Chapter II: Sidenote: TOMBA CAMPANA AT VEII

The first stage of development is represented by the Tomba Campana at Veii. This tomb was discovered in 1843, and a good description of it is given by Canina in _Antica Città di Veii_ (1847), but it has never been published with adequate illustrations. A new and thorough treatment of the ornamentation and motives of its pictures is given in a Leipzig dissertation by Andreas Rumpf (_Die Wandmalereien in Veii_, 1915). But this, too, is without illustrations. The central doorway of the back wall is provided with an ornamental painted border and flanked by paintings in yellow, grey, and red on a blue ground. The work is primitive. The ornamentation is akin to that of Greek vase-painting of the seventh century B.C. The pictures are purely decorative: animals and fabulous animals such as lion, sphinx, deer, and panther fill the surface side by side with lotus-flowers and palmettes. There is no narrative element. To be sure, Weege, like others before him, has tried to construe one of the pictures (fig. 1) into a mythological scene: the boy on the horse, which is led by the bridle by a man walking behind, is thought to be a dead man on his way to Hades, and the man with the loin-cloth, carrying an axe over his shoulder, to the left in front of the horse, to be the Etruscan death-god and conductor of souls, Charun, to whom we shall return later. Weege also thinks that the animal crouching on the back of the horse is a hunting leopard. But, apart from the rather puzzling question, what the hunting leopard has to do with the ride to Hades, the animal is not a hunting leopard at all: it is a feline animal with a short tail, while the hunting leopard has a long tail. The animal was only placed there to fill up the space, thus illustrating the poverty of ideas in these pictures. Moreover, as the man with the axe is not characterized as Charun, either by colour or by dress, it seems unnecessary to force a mythological explanation. The human figures in this picture, as in the Melian vases of the seventh century B.C., are purely decorative: they ride when the space above the back of the horse has to be filled in, and they walk when a long, narrow field makes the human figure more appropriate than a seated or walking animal as a means of filling the space. The absurd alternation of colours within the same figure, every single animal being coloured in compartments of yellow and red and having alternately red and yellow legs, affords a good instance of purely decorative conception and suggests the idea of woven tapestry. Hence it is an all but obvious conclusion to imagine, as prototype of this painting, some magnificently coloured wall-tapestry imported into Etruria in the seventh century B.C. from Crete or one of the islands in the Aegean Sea, to the vase-paintings of which the ornamentation of the tomb shows close affinity.[4] Thus there is in these pictures neither any action nor any reference to death or the tomb. They serve as a decorative ornamentation of the tomb-chamber, like the six painted shields in the inner chamber of the tomb, which suggest those ‘brass circles’ mentioned by Livy (VIII, 20, 8) as common votive offerings in early Rome. We can imagine the home of a rich Etruscan in the seventh century decorated with similar frescoes: painted tapestries and painted shields as substitutes for real wall-tapestries and metal shields.[5] The Tomba Campana is the most impressive but not the only representative of this earliest class of tombs, in the ornamentation of which only decorative considerations have been kept in view. Tombs at Cosa, Chiusi, Magliano, and Caere contain still more primitive paintings of the same sort, but they are badly preserved and still more imperfectly described.[6]

FOOTNOTES:

[4] Cp. Fr. Poulsen, _Der Orient and die frühgriechische Kunst_, p. 128, where I tried to prove that the pictures of the tomb are influenced by the art and style of decoration of the island of Cyprus. Rumpf (_op. cit._ 50) was nearer the mark in perceiving the connexion with the decorative art of Crete and the Cyclades in the seventh century B.C. The horsemen, in particular, recall the frieze from Prinia in Crete, _Bollettino d’Arte_, 1908, p. 457 ff.

[5] Shields were also common mural decorations with the early Greeks, cp. Poulsen, _Orient_, p. 77, and Alcaeus, _fragm._ 15 (Bergk).

[6] See the summary account in Rumpf, _op. cit._ 61 ff.