We have alluded to the high proficiency of this people in architecture; they were, in fact, so renowned in this craft throughout the antique world, that, as Solomon called Phenicians to Jerusalem to build his temple, so the Romans sought in Etruria the framers of their grandest masonic structures, such as the Cioaka Maxima, the temple of Jupiter on the capitol, etc. The peculiarly fantastic, and, withal, powerful mind which speaks in all their institntions, equally pervades their architectural productions; but, at the same time, everything they built, they built either for practical or pious pur poses. We cannot here enter into a discussion of their manner as it appears in various epochs, but it never reached anything like a distinct national completeness, their eager ness to profit by foreign examples not allowing them to develop it to the full unalloyed. Of their walls and gates, temples and porticoes, theaters and amphitheaters, bridges and sewers, gigantic, and, in the earliest times, cyclopean—evidently erected, in eastern fashion, by hosts of slaves—very little is extant in so complete a form as to give us an exact insight into their mode of construction; and were it not for their tombs, our knowledge would be exceedingly limited. These form one of the most peculiar features in Etruscan antiquities. Hewn in rocks, either below the ground or in the face of a cliff, they were adorned outside. with a somewhat Egyptian façade of a temple or a house, which the insides themselves most exactly reproduce, with all their internal dec orations, furniture, and utensils. Of the paintings which run round the walls, and which are our safest and most complete guides to the inner life of this nation, We will say more presently. We must not, in conclusion, omit to mention that their temples bore in primitive times, and always retained, in some measure, so far as we can judge, the unfinished character of the wood-buildings of northern mountain tribes—a square, half-house, half-fortification, overloaded with quaint ornamentation.
In their plastic and pictorial arts, Winckelmann has established three distinct styles —to which Dennis has added a fourth—viz., the Egyptian, with Babylonian analogies, the Etruscan or Tyrrhene proper, the Hellenic, and that of the decadence. Characteristic. of the first style are the prevalence of straight lines, right angles, faces of an oblong, con tracted oval, with a pointed chin, eyes mostly drawn upwards, the arms hanging close to the side, the legs close together, the drapery long, in straight parallel lines, the hair disposed in tiers of curls. In this style, the attitude is constrained, the action stiff and cramped. The progress shown by the second style is the greater attention bestowed on the delineation Q frthe mliscles, which swell out in disproportionate prominences on the now almost entirely nude body. The two remaining styles explain themselves. Their statuary, as it appears chiefly on sarcophagi and cinerary urns, suggests likewise an Egyptian origin. The figures are those of their own mystical and awful Hades, instead of the Bacchic processions of Greece and Rome. The grouping follows rather a pic torial than a plastic principle; the motion is hasty and forced; but the features of the deceased, hewn on the lid, have all the rude accuracy of a spiritless portrait. Statues
of deities in wood and stone have indeed been found, but very rarely. Of renown were their ornaments and utensils in baked clay (terra cotta), in the manufacture of which objects the Veientes were especially famous. Rome, at a very early period, possessed of this material a quadriga and the statue of Summanus, made by Etruscans. Of the art of working in bronze, the Etruscans were supposed to be the inventors: that they brought it to a very high degree of perfection, is evident from the examples which remain to us. Statues and utensils were manufactured and exported in immense quan tities, not only to Rome, but to every part of the known world. Of figures on a large scale still extant, we may mention the renowned she-wolf of the capitol, the chimaera in the museum of Florence, the warrior of Todi in the Etruscan museum of the Vatican; a portrait-statute of an orator, with the inscription Aide Meteli, in Florence; and the boy with the moose at Leyden. The various objects of ornament and use, found in great numbers in tombs, such as candelabra, cups, tripods, caldrons, couches, disks; articles of armor, as helmets, cuirasses, etc.; musical instruments, fans, cists, or caskets, are most of them models of exquisite finish and artistic skill. Their gems are as numerous as those of Egypt, and like them, cut into the form of the scarabceus or beetle. They were exclu sively intaglios, and of cornelian, sardonyx, and agate. On these the Etruscan artists represent groups from the Greek mythology, or the heroic cycle, bereft, as they seem to have been, of heroic legends of their own. They are most frequently found at Chiusi and Vulci, and were worn as charms and amulets. Special mention should be made of the metal specula, or mirrors, with figures scratched upon the concave side, the front or convex side- being highly polished. These ranged over all the phases of Etruscan art, and are especially and peculiarly Etruscan. None but Etruscan inscriptions have ever been found upon them. They will, no doubt, prove eventually of the highest impor tance, not only by enabling us to follow the gradations of artistic development step by step, but by furnishing us with lists of naives of gods and persons, and, it may be, of objects.
Of the vases and urns which are found in innumerable quantities in Etruscan tombs, we cannot treat here, as they are admitted on all hands to be, with very few exceptions, Greek, both in design and workmanship; we must refer the reader to the special article on VASES, but a few words may be added on the before mentioned tomb-paintings. They are found chiefly in the cemeteries of Tarquinii and Clusium; and they are all the more important, as they lead us with minute accuracy from the very cradle of the individual, through the various scenes of his entire life, to its close; and this through• out the existence of the nation itself, beginning before the foundation of Rome, and ending in the empire; while we follow the style in its gradual development from the Egyptian to Greco-Roman perfection. Life in its merriest aspects gleams in the most vivid of colors all round—dancing, feasting, loving, hunting. The Etruscans of later times had learned in the school of the Hellenes to dread death less, and to think of the other world as one of joyfulness.