- chapter 56: Landscape and illusionism –
poses of the dancers in the Tomb of the Triclinium, Tarquinia, (circa 470 bc, Fig. 56.6)
recall the work of the nearly contemporary red-fi gure Athenian Brygos Painter.^21 The high
quality of the paintings has led scholars to suggest a Greek artist or an Etruscan one trained
by a Greek. If so, the painter could not have been specialized in vase painting. The contorted
poses of the Etruscan dancers surpass their small-scale Greek contemporaries in creating
the sense of arrested motion and the expressive gestures of their exaggeratedly enlarged
hands are genuinely Etruscan. The large colorful fi gures perform in a grove inhabited by a
variety of birds and at least one feline on each wall. The trees, on a disproportionately small
scale compared with the fi gures, display a rich variety of foliage, now mostly faded, but
accessible through the precise lucidi executed in the nineteenth century by Carlo Ruspi.^22
Figures and trees overlap as the dancers move through the lush vegetation of a sacred grove.
In the Tomb of the Ship (circa 450 bc or slightly later, Fig. 56.7),^23 the banquet taking
place on the back wall and in the tympanum continues on to the side walls, thereby
binding the distinct zones of side and back walls into a continuous spatial arrangement.
Figures with their backs to the banquet announce a change in theme and perhaps also
of space.^24 On the right wall a cortege moves toward the symposium, whereas on the
left a small red tree separates the scene of banquet preparation, kylikeon and servants and
musicians facing right, from an imposing male fi gure facing left gazing out to a marine
landscape composed of two colorful rocks^25 and six boats. The boats are of varying sizes
with a large merchant ship dominating the foreground. The disposition of ships and
landscape elements suggests an attempt to create spatial depth.^26 Such spatial innovations,
Figure 56.5 Tarquinia, Tomb of the Mouse: detail with the mouse. Image courtesy of the
Soprintendenza per i Beni Archeologici dell’Etruria Meridionale.Figure 56.6 Tarquinia, Tomb of the Triclinium, right wall. Image courtesy of the Soprintendenza per i
Beni Archeologici dell’Etruria Meridionale.