The Etruscans in the Modern Imagination

Sam Solecki

• Publisher: McGill-Queen's University Press
• Year: 2022
• ISBN:
  9780228015772
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Ancient History
• Index: History

The Etruscans, a revenant and unusual people, had an Italian empire before the Greeks and Romans did. By the start of the Christian era their wooden temples and writings had vanished, the Romans and the early church had melted their bronze statues, and the people had assimilated. After the last Etruscan augur served the Romans as they fought back the Visigoths in 408 CE, the civilization disappeared but for ruins, tombs, art, and vases.No other lost culture disappeared as completely and then returned to the same extent as the Etruscans. Indeed, no other ancient Mediterranean people was as controversial both in its time and in posterity. Though the Greeks and Romans tarred them as superstitious and decadent, D.H. Lawrence praised their way of life as offering an alternative to modernity. In The Etruscans in the Modern Imagination Sam Solecki chronicles their unexpected return to intellectual and cultural history, beginning with eighteenth-century scholars, collectors, and archaeologists. The resurrection of this vanished kingdom occurred with remarkable vigour in philosophy, literature, music, history, mythology, and the plastic arts. From Wedgwood to Picasso, Proust to Lawrence, Emily Dickinson to Anne Carson, Solecki reads the disembodied traces of Etruscan culture for what they tell us about cultural knowledge and mindsets in different times and places, for the way that ideas about the Etruscans can serve as a reflection or foil to a particular cultural moment, and for the creative alchemy whereby artists turn to the past for the raw materials of contemporary creation. The Etruscans are a cultural curiosity because of their disputed origin, unique language, and distinctive religion and customs, but their destination is no less worthy of our curiosity. The Etruscans in the Modern Imagination provides a fascinating meditation on cultural transmission between ancient and modern civilizations.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Copyright
• Contents
• Illustrations
• Preface: The Return of the Repressed
• Acknowledgments
• PART ONE Antique Matters
• Introduction: The Etruscans from Empire to Defeat …Assimilation … Return
• PART TWO Creating a Taste for the Etruscans
• 1 Johann Joachim Winckelmann: The Etruscan Chapter in The History of the Art of Antiquity (1764)
• 2 Sir William Hamilton and Josiah Wedgwood: The Indispensable Connoisseur and the Potter Who Made the Etruscans Visible, Fashionable, and Popular
• 3 William Blake: What Is an “Etruscan” Doing in “An Island in the Moon” (1784–85)?
• 4 Barthold Georg Niebuhr: The Return of the Etruscans in The History of Rome (1812)
• 5 Lucien Bonaparte, Prince of Canino: Selling Out the Etruscans
• 6 Thomas Babington Macaulay: Lays of Ancient Rome (1842), a Poem of Empire
• 7 Mrs Hamilton Gray and George Dennis: English Travellers
• PART THREE Etruscans in Basel, Rome, Massachusetts, Paris, London, and Vienna
• 8 Johann Jakob Bachofen: Das Mutterrecht (1861), The Saga of Tanaquil (1870), and an Etruscan Queen
• 9 Etruscan Vases: Prosper Mérimée, Stendhal, and Gustave Flaubert
• 10 Etruscans in America: Ralph Waldo Emerson’s Dream (1862), Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The Marble Faun (1860), and Emily Dickinson’s Etruscan Triptych
• 11 Edgar Degas, Mary Cassatt, and Edith Reveley: The Sarcophagus of the Married Couple
• 12 Anatole France’s The Red Lily (1894), a Glance at Marcel Proust, and Etruscan Humour
• 13 Sigmund Freud’s The Interpretation of Dreams (1900): Etruscan Dreams
• PART FOUR The Etruscans after Lawrence
• 14 Aldous Huxley’s Etruscan Decade: Those Barren Leaves (1925) and “After the Fireworks” (1930), with a Glance at Roger Fry
• 15 D.H. Lawrence’s Etruscan Places (1932): The Invention of the Etruscans for the Twentieth Century and Margaret Drabble’s Lawrentian The Dark Flood Rises (2016)
• 16 Raymond Queneau: How a Restless Surrealist and Future Pataphysician Resurrected the Etruscans in The Bark Tree (1933)
• 17 Mika Waltari’s The Etruscan (1955): Civilizations in Crisis and the Fate of Spirit
• 18 Peggy Glanville-Hicks’s Etruscan Concerto (1954): Etruscan Music Imagined
• PART FIVE The Etruscans Enter Our World: The Holocaust, Modernism, the Cold War, Hollywood, Phenomenology, and Marilyn Monroe
• 19 Giorgio Bassani’s The Garden of the Finzi-Continis (1962): EtruscansJewsItalians
• 20 Pablo Picasso, Alberto Giacometti, and David Smith: Etruscan Affinities, and a Note on Massimo Campigli
• 21 Zbigniew Herbert and Wisława Szymborska: Etruscans, Poles, and “Peoples Unlucky in History”
• 22 Rika Lesser’s Etruscan Things (1983): If Stones Could Speak or Lithic Prosopopoeia
• 23 Don Siegel’s The Killers (1964) and William Gibson’s Idoru (1996): When Is an Etruscan Not an Etruscan?
• 24 Anne Carson: “Canicula di Anna” (1984) and Norma Jeane Baker in Etruria
• Afterword: Nostos
• Appendix: Etruscan Sightings
• Bibliography
• Index