- Helen Nagy –
700–590 bc,^8 have a certain abstract appeal. They hover over black and yellow stripes
that separate the back wall into “ground” and “space.” Rudimentary aquatic birds
disposed in two uneven rows, occupy the wall above the lions. The birds, therefore, must
be understood as “in the sky,” and the lions, “on the ground.” There is no narrative;
the creatures represent living aspects of nature in an environment of death. They are
perhaps meant to be apotropaic, or just symbolic of life. The forms of these animals can be
traced to vase painting from Euboea via Pithecusae,^9 but their enlarged shapes, awkward
disposition, and location are defi nitely Etruscan.
The connection between vase painting (Greek Corinthian and Etrusco-Corinthian)
and wall painting is conspicuous in the early sixth century bc Campana Tomb,^10 also
at Veii, but now the artist is experimenting with creating orderly decorative and
“narrative” fi elds. The rear wall of the fi rst chamber is decorated with two superimposed
and tightly arranged compositions on either side of an opening to the rear chamber. The
carefully rendered scenes are clearly based on the repertoire of Corinthian vase-painting.^11
Lions, panthers, fantastic animals and a few human fi gures overlap one another and are
intertwined with decorative elements, mainly palmettes, creating a sense of horror vacui,
a familiar quality of much of the vase painting of this period. The upper register on the
right omits the fantastic beasts and depicts a horse and rider with companions, a reference
to hunting or to a mythological event (Fig. 6.38).^12 The abstract plants now serve as
landscape elements. There is ground, background (overlapping) and landscape (albeit
symbolic) on a large scale. While the general style, individual forms and composition
point to an origin in Greek vase-painting, the size, location and disposition of the
paintings are not those of a vase-painter. The precision of line, graceful proportions and
creative polychromy suggest an artist comfortable with the larger scale. Although the
artist may not have been Greek, given the traffi c in Greek vases and the presence of Greek
artisans in Etruria, he would have been aware of the Greek visual vocabulary.^13
Beginning in the period that coincides with the height of the Greek Archaic (circa
575–480 bc), the tomb painters of Tarquinia developed a standard decorative treatment
of the chamber walls.^14 The resulting effect is that of a house or a tent with a tympanum
zone at either end of the chamber set apart from the main frieze by a polychrome decorative
Figure 56.1 Rear wall of the “Tomb of the Roaring Lions,” Veii. Image courtesy of the Soprintendenza
per i Beni Archeologici dell’Etruria Meridionale.