"Horror vacui" et détails inutiles (?) dans la peinture funéraire étrusque

Abstract

Abstract –. On the walls of the painted tombs of the late archaic period in Tarquinia, there are many motifs which could be thought as conventional, or even as simple filling ; other subjects on such walls might look as gratuitous, if not incongruous, without any connection with each other nor with the rest of the paintings, so that their coherence appears questionable. Analysing a few cases shows that the funerary message really takes its full meaning only through the introduction of such, apparently incoherent, details, through the way they are staged in the space of the funerary room and through the topographical and semantic relations uniting them. Therefore, the tombs of Tarquinia appear as genuine pictorial cycles, where very few motifs are superfluous and where what looks like «horror vacui » hides a meaningful overflow, a complex reality where both social and eschatological reading levels are intertwined, and where the influence of Dionysiac ideology is particularly strong in the second half of the 6th-century B. C.