The scenes on the main walls are also associated with the funeral
ceremonies. On the right-hand main wall (fig. 4) a boy is seen to the
left in a white tunic with black dots, carrying a stool and raising
one arm and his face to a man who, dressed in a red and brown cloak
and brown shoes, seems to beckon to the boy with his right hand,
gesticulating at the same time with his left. Between them a small
figure is seated who reminds one of the small boys in the Greek tomb
reliefs ‘weeping on their cold knees’. To the right is another man
clad in chiton and mantle, gesticulating violently with his left
hand, and carrying a crook in his right. Above him, and above the
excited man to the right, runs the inscription: ‘Tevarath’, probably
meaning umpire (βραβευτής, ἀγωνοθέτης). For now follow
representations of athletic contests: two wrestlers engaging in the
initial grips, the elder bearded, the younger beardless: between them
are seen the prizes—metal bowls; these are supposed to be arranged in
the background, but owing to the lack of perspective they seem to be
in the way of the combatants. This scene throws light on the preceding
one: the man with the crook is evidently not an augur, as originally
conjectured because of the staff and the flying birds, but the umpire
who has to see that no unfair tricks are used; the other man is the
spectator who has not yet seated himself, but beckons to the slave-boy
to bring him the stool on which he will sit down like the Roman knights
of later times who brought their own stools into the orchestra of the
theatre. On the other hand, the mourning, crouching slave-boy seems to
repeat the death lament of the back wall. Here already, then, we can
observe the curious fragmentariness of the scenes in Etruscan art: they
look as if they had been cut out of more comprehensive wholes, and put
together without logical sequence. Clarity and unity are wanting. There
is not the sustained composition or the pleasure in detailed narrative
which are regular in Greek and Egyptian art. The Etruscan artist is
content with hints and fragments.
[Sidenote: TOMBA DEL PULCINELLA]
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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