-hunt reliefs at Nineveh is drawn from H. Rassam, Asshur and the Land of Nimrod (New York 1897), 24ff. Expository accounts of the friezes displayed in the British Museum may be found in J. Reade, Assyrian Sculpture (London 1983), and D. Collon, Ancient Near Eastern Art (London 1995). The ‘east of Helicon’ phrase derives from M.L.West’s iconoclastic The East Face of Helicon (Oxford 1997). Egyptian narrative art: see G.A. Gaballa, Narrative in Egyptian Art (Mainz 1976); for a sample of texts,W.K. Simpson ed., The Literature of Ancient Egypt: An Anthology of Stories, Instructions and Poetry (Yale 1973).The rapport between myth, text and picture in ancient Greece has fascinated scholars for over a century, beginning with Carl Robert’s Bild und Lied (Berlin 1881); more recently A. Shapiro, Myth into Art (London 1994).The universality of the Cyclops story is argued in D.L Page, The Homeric Odyssey (Oxford 1955); see also J.G. Frazer’s Loeb edition of Apollodorus, Bibliotheca Vol. 2, 404ff. For Baya Horo in Papua New Guinea, see L.R. Goldman, Child’s Play: Myth, Mimesis and Make-Believe (Oxford/New York 1998). Trajan’s Column is ‘unwrapped’ in S. Settis et al., La Colonna Traiana (Turin 1988); on its ‘filmic’ qualities, see A. Malissard, ‘Une nouvelle approche de la Colonne Trajane’, in Aufstieg und Niedergang der römischen Welt II. 12.1 (Berlin/New York 1982), 579–604. On ‘Songlines’ and Aboriginal storytelling, T.G.H. Strehlow’s Songs of Central Australia (Sydney 1971) is necessarily complemented by a biography of the author – so B. Hill, Broken Song (Milsons Point 2002). An anthology of Aboriginal tales is collected by R. and C. Berndt, The Speaking Land (Ringwood 1989). For a case study of one myth’s antiquity, see P. Taçon et al., ‘Birth of the Rainbow Serpent in Arnhem Land Rock Art and Oral History’, in Archaeology in Oceania 31 (1996), 103–24. G. Chaloupka, Journey in Time (Chatswood,NSW, 1993), gives a well-illustrated survey of Arnhem Land rock art;D.A. Roberts and A. Parker, Ancient Ochres: The Aboriginal Rock Paintings of Mount Borradaile (Marleston 2003), publishes some of the images from this part of the territory.