Paintings on the Amazon Sarcophagus of Corneto

Abstract

Few monuments of ancient art possess either a more obvious beauty and attraction, or a greater interest for the archæological student, than the sarcophagus painted with various scenes of an Amazonomachia, which was discovered in 1869 in a grave at a little distance from Corneto, the ancient Tarquinii, and was a few years afterwards acquired for the Egyptian and Etruscan Museum at Florence. Its date is probably not much after 300 B.C., and the pictures which adorn it, even if not the work of a Greek hand, offer us the best example we possess of the manner of Greek polychrome painting in that age. They have been already described by several highly competent writers, including Dr. Helbig and Otto Donner (Bull. dell' Inst. 1869, p. 198 sq.); the late Dr. Klügmann, who for years made representations of the Amazons in ancient art his especial study (Ann. dell' Inst. 1873, p. 239 sq.); Mr. Dennis (Cities and Cemeteries of Etruria, 2nd ed., 1881, p. 96 sq.); and Dr. Woermann (Woltmann and Woermann, Hist. of Painting, English ed., 1880, vol. i., p. 100). But hitherto no adequate illustrations of them have been published. The sketches in slightly shaded outline engraved, (Mon dell' Inst., vol. ix., pl. lx.), to accompany Dr. Klügmann's article above referred to, furnish, indeed, a useful key to the shape and dimensions of the sarcophagus, and to the arrangement and subject-matter of its pictures. But of the style of the work they give little notion, and of its colouring, from the nature of the case, none at all. Coloured facsimiles of some selected portions of these most interesting paintings are published for the first time with the present number of the Journal of Hellenic Studies (Pls. XXXVI., XXXVII., XXXVIII.).