Etruscan Art.

Etruscan Art. This book is a short (190 pages of text and illustrations), lucid,readable, well illustrated and affordable account of the artisticachievements of the Etruscans that proved difficult to put down on aflight from London to Palermo. References to modern travel may seem ananachronistic a��nach��ro��nism?n.1. The representation of someone as existing or something as happening in other than chronological, proper, or historical order.2. irrelevance, when analysing ancient, mysterious Etruscans.On the contrary, the last leg of my travel from Rome to Palermo was aswifter version of the route the Casuccini Etruscan Collection took inthe last century (presumably pre��sum��a��ble?adj.That can be presumed or taken for granted; reasonable as a supposition: presumable causes of the disaster. by sea) from Chiusi to Palermo, as a symbolof Italian unification Italian unification (called in Italian the Risorgimento, or "Resurgence") was the political and social process that unified different states of the Italian peninsula into the single nation of Italy. (p. 135). More importantly, Nigel Spivey Dr Nigel Spivey teaches Classical Art and Archaeology at the University of Cambridge, where he is a Fellow of Emmanuel College. He has written extensively on the Etruscans and on the Olympic Games. effectively links the past with touches of the present, without slippinginto stretched ethnographic analogy. Colourful modern references rangefrom Giacometti to Lawrence, from tomb-robbers (last photograph of thebook) to Malibu (perhaps not so distant). The Etruscans are brought tolife through their images, but in an understandable modern setting.Etruscan art Etruscan art(ĭtrŭs`kən), the art of the inhabitants of ancient Etruria, which, by the 8th cent. B.C., incorporated the area in Italy from Salerno to the Tiber River (see Etruscan civilization). is also a modern book in its academic achievement,presented in an accessible manner - an ideal writer for ANTIQUITY. Thework is dedicated to the late Mauro Cristofani Mauro Cristofani (born, Rome, Italy, 1941; died 1997) was a linguist and researcher in Etruscan studies.Cristofani was a student of Massimo Pallottino and would himself teach at the Universit�� di Pisa, Universit�� di Siena and, his final post, at the Universit�� "Federico II" who also had a greatability to bring the artistic production of Etruria into clear focus(Cristofani 1978). It provides an excellent illustrated introduction tomany of the current issues. The author starts the book by providingsound answers to the questions we are all asked about the Etruscans oncewe admit our interests: Where did they come from? Can anyone understand[or decipher] their language? Briefly, the answer is not very fargeographically, and they wrote with a Greek alphabet Greek alphabetWriting system developed in Greece c. 1000 BC, the direct or indirect ancestor of all modern European alphabets. Derived from the North Semitic alphabet via that of the Phoenicians, it modified an all-consonant alphabet to represent vowels. in a formulaic andrepetitive manner mainly about death. A considerable range of modernissues of Etruscan archaeology is tackled through the medium of art,skilfully managing to overcome problems such as the lack of knowledge ofcontext, or even provenance, which have traditionally plaguedinterpretation. One important passage (p. 43) provides a positivere-assessment of the role of the Phoenicians who have often beenrepressed by classical Mediterranean research (cf. Vella 1996). In othersections, the author convincingly seeks to interpret myths in Etruscanterms (p. 76), to decode imagery (p. 109) and to uncover the ideologicalopposition between Greek Etruscans and Trojan Romans (p. 156).Etruscan art does not claim to be a complete survey of the Etruscans.At one level, this is guided by the format of the 'World ofArt' series of which it is one part; no book on art can form acomplete study of a period or civilization, even if in the instance ofthe Etruscans this has traditionally come close to being the case. Theother non-representational world of the Etruscans is being brought tolight in collaborations between classicists such as Spivey and fieldarchaeologists/prehistorians (Spivey & Stoddart 1990; Barker andRasmussen in press - the first of these is now out of print and wasdescribed as 'patchy' by Nigel Spivey in his bibliographicalsection (p. 203), and we look forward eagerly to publication of thesecond). At another level, Spivey guides the reader through the levelsof comprehensiveness of the areas he plans to cover. He combinessynthetic chapters (Introduction - the limits of demystification,chapter 4 - city-based, regional coverage and chapter 6 - the Etruscanlegacy) with a chronological development through the Emerging,Orientalizing, Hellenizing and Roman phases of Etruscan art (chapters 1,2, 3 & 5). The book ends with a short but valuable bibliographicessay. Throughout these chapters, the author provides a balance betweengeneralization and more detailed consideration of examples such as theRegolini Galassi tomb (for the Orientalizing, p. 47) and the FrancoisTomb at Vulci (for the Roman, p. 53). In the city-based coverage ofEtruscan art, there is a clear explanation of his necessarily selectivechoice to illustrate particular issues and to avoid repetition withother parts of the book. The major focus in this chapter is on the threesouthern coastal cities of Etruria: the innovative role of Cerveteri(where the author is currently excavating), the extraordinary paintingsof Tarquinia and the sculpture and vase painting of Vulci (on which theauthor did his doctoral dissertation). Under Spivey's guiding hand,these cities illustrate the different media of production and arecompared principally with the inland city of Chiusi. Some mention ismade of the new discoveries at Murlo (which together with Acquarossa aremissing from the one (opening) map of Etruria), but this is a section ofthe book where (even within the constraints of length) more detailedcoverage might have been included, since these discoveries haveradically shifted the balance of our reading of Etruscan art. Taken as awhole, the organization, selection and development of examplesthroughout the book are logical and well conceived.It is unfair to point out the very few weaknesses in such a readableand informative book, particularly since they are not in areas centralto its main coverage. However, the author's consummate knowledge ofart is not repeated in his coverage of prehistory prehistory,period of human evolution before writing was invented and records kept. The term was coined by Daniel Wilson in 1851. It is followed by protohistory, the period for which we have some records but must still rely largely on archaeological evidence to , geology/geomorphologyand in his streamlined approach to some aspects of chronology. In asense this is acceptable since this is an Etruscan account and theEtruscans clearly had a vague view of their prehistoric origins thatowed much to a post hoc post hoc?adv. & adj.In or of the form of an argument in which one event is asserted to be the cause of a later event simply by virtue of having happened earlier: elaboration of saecula or precise stages ofdevelopment, elaborated in formulaic fashion once the Roman threat couldbe clearly identified. Nigel Spivey's intellectual origins are alsorevealed (although not to the level of Finley) when dealing with theabsence of detailed written sources. Is the absence of written sourceson the Etruscans a cause for frustration or a liberating opportunity ?Whatever the answer to this question (and I suspect that our respectiveanswers would differ substantially), Nigel Spivey has given us abrilliant and lively account of modern knowledge on what we currentlyunderstand from the images and other artistic production of theEtruscans.SIMON Simon,in the Bible.1 One of the Maccabees.2 or Simon Peter: see Peter, Saint.3 See Simon, Saint.4 Kinsman of Jesus.5 Leper of Bethany in whose house a woman anointed Jesus' feet. STODDART Department of Archaeology University of Cambridgess16@cus.cam.ac.ukReferencesBARKER. G. & T. RASMUSSEN. In press. The Etruscans. Oxford:Blackwell.CRISTOFANI, M. 1978. L'arte degli Etruschi. Produzione econsumo. Torino: Einaudi.SPIVEY, N. & S.K.F. STODDART. 1990. Etruscan Italy. London:Batsford.VELLA, N. 1996. Elusive Phoenicians, Antiquity 70: 245-50.