In later Etruscan paintings we come upon two new groups of motives—fantastic pictures of the Underworld, and scenes from Greek mythology. Sometimes they mingle as in the Theseus and Pirithous scene and in the pictures of Hades and Persephone. Hades and Persephone recur in a painting in the third chamber of the Tomba dell’ Orco (inscription: Aita and Phersipnei), where weird mists roll about them, and a figure with three heads, Gerun, is standing before their throne (fig. 37). It is the Geryon of the Greeks, but he is not the cowherd on the far-distant island Erythra, but a warrior in complete armour who seems to be receiving the commands of Hades. Evidently the Etruscans have made him the servant and champion of Hades. Persephone has snakes in her hair and a curious collar which we meet again on the chitons of women in white Attic lekythoi of the fifth century B.C.[101] Hades wears the traditional wolf-helmet. It is remarkable that a head exactly similar to that of Hades is found among Michelangelo’s sketches (fig. 38), which seems to indicate that Michelangelo somewhere in Tuscany saw and sketched an old Etruscan tomb. To be sure, the snout of the animal reminds one of a pig’s, but the long ears and the fur are those of the wolf. [Sidenote: TOMBA DELL’ ORCO] [Illustration: Fig. 38. Head of man surmounted by that of a pig.] In the other paintings of the Tomba dell’ Orco we meet furthermore with Agamemnon in the underworld, and in front of him Tiresias (Hinthial Teriasals it reads, i. e. the shade of Tiresias). But in the second chamber of this tomb, dating from the fourth century B.C., there is also a scene from Greek mythology which has nothing to do with death and the underworld; Odysseus blinding the Cyclops Polyphemus (inscriptions: Uthuste and Cuclu). We can here speak of a renaissance, in so far as a scene from a Greek myth formed the subject of the big picture of the beginning of the sixth century in the Tomba dei Tori (cp. fig. 2). But the aim of the later school of Etruscan painters is not so much to adorn the tomb with a beautiful decorative panel after some Greek prototype; on the contrary, they turn to the Greek myths for the sake of their subjects and pick out motives which also give expression to the curious strain of cruelty inherent in the Etruscan mind.