The Greeks, in contrast, believed that head and body were inseparable parts of an integral whole. Why: The Romans believed that the head or bust alone was enough to constitute a portrait. Likened himself to Alexander the Great, and placed his own likeness on a coin in 44 BCE. They celebrate the good life of the privileged Etruscan elite.What: Veristic or bust of Pompey the Great. The man on the couch at the far right on the rear wall holds up an egg, the symbol of regeneration. In characteristic Etruscan fashion, the banqueters, servants, and entertainers all make exaggerated gestures with unnaturally enlarged hands. Pitcher- and cup-bearers serve the guests, and musicians entertain them. Unlike Greek banquet scenes, the Tarquinian meal takes place in the open air or perhaps in a tent set up for the occasion. The men have dark skin, the women light skin, in conformity with the age-old convention. Instead, banqueting couples (unheard of in Greece see "Etruscan Women," page 167) are the protagonists. But mythological figures, whether Greek or Etruscan, are uncommon in Tarquinian murals, and there are none here. The confronting felines are reminiscent of the panthers on each side of Medusa in the pediment (fig. The tomb takes its name from the leopards guarding the burial chamber from their perch within the pediment of the rear wall.
And although the Tarquinian painters adopted many Late Archaic Greek stylistic features, such as the tentative exploration of foreshortening and the attempt to depict profile eyes in the profile heads, the subject they represented is distinctly Etruscan. The Etruscan tomb also has fresco paintings on all four walls, an art form virtually unknown in sixth-century bce Greece.
It is one of thousands of underground tombs laboriously carved out of the bedrock at the important Etruscan city of Tarquinia at a time when the Greeks still buried their dead in simple graves with a statue or stele as a commemorative marker. 6-1), constructed around 480 bce, makes that point forcefully. Consequently, art historians have an almost unbroken series of mural paintings in Etruria from Archaic to Hellenistic times. Archaeologists have succeeded in locating such a large number of them because they use periscopes to explore tomb interiors from the surface before considering timeconsuming and costly excavation. Painted tombs are nonetheless statistically rare, the privilege of only the wealthiest Tarquinian families.
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