WHY THE ETRUSCANS WERE TOO MODERN FOR THE VICTORIANS.

There is always a need to find meaning in things. But where (or when) does meaning come from? The answer is a curious one: from the future. This is not science fiction; we see it all the time. It’s an argument with a basis in psychoanalytic thought. Simply put, the past emerges out of the present.

Consider the following: Johann Sebastian Bach (1685-1750) - sidelined, often considered mediocre during his lifetime and for generations thereafter - around 1900 unexpectedly became the father of Western classical music. In compiling, studying, and repeating Bach’s compositions, composers such as Mendelssohn effectively changed the past and everything that had happened since. The long-dead Johann Sebastian retroactively became the logic guiding the evolution of the art.

This period between Bach’s death and the recognition of his historical significance is the key. Etruscan art, I argue, still remains in this in-between, ghostly phase. Just like the unfortunate composer - always there, always misrecognized - the true identity (legacy even) of the Etruscans has been waiting, hidden behind delicate constellations of sprinkled and finely wound gold… waiting to be returned to them; yes, out of their future, but from our present.

Read on...

1. Ghosts!

What do Marie Antoinette, Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, and Edgar Allan Poe have in common?

In commemoration of their very different lifetime achievements, history has granted them their plaques and monuments, but has not, as far as I’m aware, depicted the three, like celestial bodies, in orbit of one attractive ‘something’. In leaving the ‘great historical figure’ narrative to one side, one could focus not on the ‘something’ but on the mysterious force of attraction itself; not on the object of desire, but on the cause of desire. Behind scientific reality lie forces and fields; behind social and historic (human) reality lies the mysterious excess of things. Their elusive, desirous aura draws us to them; here, in their ghostly dimension, our desire for things is constituted. Our objective, then, is to search for these ghosts.

“An inadvertent exposure to Etruscan Art”, of course, was the correct response to my original question. Let me explain:

Mozart (very young at the time) played music alongside Sir William Hamilton, an antiquarian and British envoy to Naples. Hamilton was curating a collection which in 1772 was sold to the British Museum and subsequently catalogued in his 4 volume publication “Collection of Etruscan, Greek, and Roman Antiquities from the Cabinet of the Honble. Wm. Hamilton, His Britannick Majesty’s Envoy Extraordinary at the Court of Naples (1767–76)” (now available on Amazon.)

Marie Antoinette too (7 years old and no-doubt adorable) in 1762, had the pleasure of being upstaged by the slightly younger W.A.Mozart who entertained her family at their summer residence in Vienna. But Marie’s contact with the Etruscans was more immediate. Rambouillet is an area on the outskirts of Paris where Louis XVI acquired a mediaeval building - the Château de Rambouillet. Louis had a dairy (a small, pretty and decorative building in the gardens) built for Marie, which was ornamented with ceramics designed specifically with etruscan and neoclassical elements in mind.¹ It’s unclear whether or not she met the aforementioned antiquarian The Honble. Wm. Hamilton, but her library certainly contained a book of his.²

Edgar Allan Poe’s foster father acquired two Etruscan-style vases in England somewhere between 1815 and 1820. Not even the amateur “etruscologist” has so far failed to cite the following passage from Poe’s 1834 short story “The Visionary,” (later retitled “The Assignation”): “Come!” he said at length, turning towards a table of richly enamelled and massive silver, upon which were a few goblets fantastically stained, together with two large Etruscan vases”.³

So there you have it: from the mansion of Poe’s foster family in Virginia to Louis XVI’s Château de Rambouillet, the British Museum and the imperial residence of Vienna where an unlikely infant duo played music, from 1770 to 1820, the Etruscans were haunting the late enlightenment, or the late modern.

¹ SCHWARTZ, SELMA, The “Etruscan" Style at Sevres: A Bowl from Marie- Antoinette's Dairy at Rambouillet

² ibid

³ RAMAGE, NANCY HIRSCHLAND and CROMEY, R. D., Two “Etruscan” Vases and Edgar Allan Poe

2. Dangerous Ideas

The Sevres porcelains presented to Marie Antoinette represent a move from Rococo to Neoclassicism. This transition was spearheaded by Charles Claude de Flahaut, Comte d'Angiviller. He was “not only Louis XVI's minister of buildings but also supervisor of the royal manufactories and academies of art and architecture.”⁴ Essentially, he was Louis XVI’s culture minister. In 1779 he became artistic director of Sevres Royal Porcelain Manufactory, and the renovation of the Château de Rambouillet was his project. Selma Schwartz, in her study of Marie Antoinette's porcelains highlights “the excavations of Herculaneum”, “Italian elements”, “Greek vase painting” as pillars of d'Angiviller’s artistic vision. D'Angiviller even acquired a book: “Antiquités Étrusques,grecques et romaines tirées du cabinet de M.Hamilton”. (Remember?)

In France and in Europe we see a “classicalizing” of taste - something that the French revolutionaries and the Monarchy agreed was necessary⁵. The revolution did away with King Louis and Marie, but the new French Government still felt… “imitation of antiquity was the ideal: it would encourage refined taste as well as maintain the nation's superiority.”⁶

The new taste for “classical” adornment was fueled by a growing interest in archaeological excavation. The “grand tours” of wealthy westerners during the 19th century intensified this passion for antiquity. In Rome, the workshop of the renowned jeweller Fortunato Pio Castellani was an unmissable destination on the tours⁷. Castellani was participating in excavations, studying the finds, and learning (reviving) forgotten metallurgic techniques like granulation - one of the hallmarks of Etruscan goldwork often showcased in his pieces⁸.

Archaeological revival necklace - Castellani ca. 1880

Addressing the young and impressionable, journeying elites of the Grand Tours, none other than Francis Bacon gave some notable (bizarre, even) pieces of advice:

…let his travel appear rather in his discourse, than his apparel or gesture;... and let it appear that he doth not change his country manners, for those of foreign parts; but only prick in some flowers, of that he hath learned abroad, into the customs of his own country.⁹

Bacon’s warning, the conclusion of his essay “Of Travel” , that the traveller must not identify too much with the foreign, is curious to say the least. It’s as if the past, the very same antiquity which the tours were built around (to inspire, educate and enlighten future lords and ladies), has a threatening dimension - ghosts! - from which the innocent traveller must maintain a safe distance. He seems to say: “enjoy it, talk about it over dinner with friends, but don’t take it too seriously!”. Well, why not?

Ancient Rome - Giovanni Paolo Panini, Italian 1757

Here we can again distinguish between object of desire, and cause of desire. Acquire the object, says Bacon - no problem -, just stay well clear of the essence which makes it desirable: ignore the fact of your desire; ignore that what is really drawing you to it is its subversive, radical, unnamed potential.

He knows that this ghostly essence - the cause of desire - is a totally different and much more risky ball game. Suddenly, the ‘thing’ seems to have acquired a dangerous dimension…

⁴ SCHWARTZ, SELMA, The “Etruscan" Style at Sevres: A Bowl from Marie- Antoinette's Dairy at Rambouillet

⁵ ibid

⁶ ibid

⁷ https://www.metmuseum.org/art/collection/search/827209

⁸ https://www.metmuseum.org/art/collection/search/236764

⁹ http://www.esp.org/books/bacon/essays/contents/essay18.pdf

3. Who's afraid of granulation?

The trajectory of Etruscan civilization is typically divided into five periods spanning some eight to nine hundred years. Those with an eye for great craftsmanship and gold work would, not incorrectly, pay most attention to the second and third phases: “the Orientalising” and “Archaic” periods, where the influx of traders, artisans, refugees from Greece etc., fostered the Etruscans learning, development, and mastery of widely celebrated techniques like granulation and filigree. My timeline starts from the beginning, and adds a twist:

The Villanova (c. 900–700 BC)¹⁰

Already we see a fondness for luxury adornment,
Excavations find necklaces of glass and amber.
Men are found with grave goods like weapons, but also items related to textiles and as such, the home.
Tools found in womens’ graves indicate that their roles were not limited to domestic or care-giving responsibilities, but also to production and economic activity.

Gold sanguisuga-type fibulae (safety pins) with glass paste bows - Etruscan late 8th–early 7th century BC

Marie Antoinette and her “Etruscan” Bowl (c.1788)

Bowl from the Rambouillet service (Jatte écuelle)

Rousseau’s views, as set out in On Education, that a girl’s education should nurture domestic and care-giving responsibilities are the mainstream.^{11 12}
Women can neither own nor inherit property ¹³

The Orientalizing (720–580 BC)

Richer grave goods indicate, and wall paintings depict, increasingly affluent upper classes ¹⁴
Cultural exchange and trade brings eastern techniques and motifs: granulation and filigree; realistic portraiture; palmettes, lions, and geometric forms. ¹⁵
Specialist Audrey Guoy notes that jewellery and adornments “highlighted, shaped, and performed gender, identity, and status; however, they could also blur, transform, and reverse them” ¹⁶
It is suggested that women owned not only goods but workshops: ‘In the Louvre, on the other hand, there is a pyx, dated to about 630 B.C., on which is inscribed “Kusnailise,” which could be translated as “in the workshop of Kusnai,” …Kusnai (a woman’s name) is presumably the owner of the business.’ ^{17 18}

Bronze statuette of a young woman - Etruscan, late 6th century BC

Mozart’s Death (1791)

Grave of W.A. Mozart

In revolutionary France Pauline Léon and Théroigne de Méricourt are agitating for full citizenship for women, but women are "denied political rights of 'active citizenship' (1791) and democratic citizenship (1793) ¹⁹
Revolutionary France gives women equal inheritance rights. ²⁰

The Archaic (580–480 BC)

The Archaic period builds upon the cultural explosion of the preceding centuries
Larger adornments are found, showing spectacular granulation techniques which come to define Etruscan gold work. ²¹
Men and women appear to be depicted as equals in the public and religious realm: women share in banquets and participate actively in religious ceremonies ²²

Gold strap necklace - Etruscan, 6th century BC

Edgar Allen Poe is born (1809)

Design for the poster and cover for The Raven by Edgar Allan Poe -1875

Married women in France and, around the world women generally, still aren't allowed to own anything. ²³

The Classical (480–320 BC) and The Hellenistic (320–27 BC)²⁴

The beginning of the end;
There are increasingly fewer technical or artistic innovations,
During the Hellenstic, the Etruscans slowly become indistinguishable from their successors, the Romans.

Crouching Lion - Roman Republic, probably Etruria ca. 5th–3rd century BC

The French monarchy is restored (1814)

La famille royale française en 1816 - Jean-Baptiste Gautier (éditeur)

Women lose any rights gained during the revolution ²⁵

Yes, mapping the periods of Etruscan development onto the emergence of neoclassicism is a completely arbitrary historical exercise. But I hope the purposes for doing so are more or less clear:

a) The late-modern european woman, far from participating actively in and enjoying the public sphere (like her etruscan counterpart), was seen as biologically inferior.

b) Etruscan art was created by and for women, as well as men. Even a superficial reading of etruscan material culture has an inherent, progressive gender discourse.

c) 19th century society had no idea what they were dealing with.

¹⁰ https://www.worldhistory.org/Villanovan_Culture/

¹¹ ROUSSEAU, JEAN-JACQUES, Emile, or On education; https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emile,_or_On_Education

¹² “She needs patience and gentleness, zeal and an affection that nothing can rebuff in order to raise her children. She serves as the link between them and their fathers” (Rousseau, Emile, or On education, p. 361)

¹³ https://www.theguardian.com/money/us-money-blog/2014/aug/11/women-rights-money-timeline-history

¹⁴ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Etruscan_jewelry

¹⁵ Ibid

¹⁶ GOUY, AUDREY; Gendered adornment and dress soundscape in Etruscan dance

¹⁷ Giannini, Federico and Baratta, Federico https://www.finestresullarte.info/en/works-and-artists/the-etruscan-woman-independent-free-modern-and-beautiful

¹⁸ Although there are plenty of sources which indicate the authors’ general argument, this specific claim is hard to verify.

¹⁹ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Women_in_the_French_Revolution

²⁰ https://www.theguardian.com/money/us-money-blog/2014/aug/11/women-rights-money-timeline-history

²¹ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Etruscan_jewelry

²² GOUY, AUDREY; Gendered adornment and dress soundscape in Etruscan dance

²³ https://www.theguardian.com/money/us-money-blog/2014/aug/11/women-rights-money-timeline-history

²⁴ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Etruscan_jewelry

²⁵ https://www.theguardian.com/money/us-money-blog/2014/aug/11/women-rights-money-timeline-history

4. Ghosts have names; Repeating the Revival,

A mere two decades (c.1860-1880) delimit the Etruscan Revival proper (by this time 3 US states, Iceland, and the UK allowed women to own and inherit property… and only under certain conditions)²⁶. But as neoclassicism limped on into the 20th century, the attention of antiquarians and fashions turned away from the Etruscans to other aspects of antiquity.

Was this short-lived resurgence precisely because of a dangerous, threatening component in the Etruscan world-view? Was the revival somehow crushed due to its potential as ammunition for increasingly noisy women’s suffrage movements? This is not what I intend to argue.

Instead, the key question should be the following one: what can we, today, offer the Etruscans that the Victorians could not?

It seems uncontroversial to claim that:

1. Poe’s vases, Marie Antoinette’s ceramics, and Mozart’s accompanist (The Honourable Sir William) almost certainly did not inspire the three with a passion for women’s liberation. And Castellani’s workshop was not a proto-feminist enclave or mecca at the end of the Grand Tour,

and yet…

2. Just as a religious artefact is meaningless without the intangible, fantasmatic surplus of ceremony and liturgy, the Etruscan artefact can also be seen to be imbued with the same kind of excess: the Etruscans themselves would have been appalled if one of their diviners, or seers, had informed them that over two millennia later they would be revived in the confines of a monotheistic culture in which their female population was prohibited from owning property or carrying out any significant role in public life.

So what we can offer then, is a filling in of the gaps, and a time-travelling of sorts. Rather than saying “the Etruscan Revival of the late 1800s was not a bell-weather of the march towards women’s liberation, we should claim “the Etruscan Revival of the 1800s was not yet aware of its own essence as a bell-weather of the march towards women’s liberation. In doing so, we reveal a story that has been waiting to be told. Doesn’t love work in a similar way? When you find yourself in love, suddenly the flirting and the dating that preceded it always had a profound logic and inevitability which you weren’t yet aware of.

Similarly, Slavoj Zizek argues that when something happens it is meaningless until it is somehow repeated. When we repeat it, we can fill in the gaps in the original story; we can establish that what happened before always meant something. Retroactively, the past becomes. Zizek writes:

when (something) erupts for the first time it is experienced as a contingent trauma, as an intrusion of a certain non-symbolized Real; only through repetition is this event recognized in its symbolic necessity.²⁷

Our chance, accidental, “contingent” event is the Revival. In repeating it today, we might return to this past and find new meanings that were always there. Bacon resisted this at the time. He wanted the ornament without its excess (the tangible without the intangible), or as Zizek might say, he wanted beer without alcohol; coffee without caffeine. We, on the other hand, should hedonistically put the “alcohol” and the “caffeine” back into the story precisely because these radical ingredients are in fact really there! Similar to the fentanyl crisis, people just didn’t know it…

Bacon, like big pharma, is, of course, the bad guy here. He doesn’t want us to know the true essence of the thing. There is a shadowy component which he doesn’t want us to name. He is warning against ‘symbolisation’ - against revealing the reality of the thing.

Through reviving the revival, we reject Bacon’s position: we insist upon knowing what the Etruscans always were; we give a still meaningless (“non-symbolised”) history the form that it always had; we allow the repressed, liberating nature of the Etruscan Revival, and of the Etruscan’s themselves, to return to the past, from the future - from our present. History, Zizek maintains, has a retroactive structure²⁸. Only afterwards does history, like love, find its logic, its narrative thread.

Today we can join the dots. We can see an ancient criticism of the gender hierarchy of all future civilisations. It almost seems as though the Etruscans have been waiting to be revived at the right time; that they had already read the feminist literature and have been screaming at us for generations, for millennia, to recognise them for what they really were. But nobody was listening! Are we?

Revive again, and they might finally become what they always were.

²⁶ https://www.theguardian.com/money/us-money-blog/2014/aug/11/women-rights-money-timeline-history

²⁷ https://zizek.livejournal.com/3848.html

²⁸ https://divinecuration.github.io/2021/09/04/zizek-retroactivity.html

Bibliography

Etruscan Civilisation chronology and archaeology:

Women's rights and their money: a timeline from Cleopatra to Lilly Ledbetter

https://www.theguardian.com/money/us-money-blog/2014/aug/11/women-rights-money-timeline-history

Other Resources:

WHY THE ETRUSCANS WERE TOO MODERN FOR THE VICTORIANS.

1. Ghosts!

2. Dangerous Ideas