Echo of the Etruscans June 27, 2006
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The World of the Etruscans, currently showing at the Hong Kong Museum of Art.
This is a marvelous exhibition, with many extraordinary pieces from the ninth to the third century BC, drawn from several Museums in Tuscany, the Etruscan heartland.
These include some beautiful examples of large classical painted Attic (Athenian), or at least Attic-style, vases, the canvases of the ancient Greek world, among which is one portraying Hercules fighting the Amazons. Another unforgettable pottery piece is a duck-shaped vessel decorated with a figure of Nike, the deity, not the shoe. The three elongated, not very macho-looking bronze soldiers don’t look like they’d last long if they happened to come up against the Amazons.
Other highlights include a pair of ivory panels carved in elaborate bas-relief and, of perhaps particular interest in Hong Kong, masses of gold jewelry, some of which still looks wearable. Boys and their dads will probably take a fancy to almost perfectly preserved bronze helmets, spear points, horse bridle and bits, and a set of leg armor: if you watched the movie Troy, here is the real thing.
The influence of classical Greece is so strong the exhibition also substitutes as a reminder of how much Greece has influenced, and continues to influence, modern popular culture: this is literally the stuff of TV and movies.
It is not just the quality of individual pieces that makes the exhibition stand out, but also their careful selection and presentation: the exhibition gives a clear and illuminating historical overview of Etruscan culture, how it developed, matured and declined in the eight centuries of its independent existence.
The exhibition traces Etruscan culture from its early beginnings around 900 BC, through a period of “oriental” influence, which here means west Asia and North Africa, thence through a period where the Etruscans, largely contemporaneously with the height of classic Greek civilization in the fifth and sixth centuries BC, appear almost Greek themselves. A defeat at the hands of the Syrcusans in 474 BC signified the beginning of the end of Etruscan dominance in the Italian peninsula and the beginning of a slow decline, which becomes evident a century or so on in the artwork: the exhibit ends, appropriately enough perhaps, with a half-dozen or so sarcophagi and funereal urns from the last couple of centuries of Etruscan independence.
The pieces show wide-ranging influences and commercial relations: from the Baltic to the Caucasus. A couple of pieces, notably a very early funeral object in the shape of a house and a bronze ax, might not look entirely out of place in an exhibition of Chinese artifacts, although this is surely just coincidental.
While it is true that Hong Kong is just one leg, actually, the final leg, of a multi-city tour, everyone, from the Hong Kong Museum of Art and the Leisure and Cultural Services Department, to the Italian organizations who put the exhibition together, deserves kudos for a job very well done.
There is a certain poignancy to the Etruscans and their story. Their origins are steeped in mystery, while there are theories, no one is quite sure whence they came and what language they spoke: it seems not to be related to any Indo-European language. They seem to have been an educated, cultured people at a time when the Romans were living in huts: indeed, some of the Roman kings, in the period before Rome was a Republic, were Etruscan. Much of what we know as Roman culture, that part which derives from the Greeks including the alphabet, passed to Rome via the Etruscans. Even after the Romans had erased Etruria from the maps, they remarked upon the Etruscans’ conspicuous religiosity and relied upon their skills in divination.
The choice to show Etruscan rather than Roman culture in Hong Kong is not without irony. After all, it was in southern China that much of China’s ancient trade relations and much of what we now consider Chinese culture developed; Cantonese appears to be an older language than Putonghua. All it takes is a few bad throws of the historical dice for an old culture to be relegated to a relative political backwater.
The Etruscan civilization lasted for about 50 years for each week the exhibition is on. So hurry and see it before it closes on September 10.
Editor’s Note > Above article is published under licence by The Standard, Hong Kong. Copyright 2006 by The Standard, Hong Kong. All rights reserved.
