Etruscan architecture

The Etruscans, settlers of ancient Etruria (central Italy, between the Tiber and Arno rivers) whom the Greeks called Tyrrhenians and who probably descended from the Pelasgians, cultivated art in a simultaneous with the Dorians and perhaps, prior to them since the organized people were already around ten centuries before Christ.

Constructive elements

In addition to several Cyclopean constructions attributed to them, it is known that they imported from the East and used the semicircular arch, the perfect vault, in their buildings. These architectural elements reached the Romans precisely through the Etruscans.

The Etruscans who may have settled initially in northern Greece and later fled to Italy due to the invasion of the Dorians, or who, wherever they came from, settled in Etruria, learned from the Greeks the basic techniques and forms of Mycenaean construction and imitated the three orders in their constructions.

Etruscan architecture has a great influence on the Roman world, especially with regard to the way of conceiving cities, the layout and shape of temples, the use of the arch and the vault, and the construction of mausoleums.. They do not use noble materials such as marble, but rather low quality stones in reinforcements, wood, brick and rammed earth. Its constructions use the arch and the vault with the column on support, forming the Tuscan order, an order that is related to the Doric and other Greek orders.

The components of said Tuscan order are:

• A smooth and diminished column of fourteen modules, with its base and capitel.
• Simpler captains than dorics.
• It lacks triglyphs, mútulos and denticles and all ornaments that were not smooth moulding.
• The column rests on a pedestal that has a third elevation than that.

There are only few remains of this order known and they have only been found in central Italy (in Vulci and Alba Fucense) but their proportions are known from The ten books of Architecture written by Marcus Vitruvius.

There are no Etruscan buildings as such except for some walls and some doors like the one in Perugia and the remains of tombs, like those in Castel D'Asso. But a multitude of underground galleries or funerary crypts have been discovered such as those of Corneto, Volterra, Cerveteri, etc., which sometimes have a false dome cover and reveal great Egyptian and Mycenaean reminiscences. From them and from other places in Etruria, numerous ceramic and goldware objects have been extracted that are kept in museums and in which the Greek inspiration can be seen powerfully, whether from Asia Minor or from Europe. From the drawings that can be seen on some Etruscan vessels, it is clear that a portico of the so-called in antis gave entrance to their temples, like the primitive Greek porticos. In Rome, the famous Cloaca Maxima, a vaulted conduit dating from the time of Tarquin Priscus (6th century BC), is still preserved as the first construction of the Etruscans.

In various archaeological museums there are magnificent cinerary urns and large stone or clay sarcophagi, with notable reliefs of Etruscan work and similar to Roman sarcophagi. It is distinguished from these in that the lid of the Etruscan sarcophagus usually carries the image of the deceased in great relief or in a real statue but always in a reclining attitude. Sometimes, however, the lid is presented in the shape of a roof.

Urbanism

The Etruscan city was quadrangular, it was divided into grids and surrounded by a wall that had main entrance doors that opened between two towers through a semicircular arch and that faced the two most important streets that intersected. The street that extended from north to south was called Cardo and the one that cut perpendicular to it in the middle was called Decumano. Possibly this structure of the Etruscan city is heir to the plans of military camps.

Housing

The houses were very simple, similar to circular huts made of mud and covered with branches. This housing model changed in the 8th century BC. C., the houses becoming quadrangular, a morphology that Rome later inherited. They were made of wood and adobe and later of tuff stones. They could have up to two floors. The wooden structures of the richest houses of Antiquity were protected from humidity by terracotta plates painted in bright colors. Initially, the aristocracy lived in three-room houses, sometimes preceded by a portico that opened onto a patio. Later they built large residences (domus) with a central courtyard, according to the Greek style. The rooms were built around the patio. The patio had an impluvium in the center and the roof had four slopes towards the interior. Another variety was the despluvium, with the roof with four slopes towards the outside.

Temples

Given that they were built with perishable materials, only a few testimonies of Etruscan religious architecture in general and the temples in particular have survived to modern times. The information we have about them comes from the texts of Vitruvius, who classified them under a new order, the Tuscan. Only through documents from Roman times, therefore, can we attempt to reconstruct the way in which they were made.

The Etruscan temples were located outside the cities, on high places.

The temples were large buildings, almost square. They stood on a stone plinth or podium. They were intended to be seen only from the front, the only place through which they could be accessed, through a staircase, instead of through a perimeter crepidoma. The surface of the temple was divided into two areas:

• The portico in antis with columns; it is the antecedent or pronaowith eight columns arranged in two rows of four. Sometimes there were columns on the side of the cella but in no case on its back.
• The back, with one cella, that sometimes becomes triple, remembering the belief in a triad of gods, dedicating each other cella a particular divinity.

The structure was lintel. The double-sloped roof is unique for the three cellas, although the central one is wider, differing from the Greek one by the lack of krepis, the absence of proportions, the triple cella and the lack of the back porch.

Frequently, the temples were covered with terracotta plates. Both the roof and the pediment were decorated with polychrome. An example of decoration is the head of Gorgon in the temple of Portonaccio in Veii, currently preserved in Villa Giulia (Rome). Sometimes large round statues, also painted, were placed on the roof.

Unlike the Greek and Egyptian temples, which changed with the evolution of the civilization that originated them, the Etruscan temples always remained substantially the same throughout the centuries, perhaps due to the fact that in the Etruscan mentality They were not the earthly abode of divinity, but a place to gather to pray to the gods.

It was common to bring offerings to the temples, generally consisting of statuettes or animals for sacrifice.

Funerary architecture (necropolis)

The Etruscan tombs are well preserved, having been built in stone. They were generally located on the outskirts of the city walls, but with a parallel orientation to the cardo and the decumanus. There is a classification of Etruscan funerary architecture, distinguishing in fact three types of necropolis or catacombs: hypogeums, aedicules and tumuli that cover a false dome or vault, which are the best known. Those of Tarquinia and Cerveteri are famous.

For the Etruscan religion, man, being weak and insignificant in life, in the afterlife needs a family environment in which life takes place after death, along with his personal objects. This explains the care with which the necropolises were built, the fact that the painting of this town is almost exclusively funerary and that rich grave goods have been found in the tombs, some of them coming from the Greek colonies in southern Italy. The walls of the necropolis were painted with bright colors that contrasted with the darkness, a symbol of spiritual death. Thus, the Etruscan necropolises are a very significant source, historically speaking, that allows us to know many aspects of daily life, beliefs and popular rites that would have been impossible to know by analyzing written texts exclusively.

Hypogeums

They were dug entirely underground or built in pre-existing natural cavities, such as grottos or caverns. Of them, the most famous is the Hypogeum of the Volumnios, discovered in 1840. This type of catacomb was formed by an inclined access of steps, which led directly to the atrium. Here there were usually six tombs (or groups of tombs), linked by narrow corridors (in some cases they were real tunnels). It is believed that burial in hypogeums was reserved for people of a certain social rank, especially politicians, soldiers and priests.

Edicles

They were built entirely out of the ground, pretending to be miniature temples, but in practice they were very similar to the rooms of the first Etruscan settlements. In Etruscan symbology, the shape of a temple was very significant: it represented the intermediate point of the journey that the deceased had to make from life to death, a kind of last stage of earthly life. Among them, we must remember the Bronzetto dell'Offerente, the best preserved, which is located in Populonia.

Mounds

They owe their name to the fact that, once the grave was made, it was covered with a pile of earth, in order to create a kind of artificial hill. Each of these tombs is divided, like the hypogeums, into various sepulchral chambers of dimensions proportional to the wealth and notoriety of the deceased or his family. They were generally circular in plan. Among them we must remember the Tomb of the Reliefs, inside the Banditaccia necropolis, near Cerveteri.