Volterra is the most northerly of the great etruscan cities of the west. It lies back some thirty miles from the sea, on a towering great bluff of rock that gets all the winds and sees all the world, looking out down the valley of the Cecina to the sea, south over vale and high land to the tips of Elba, north to the imminent mountains of Carrara, inward over the wide hills of the Pre-Apennines, to the heart of Tuscany.
You leave the Rome-Pisa train at Cecina, and slowly wind up the valley of the stream of that name, a green, romantic, forgotten sort of valley, in spite of all the come-and-go of ancient Etruscans and Romans, mediaeval Volterrans and Pisans, and modern traffic. But the traffic is not heavy. Volterra is a sort of inland island, still curiously isolated, and grim.
The small, forlorn little train comes to a stop at the Saline di Volterra, the famous old salt-works now belonging to the State, where brine is pumped out of deep wells. What passengers remain in the train are transferred to one old little coach across the platform, and at length this coach starts to creep like a beetle up the slope, up a cog-and-ratchet line, shoved by a small engine behind. Up the steep but round slope among the vineyards and olives you pass almost at walking pace, and there is not a flower to be seen, only the beans make a whiff of perfume now and then, on the chill air, as you rise and rise, above the valley below, coming level with the high hills to south, and the bluff of rock with its two or three towers, ahead.
After a certain amount of backing and changing, the fragment of a train eases up at a bit of a cold wayside station, and is finished. The world lies below. You get out, transfer yourself to a small ancient motor-omnibus, and are rattled up to the final level of the city, into a cold and gloomy little square, where the hotel is.
The hotel is simple and somewhat rough, but quite friendly, pleasant in its hap-hazard way. And what is more, it has central heating, and the heat is on, this cold, almost icy April afternoon. Volterra lies only 1800 feet above the sea, but it is right in the wind, and cold as any alp.
The day was Sunday, and there was a sense of excitement and fussing, and a bustling in and out of temporarily important persons, and altogether a smell of politics in the air. The waiter brought us tea of a sort, and I asked him what was doing. He replied that a great banquet was to be given this evening to the new podestà who had come from Florence to govern the city, under the new régime. And evidently he felt that this was such a hugely important “party” occasion, we poor outsiders were of no account.
It was a cold grey afternoon, with winds round the hard dark corners of the hard, narrow mediaeval town, and crowds of black-dressed, rather squat little men and pseudo-elegant young women pushing and loitering in the streets, and altogether that sense of furtive grinning and jeering and threatening which always accompanies a public occasion—a political one especially—in Italy, in the more out-of-the-way centres. It is as if the people, alabaster-workers and a few peasants, were not sure which side they wanted to be on, and therefore were all the more ready to exterminate anyone who was on the other side. This fundamental uneasiness, indecision, is most curious in the Italian soul. It is as if the people could never be whole-heartedly anything: because they can’t trust anything. And this inability to trust is at the root of the political extravagance and frenzy. They don’t trust themselves, so how can they trust their “leaders” or their “party”?
Volterra, standing sombre and chilly alone on her rock, has always, from etruscan days on, been grimly jealous of her own independence. Especially she has struggled against the Florentine yoke. So what her actual feelings are, about this new-old sort of village tyrant, the podestà, whom she is banqueting this evening, it would be hard, probably, even for the Volterrans themselves to say. Anyhow the cheeky girls salute one with the “Roman” salute, out of sheer effrontery: a salute which has nothing to do with me, so I don’t return it. Politics of all sorts are anathema. But in an etruscan city which held out so long against Rome, I consider the Roman salute unbecoming, and the Roman imperium unmentionable.
It is amusing to see on the walls, too, chalked fiercely up: Morte a Lenin: Death to Lenin: though that poor gentleman has been long enough dead, surely, even for a Volterran to have heard of it. And more amusing still is the legend permanently painted: Mussolini ha sempre ragione! Mussolini is always right! Some are born infallible, some achieve it, and some have infallibility thrust upon them.
But it is not for me to put even my little finger in any political pie. I am sure every post-war country has hard enough work to get itself governed, without outsiders interfering or commenting. Let those rule who can rule.
We wander on, a little dismally, looking at the stony stoniness of the mediaeval town. Perhaps on a warm sunny day it might be pleasant, when shadow was attractive and a breeze welcome. But on a cold, grey, windy afternoon of April, Sunday, always especially dismal, with all the people in the streets, bored and uneasy, and the stone buildings peculiarly sombre and hard and resistant, it is no fun. I don’t care about the bleak but truly mediaeval piazza: I don’t care if the Palazzo Pubblico has all sorts of amusing coats of arms on it: I don’t care about the cold cathedral, though it is rather nice really, with a glow of dusky candles and a smell of Sunday incense: I am disappointed in the wooden sculpture of the taking down of Jesus, and the bas reliefs don’t interest me. In short, I am hard to please.
The modern town is not very large. We went down a long stony street, and out of the Porta all’Arco, the famous old etruscan gate. It is a deep old gateway, almost a tunnel, with the outer arch facing the desolate country on the skew, built at an angle to the old road, to catch the approaching enemy on his right side, where the shield did not cover him. Up handsome and round goes the arch, at a good height, and with that peculiar weighty richness of ancient things; and three dark heads, now worn featureless, reach out curiously and inquiringly one from the keystone of the arch, one from each of the arch-bases, to gaze from the city out into the steep hollow of the world beyond.
Strange, dark old etruscan heads of the city gate, even now they are featureless they still have a peculiar, out-reaching life of their own. Ducati says they represented the heads of slain enemies hung at the city gate. But they don’t hang. They stretch with curious eagerness forward. Nonsense about dead heads. They were city deities of some sort.
And the archaeologists say that only the door-posts of the outer arch, and the inner walls, are etruscan work. The Romans restored the arch, and set the heads back in their old positions. Unlike the Romans to set anything back in its old position!—While the wall above the arch is merely mediaeval.
But we’ll call it etruscan still. The roots of the gate, and the dark heads, these they cannot take away from the Etruscans. And the heads are still on the watch.
The land falls away steeply, across the road in front of the arch. The road itself turns east, under the walls of the modern city, above the world: and the sides of the road, as usual outside the gates, are dump heaps, dump-heaps of plaster and rubble, dump-heaps of the white powder from the alabaster works, the waste edge of the town.
The path turns away from under the city wall, and dips down along the brow of the hill. To the right we can see the tower of the church of Santa Chiara, standing on a little platform of the irregularly-dropping hill. And we are going there. So we dip downwards above a Dantesque, desolate world, down to Santa Chiara, and beyond. Here the path follows the top of what remains of the old etruscan wall. On the right are little olive gardens and bits of wheat. Away beyond is the dismal sort of crest of modern Volterra. We walk along, past the few flowers and the thick ivy, and the bushes of broom and marjoram, on what was once the etruscan wall, far out from the present city wall. On the left the land drops steeply in uneven and unhappy descents.
The great hill-top or headland on which etruscan “Volterra,” Velathri, Vlathri, once stood spreads out jaggedly, with deep-cleft valleys in between, more or less in view, spreading two or three miles away. It is something like a hand, the bluff steep of the palm sweeping in a great curve on the east and south, to seawards, the peninsulas or fingers running jaggedly inland. And the great wall of the etruscan city swept round the south and eastern bluff, on the crest of steeps and cliffs, turned north and crossed the first finger, or peninsula, then started up hill and down dale, over the fingers and into the declivities, a wild and fierce sort of way, hemming in the great crest. The modern town merely occupies the highest bit of the etruscan city-site.
The walls themselves are not much to look at, when you climb down. They are only fragments, now, huge fragments of embankment, rather than wall, built of uncemented square masonry, in the grim, sad sort of stone. One only feels, for some reason, depressed. And it is pleasant to look at the lover and his lass going along the top of the ramparts, which are now olive orchards, away from the town. At least they are alive and cheerful and quick.
On from Santa Chiara the road takes us through the grim and depressing little suburb-hamlet of San Giusto, a black street that emerges upon the waste open place where the church of San Giusto rises like a huge and astonishing barn. It is so tall, the interior should be impressive. But no! It is merely nothing. The architects have achieved nothing, with all that tallness. The children play around with loud yells and ferocity. It is Sunday evening, near sundown, and cold.
Beyond this monument of christian dreariness we come to the etruscan walls again, and what was evidently once an etruscan gate: a dip in the wall-bank, with the groove of an old road running to it.
Here we sit on the ancient heaps of masonry and look into weird yawning gulfs, like vast quarries. The swallows, turning their blue backs, skim away from the ancient lips and over the really dizzy depths, in the yellow light of evening, catching the upward gusts of wind, and flickering aside like lost fragments of life, truly frightening above those ghastly hollows. The lower depths are dark-grey, ashy in colour, and in part wet, and the whole thing looks new, as if it were some enormous quarry all slipping down.
This place is called Le Balze—the cliffs. Apparently the waters which fall on the heights of Volterra collect in part underneath the deep hill and wear away at some places the lower strata, so that the earth falls in immense collapses. Across the gulf, away from the town, stands a big, old, picturesque, isolated building, the Badia or Monastery of the Camaldolesi, sad-looking, destined at last to be devoured by Le Balze, its old walls already splitting and yielding.
From time to time, going up to the town homewards, we come to the edge of the walls and look out into the vast glow of gold, which is sunset, marvellous, the steep ravines sinking in darkness, the further valley silently, greenly gold, with hills breathing luminously up, passing out into the pure, sheer gold gleam of the far-off sea, in which a shadow, perhaps an island, moves like a mote of life. And like great guardians the Carrara mountains jut forward, naked in the pure light like flesh, with their crests portentous: so that they seem to be advancing on us: while all the vast concavity of the west roars with gold liquescence, as if the last hour had come, and the gods were smelting us all back into yellow transmuted oneness.
But nothing is being transmuted. We turn our faces, a little frightened, from the vast blaze of gold, and in the dark, hard streets the town band is just chirping up, brassily out of tune as usual, and the populace, with some maidens in white, are streaming in crowds towards the piazza. And like the band, the populace also is out of tune, buzzing with the inevitable suppressed jeering. But they are going to form a procession.
When we come to the square in front of the hotel, and look out from the edge into the hollow world of the west, the light is sunk red, redness gleams up from the far-off sea below, pure and fierce, and the hollow places in between are dark. Over all the world is a low red glint. But only the town, with its narrow streets and electric light, is impervious.
The banquet, apparently, was not till nine o’clock, and all was hubbub. B. and I dined alone soon after seven, like two orphans whom the waiters managed to remember in between-whiles. They were so thrilled getting all the glasses and goblets and decanters, hundreds of them, it seemed, out of the big chiffonnier cupboard that occupied the back of the dining-room, and whirling them away, stacks of glittering glass, to the banquet room: while out-of-work young men would poke their heads in through the doorway, black hats on, overcoats hung over one shoulder, and gaze with bright enquiry through the room, as though they expected to see Lazarus risen, and not seeing him, would depart again to the nowhere whence they came.—A banquet is a banquet, even if it is given to the devil himself; and the new podestà may be an angel of light.
Outside was cold and dark. In the distance the town band tooted spasmodically, as if it were short-winded this chilly Sunday evening. And we, not being bidden to the feast, went to bed. To be wakened occasionally by sudden and roaring noises—perhaps applause—and the loud and unmistakeable howling of a child, well after midnight.
Morning was cold and grey again, with a chilly and forbidding country yawning and gaping and lapsing away beneath us. The sea was invisible. We walked the narrow cold streets, whose high, cold, dark stone walls seemed almost to press together, and we looked in at the alabaster work-shops, where workmen, in Monday-morning gloom and half-awakenedness, were turning the soft alabaster, or cutting it out, or polishing it.
Everybody knows Volterra marble—so-called—nowadays, because of the translucent bowls of it which hang under the electric lights, as shades, in half the hotels of the world. It is nearly as transparent as alum, and nearly as soft. They peel it down as if it were soap, and tint it pink or amber or blue, and turn it into all those things one does not want: tinted alabaster lamp-shades, light-bowls, statues, tinted or untinted, vases, bowls with doves on the rim, or vine-leaves around, and similar curios. The trade seems to be going strong. Perhaps it is the electric light demand: perhaps there is a revival of interest in “statuary.” Anyhow there is no love lost between a Volterra alabaster-worker and the lump of pale Volterran earth he turns into marketable form. Alas for the goddess of sculptured form, she has gone from here also.
But it is the old alabaster jars we want to see, not the new. As we hurry down the stony street, the rain, icy cold, begins to fall. We flee through the glass doors of the museum, which has just opened, and which seems as if the alabaster inside had to be kept at a low temperature, for the place is dead cold as a refrigerator.
Cold, silent, empty, unhappy the museum seems. But at last an old and dazed man arrives, in uniform, and asks us quite scared what we want.—Why, to see the museum! Ah! Ah! Ah si—sì! It just dawns on him that the museum is there to be looked at. Ah sì, si Signori!
We pay our tickets, and start in. It is really a very attractive and pleasant museum, but we had struck such a bitter cold April morning, with icy rain falling in the courtyard, that I felt as near to being in the tomb as I have ever done. Yet very soon, in the rooms with all those hundreds of little sarcophagi, ash-coffins, or urns, as they are called, the strength of the old life began to warm one up.
Urn is not a good word, because it suggests, to me at least, a vase, an amphora, a round and shapely jar: perhaps through association with Keats’ “Ode on a Grecian Urn”—which vessel no doubt wasn’t an urn at all, but a wine-jar—and with the “tea-urn” of children’s parties. These Volterran urns, though correctly enough used for storing the ashes of the dead, are not round, they are not jars, they are small alabaster sarcophagi. And they are a peculiarity of Volterra. Probably because the Volterrans had the alabaster to hand.
Anyhow here you have them in hundreds, and they are curiously alive and attractive. They are not considered very highly as “art.” One of the latest Italian writers on etruscan things, Ducati, says: If they have small interest from the artistic point of view, they are extremely valuable for the scenes they represent, either mythological or relative to the beliefs in the after-life.—
George Dennis, however, though he too does not find much “art” in etruscan things, says of the Volterran ash-chests:—“the touches of Nature on these etruscan urns, so simply but eloquently expressed, must appeal to the sympathies of all—they are chords to which every heart must respond; and I envy not the man who can walk through this museum unmoved, without feeling a tear rise to his eye,
‘And recognising ever and anon
The breeze of Nature stirring in his soul.’ ”—
The breeze of Nature no longer shakes dewdrops from our eyes, at least so readily, but Dennis is more alive than Ducati to that which is alive. What men mean nowadays by “art” it would be hard to say. Even Dennis said that the Etruscans never approached the pure, the sublime, the perfect beauty which Flaxman reached. Today, this makes us laugh: the greekified illustrator of Pope’s Homer! But the same instinct lies at the back of our idea of “art” still. Art is still to us something which has been well cooked—like a plate of spaghetti. An ear of wheat is not yet “art.” Wait, wait till it has been turned into pure, into perfect macaroni.
For me, I get more real pleasure out of these Volterran ash-chests than out of—I had almost said, the Parthenon frieze. One wearies of the aesthetic quality—a quality which takes the edge off everything, and makes it seem “boiled down.” A great deal of pure Greek beauty has this boiled-down effect. It is too much cooked in the artistic consciousness.
In Dennis’ day, a broken Greek or Greekish amphora would fetch thousands of crowns in the market, if it was the right “period” etc. These Volterran urns fetched hardly anything. Which is a mercy, or they would be scattered to the ends of the earth.
As it is, they are fascinating like an open book of life, and one has no sense of weariness with them, though there are so many. They warm one up, like being in the midst of life.
The downstairs rooms of ash-chests contain those urns representing “etruscan” subjects: those of sea-monsters, the sea-man with fish tail, and with wings, the sea-woman the same: or the man with serpent legs, and wings, or the woman the same. It was etruscan to give these creatures wings, not Greek.
If we remember that in the old world, the centre of all power was at the depths of the earth, and at the depths of the sea, while the sun was only a moving subsidiary body: and that the serpent represented the vivid powers of the inner earth, not only such powers as volcanic and earthquake, but the quick powers that run up the roots of plants and establish the great body of the tree, the tree of life, and run up the feet and legs of man, to establish the heart: while the fish was the symbol of the depths of the waters, whence even light is born: we shall see the ancient power these symbols had over the imagination of the Volterrans. They were a people faced with the sea, and living in a volcanic country.
Then the powers of the earth and the powers of the sea take life as they give life. They have their terrific as well as their prolific aspect.
Someone says the wings of the water deities represent evaporation towards the sun, and the curving tail of the dolphin represent torrents. This is part of the great and controlling ancient idea of the come-and-go of the life-powers, the surging up, in a flutter of leaves and a radiation of wings, and the surging back, in torrents and waves and the eternal down-pour of death.
Other common symbolic animals in Volterra are the beaked gryphons, the creatures of the powers that tear asunder, and at the same time, are guardians of the treasure. They are lion and eagle combined, of the sky and of the earth with caverns. They do not allow the treasure of life, the gold, which we should perhaps translate as consciousness, to be stolen by thieves of life. They are guardians of the treasure: and then, they are the tearers-asunder of those who must depart from life.
It is these creatures, creatures of the elements, which carry man away into death, over the borders between the elements. So is the dolphin, sometimes: and so the hippocampus, the sea-horse; and so the centaur.
The horse is always the symbol of the strong animal life of man: and sometimes he rises, a sea-horse, from the ocean: and sometimes he is a land creature, and half-man. And so he occurs on the tombs, as the passion in man returning into the sea, the soul retreating into the death-world at the depths of the waters: or sometimes he is a centaur, sometimes a female centaur, sometimes clothed in a lion-skin, to show his dread aspect, bearing the soul back, away, off into the otherworld.
It would be very interesting to know if there were a definite connection between the scene on the ash-chest, and the dead whose ashes it contained. When the fish-tailed sea-god entangles a man to bear him off, does it mean drowning at sea? And when a man is caught in the writhing serpent-legs of the Medusa, or of the winged snake-power, does it mean a fall to earth?—a death from the earth, in some manner; as a fall, or the dropping of a rock, or the bite of a snake? And the soul carried off by a winged centaur: is it a man dead of some passion that carried him away.
But more interesting even than the symbolic scenes, are those scenes from actual life, such as boar-hunts, circus games, processions, departures in covered wagons, ships sailing away, city gates being stormed, sacrifices being performed, girls with open scrolls, as if reading at school; many banquets with man and woman on the banqueting couch, and slaves playing music, and children around; then so many really tender fare-well scenes, the dead saying goodbye to his wife, as he goes on the journey, or as the chariot bears him off, or the horse waits; then the soul alone, with the death-dealing spirits standing by with their hammers that gave the blow. It is as Dennis says, the breeze of Nature stirs one’s soul. I asked the gentle old man if he knew anything about the urns. But no! no! he knew nothing at all. He had only just come. He counted for nothing.—So he protested. He was one of those gentle, shy Italians too diffident even to look at the chests he was guarding. But when I told him what I thought some of the scenes meant, he was fascinated like a child, full of wonder, almost breathless. And I thought again, how much more etruscan than Roman the Italian of today is: sensitive, diffident, craving really for symbols and mysteries, able to be delighted with true delight over small things, violent in spasms, and altogether without sternness or natural will-to-power. The will-to-power is a secondary thing in an Italian, reflected on to him from the Germanic races that have almost engulfed him.
The boar-hunt is still a favourite Italian sport, the grandest sport of Italy. And the Etruscans must have loved it, for they represented it again and again, on the tombs. It is difficult to know what exactly the boar symbolised to them. He occupies often the centre of the scene, where the one who dies should be: and where the bull of sacrifice is. And often he is attacked, not by men, but by young winged boys, or by spirits. The dogs climb in the trees around him, the double axe is swinging to come down on him, he lifts up his tusks in a fierce wild pathos. The archaeologists say that it is Meleager and the boar of Calydon, or Hercules and the fierce brute of Erymanthus. But this is not enough. It is a symbolic scene: and it seems as if the boar were himself the victim this time, the wild, fierce fatherly life hunted down by dogs and adversaries. For it is obviously the boar who must die: he is not, like the lions and gryphons, the attacker. He is the father of life running free in the forest, and he must die.—They say too he represents winter: when the feasts for the dead were held. But on the very oldest archaic vases, the lion and the boar are facing each other, again and again, in symbolic opposition.
Fascinating are the scenes of departures, journeyings in covered wagons drawn by two or more horses, accompanied by the driver on foot and friend on horseback, and dogs, and met by other horsemen coming down the road. Under the arched tarpaulin tilt of the wagon reclines a man, or a woman, or a whole family: and all moves forward along the highway with wonderful slow surge. And the wagon, as far as I saw, is always drawn by horses, not by oxen.
This is surely the journey of the soul. It is said to represent even the funeral procession, the ash-chest being borne away to the cemetery, to be laid in the tomb. But the memory in the scene seems much deeper than that. It gives so strongly the feeling of a people who have trekked in wagons, like the Boers, or the Mormons, from one land to another.
They say these covered-wagon journeys are peculiar to Volterra, found represented in no other etruscan places. Altogether the feeling of the Volterran scenes is peculiar. There is a great sense of journeying: as of a people which remembers its migrations, by sea as well as land. And there is a curious restlessness, unlike the dancing surety of southern Etruria; a touch of the Gothic.
In the upstairs rooms there are many more ash-chests, but mostly representing Greek subjects: so-called.—Helen and the Dioscuri, Pelops, Minotaur, Jason, Medea fleeing from Corinth, Oedipus and the Sphinx, Ulysses and the Sirens, Eteocles and Polynices, Centaurs and Lapithae, the Sacrifice of Iphigenia—all are there, just recognisable. There are so many Greek subjects, that one archaeologist suggested that these urns must have been made by a Greek colony planted there in Volterra after the Roman conquest.
One might almost as well say that Timon of Athens was written by a Greek colonist planted in England after the overthrow of the Catholic Church. These “Greek” ash-chests are about as Grecian as Timon of Athens is. The Greeks would have done them so much “better.”
No, the “Greek” scenes are innumerable, but it is only just recognisable, what they mean. Whoever carved these chests knew very little of the fables they were handling: and fables they were, to the etruscan artificers of that day, as they would be to the Italians of this. The story was just used as a peg upon which the native Volterran hung his fancy, as the Elizabethans in England used Greek stories for their poems. Perhaps also the alabaster-cutters were working from old models, or the memory of them. Anyhow, the scenes show nothing of Hellas.
Most curious these “classic” subjects: so un-classic! To me they hint at the Gothic which lay unborn in the future, far more than at the Hellenistic past of the Volterran Etruscan. For of course, all these alabaster urns are considered late in period, after the fourth century B.C. The christian sarcophagi of the fifth century A.D. seem much more nearly kin to these ash-chests of Volterra, than do contemporary Roman chests: as if christianity really rose, in Italy, out of etruscan soil, rather than out of Graeco-Roman. And the first glimmering of that early, glad sort of christian art, the free touch of Gothic within the classic, seems evident in the etruscan scenes. The Greek and Roman “boiled” sort of form gives way to a raggedness of edge and a certain wildness of light and shade which promises the later Gothic, but which is still held down by the heavy mysticism from the east.
Very early Volterran urns were probably plain stone or terra-cotta. But no doubt Volterra was a city long before the Etruscans penetrated into it, and probably it never changed character profoundly. To the end, the Volterrans burned their dead: there are practically no long sarcophagi of Lucumones. And here most of all one feels that the people of Volterra, or Velathri, were not oriental, not the same as those who made most show at Tarquinii. This was surely another tribe, wilder, cruder, and far less influenced by the old Aegean influences. In Caere and Tarquinii the aborigines were deeply overlaid by incoming influences from the east. Here not! Here the wild and untameable Ligurian was neighbour, and perhaps kin, and the town of wind and stone kept and still keeps its northern quality.
So there the ash-chests are, an open book for anyone to read who will, according to his own fancy. They are not more than two feet long, or thereabouts, so the figure on the lid is queer and stunted. The classic Greek or Asiatic could not have borne that. It is a sign of barbarism in itself. Here the northern spirit was too strong for the Hellenic or oriental or ancient Mediterranean instinct. The Lucumo and his lady had to submit to being stunted, in their death effigy. The head is nearly life-size. The body is squashed small.
But there it is, a portrait effigy. Very often, the lid and the chest don’t seem to belong together at all. It is suggested that the lid was made during the lifetime of the subject, with an attempt at real portraiture: while the chest was bought ready-made, and apart. It may be so. Perhaps in etruscan days, there were the alabaster workshops as there are today, only with rows of ash-chests portraying all the vivid scenes we still can see: and perhaps you chose the one you wished your ashes to lie in. But more probably, the work-shops were there, the carved ash-chests were there, but you did not select your own chest, since you did not know what death you would die. Probably you only had your portrait carved on the lid, and left the rest to the survivors.
Or maybe, and most probably, the mourning relatives hurriedly ordered the lid with the portrait bust, after the death of the near one, and then chose the most appropriate ash-chest. Be it as it may, the two parts are often oddly assorted: and so they were found, with the ashes inside them.
But we must believe that the figure on the lid, grotesquely shortened, is an attempt at a portrait. There is none of the distinction of the southern etruscan figures. The heads are given the “imperious” tilt of the Lucumones, but here it becomes almost grotesque. The dead nobleman may be wearing the necklace of office and holding the sacred patera or libation dish in his hand; but he will not, in the southern way, be represented ritualistically as naked to below the navel; his shirt will come up to his neck; and he may just as well be holding the tippling wine-cup in his hand, as the sacred patera; he may even have a wine-jug in his other hand, in full carousal. Altogether the peculiar “sacredness,” the inveterate symbolism of the southern Etruscans is here gone. The religious power is broken.
It is very evident in the ladies: and so many of the figures are ladies. They are decked up in all their splendour, but the ancient mystical formality is lacking. They hold in their hands wine-cups or fans or mirrors, pomegranates or perfume-boxes, or the queer little books which perhaps were the wax tablets for writing upon. They may even have the old sexual and death symbol of the pine-cone. But the power of the symbol has almost vanished. The Gothic actuality and idealism begins to supplant the profound physical religion of the southern Etruscans, the true ancient world.
In the museum there are jars and bits of bronze, and the pateras with the hollow knob in the middle. You may put your two middle fingers in the patera, and hold it ready to make the last libation of life, the first libation of death, in the correct etruscan fashion. But you will not, as so many of the men on these ash-chests do, hold the symbolic dish upside-down, with the two fingers thrust into the “mundus.” The torch upside-down means the flame has gone below, to the underworld. But the patera upside-down is somehow shocking. One feels the Volterrans, or men of Vlathri, were slack in the ancient mysteries.
At last the rain stopped crashing down icily in the silent inner courtyard; at last there was a ray of sun. And we had seen all we could look at for one day. So we went out, to try and get warmed by a kinder heaven.
There are one or two tombs still open, especially two outside the Porta a Selci. But I believe, not having seen them, they are of small importance. Nearly all the tombs that have been opened in Volterra, their contents removed, have been filled in again, so as not to lose two yards of the precious cultivable land of the peasants. There were many tumuli: but most of them are levelled. And under some were curious round tombs built of unsquared stones, unlike anything in southern Etruria. But then, Volterra is altogether unlike southern Etruria.
One tomb has been removed bodily to the garden of the Archaeological Museum in Florence: at least its contents have. There it is built up again as it was when discovered in Volterra in 1861, and all the ash-chests are said to be replaced as they stood originally. It is called the Inghirami Tomb, from the famous Volterran archaeologist Inghirami.
A few steps lead down into the one circular chamber of the tomb, which is supported in the centre by a square pillar, apparently supposed to be left in the rock. On the low stone bed that encircles the tomb stand the ash-chests, a double row of them, in a great ring encircling the shadow.
The tomb belongs all to one family, and there must be sixty ash-chests, of alabaster, carved with the well-known scenes. So that if this tomb is really arranged as it was originally, and the ash-chests progress from the oldest to the latest counter-clockwise, as is said, one ought to be able to see certainly a century or two of development in the Volterran urns.
But one is filled with doubt and misgiving. Why oh why wasn’t the tomb left intact as it was found, where it was found? The garden of the Florence museum is vastly instructive, if you want object-lessons about the Etruscans. But who wants object-lessons about vanished races? What one wants is a contact. The Etruscans are not a theory or a thesis. If they are anything, they are an experience.
And the experience is always spoilt. Museums, museums, museums, object-lessons rigged out to illustrate the unsound theories of archaeologists, crazy attempts to co-ordinate and get into a fixed order that which has no fixed order and will not be coordinated! It is sickening? Why must all experience be systematised? Why must even the vanished Etruscans be reduced to a system? They never will be. You break all the eggs, and produce an omelette which is neither etruscan nor Roman nor Italic nor Hittite, nor anything else, but just a systematised mess. Why can’t incompatible things be left incompatible? If you make an omelette out of a hen’s egg, a plover’s, and an ostrich’s, you won’t have a grand amalgam or unification of hen and plover and ostrich into something we may call “oviparity.” You’ll have that formless object, an omelette.
So it is here. If you try to make a grand amalgam of Cerveteri and Tarquinia, Vulci, Vetulonia, Volterra, Chiusi, Veio, then you won’t get the essential Etruscan as a result, but a cooked-up mess which has no life-meaning at all. A museum is not a first-hand contact: it is an illustrated lecture. And what one wants is the actual vital touch. I don’t want to be “instructed”; nor do many other people.
They could take the more homeless objects for the museums; and still leave those that have a place in their own place: the Inghirami Tomb here at Volterra.
But it is useless. We walk up the hill and out of the Florence gate, into the shelter under the walls of the huge mediaeval castle which is now a state prison. There is a promenade below the ponderous walls, and a scrap of sun, and shelter from the biting wind. A few citizens are promenading even now. And beyond, the bare green country rises up in waves and sharp points, but it is like looking at the choppy sea from the prow of a tall ship, here in Volterra we ride above all.
And behind us, in the black fortress, are the prisoners. There is a man, an old man now, who has written an opera inside those walls. He had a passion for the piano: and for thirty years his wife nagged him when he played. So one day he silently and suddenly killed her. So, the nagging of thirty years silenced, he got thirty years of prison, and still is not allowed to play the piano. It is curious.
There were also two men who escaped. Silently and secretly they carved marvellous likenesses of themselves out of the huge loaves of hard bread the prisoners get. Hair and all, they made their own effigies life-like. Then they laid them in the bed, so that when the warder’s light flashed on them he should say to himself: There they lie sleeping, the dogs!
And so they worked, and they got away. It cost the governor, who loved his houseful of malefactors, his job. He was kicked out. It is curious. He should have been rewarded, for having such clever children, sculptors in bread.