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SCULPTURE HAS ALWAYS BEEN POPULAR and has been created afresh throughout history. Its appeal and beauty are obvious. Vases are different. Like sculpture, ceramics have been produced throughout history and in many different locations. But Greek vases stand out, partly for the great variety of their shapes, but mainly for the drama of the paintings that grace those shapes and are so different from anything else. These factors have combined to produce in art lovers, connoisseurs, and collectors a greater level ofpassion for Greek vases than for any other kind.
Given the sheer numbers of vases that have been excavated, there can be little doubt about their popularity in antiquity. An Athenian fifth-century BC poet, listing the most noteworthy products of different peoples, praised Athens for its invention of the potter’s wheel and “the child of clay and the oven, noblest pottery.” Plato wrote that a fine clay vase can be “very beautiful” though “not when set beside maidens.” Pliny observed that in his day (he died in AD 79, observing the eruption of Vesuvius), “the greater part of mankind uses earthenware vases.” Some Roman graves have been found containing Greek and Etruscan vases, but not many.
In more modern times, however, the passion for collecting these extraordinary relics of the past did not really emerge until the middle of the eighteenth century. There were vases in Renaissance collections (for example, the Medici in Florence had a vase collection, according to Giorgio Vasari, who wrote biographies of many artists), and ancient vases are mentioned in five collections in a Roman guidebook of the time. But their eighteenth-century popularity followed the discovery—in the late 1730s and then throughout the 1740s—of the buried remains of Pompeii and Herculaneum, which had been overwhelmed in AD 79 when the volcano Vesuvius erupted, spreading ash over a wide range and completely obliterating whole cities across a large area. The excavation of entire towns—whose inhabitants had been so surprised at the suddenness of the eruptions that they had been trapped going about their everyday activities, with their bodies as it were “frozen” for all time—captured the imagination of Europeans and others and was one of the factors that made archaeology popular. It was a vivid episode with which everyone could identify. Whole rooms, whole houses, entire temples and tombs, rows of shops and villas, even complete theaters, were recovered over the decades, together with fabulous frescoes, important sculptures, hoards of silver, armor, and other objects, some of them luxurious, some of them common-or-garden variety, all of them fascinating for the vivid light they threw on the past.
The Dominican friar Antonio da Viterbo wrote of “Truscomania,” but it was the German art historian Johann Joachim Winckelman who paid several visits to Pompeii and Herculaneum in the 1760s and helped establish what became known as the Greek revival in a book that took eighteenth-century Europe by storm, The History of the Art of Antiquity. In the text he said that the allure of Greek art, its defining characteristic, was its “noble simplicity and calm grandeur,” a phrase that became famous, and is indeed still famous. Generations of Germans and others, such people as Herder, Goethe, and Byron, became obsessed with ancient Greek culture. During Goethe’s Italian journey in 1787, he observed, “One now pays a lot of money for Etruscan vases, and certainly one finds beautiful and exquisite pieces among them. Every traveller wants one.” There was an early collection of vases in the Vatican. Initially, they were regarded as Etruscan and played a role in establishing the view that a large and sovereign Etruria was the basis of Western civilization. Winckelman, however, argued for their predominantly Greek origin. Laws to control their export were introduced as early as 1624 and again in 1755.
The Etruscans were in fact a rather mysterious people, but they were important because they composed the earliest urban civilization in the north Mediterranean, flourishing sometime between the ninth and first centuries BC, being most dominant in the sixth to third centuries. Much of what we know about them comes from the early writings of the ancient Greeks and Romans. According to the Greek historian Herodotus, for example, they originally occupied the land of Lydia—what is now western Turkey—but were compelled to disperse after a great famine, when half the nation moved on and half remained behind. Their leader at the time was Tyrrhenos, from whom they adopted the name Tyrrhenians (and hence the Tyrrhenian Sea, along the western coast of Italy). Another theory is that they left Turkey after the fall of Troy, but the most recent archaeology suggests that the Etruscans were actually descendants of the Villanovans, people who thrived in central Italy in the ninth and eighth centuries BC and had an active artistic tradition, especially in bronze jewelry and glass-paste beads. Etruscan cities began to arise in the seventh century BC where Villanovan villages had once been. During the 700s BC, the Etruscans developed into a series of autonomous city-states: Arretium (Arezzo), Caisra (Caere, or modern Cerveteri), Veii, Tarchna (Tarquinii, or modern Tarquinia), and Velch (Volci, or modern Vulci).
The first Etruscan pieces to be discovered were two bronzes, found as long ago as 1553 and 1556, that is, during the Renaissance. Etruscan excavations proper began in the late eighteenth century, and in the nineteenth century, major archaeological discoveries were made at several sites, including Tarquinia, Ceveteri, and Vulci, all cultures that feature in the discoveries made in the Medici warehouse at Geneva.
To date, some 6,000 grave sites have been examined by professional, authorized archaeologists. The Italian archaeologists who examined the objects in Medici’s Geneva warehouse calculate that “thousands” of tombs must have been desecrated to provide his “inventory,” suggesting that illicit digs have ruined as many tombs as have been excavated legally and scientifically. In other words, as much has been lost to looters as has been found by reputable archaeologists.
No Etruscan literary works or historical accounts have been found, but there are about 9,000 inscriptions in Etruscan writing carved mainly on tombs. The first to be found were the bilingual Phoenician-Etruscan Pyrgi Tablets, found at the port of Caere in 1964. They showed that the Etruscan writing system is unique in that its letters come from the Greek alphabet, yet its grammatical structure is unlike any other European language. What can be discerned from the records is that religion was at the heart of Etruscan culture. The Romans themselves depended on some Etruscan books of divination. It appears that the Etruscans followed three sacred books for predicting the will of the gods: One book was devoted to reading the entrails of animals, another interpreted the meaning of lightning, and a third dealt with the flight patterns of birds. The Etruscan myths were heavily influenced by the Greeks, mainly in the fact that their gods possessed human attributes and dispositions. In Etruscan religion, on the other hand, the realms occupied by humans and by the gods were very specific, and their ritual followed very exact procedures to avoid the ill will of the gods. The Etruscan religion was based on more or less complete submission to their deities—one had to watch out for signs as to how to behave. A number of divinities were borrowed from Hellenic culture, including Aplu (Apollo), Artumes (Artemis), Maris (Mars), and Hercle (Hercules). Unlike many ancient civilizations, there does not appear to have been a great deal of difference in Etruria between the status of men and women.
The Etruscans were farmers, but they had a militaristic side and fortified their cities. They were also great seafarers and had active trading links to Phoenicians and to Carthage, long before Rome did; and they were active miners of iron, copper, tin, lead, and silver—and these sources of wealth contributed to the success of their civilization between the eighth and sixth centuries BC. Their decline began in the fifth century, then accelerated in the fourth. The main weakness was the inability of Etruscan city-states to unite against Roman aggression, and in the third century they were taken over by Rome. Their language, practices, and culture were suppressed, and they disappeared as a civilization.
The Etruscans were very advanced in science, technology, and art. Much of what we consider as typically Roman technology was in fact Etruscan: such things as stone arches, paved streets, aqueducts, and sewers. They had their own strong tradition of painting and sculpture, and they are as much the founders of Western culture as the Greeks and Romans. They had what has been described as an “ephemeral” attitude toward life on earth, which led them to build their homes of wood or clay, whereas their tombs were built to last forever. This attitude comes home most clearly at Cerveteri, where the cemetery is also a real town with streets and squares, with massive tumuli and rectangular tombs cut into the rock. This city, in fact, shows in a funerary context the same town planning and architectural schemes used in a living ancient city—if it were not for Cerveteri, we wouldn’t know what ancient architecture was like. The tombe a camera (room tombs) were for entire families and were used for generations. These tombs were furnished lavishly, with stucco and terra-cotta sculptures, bronze models of sheep’s livers (for divination), frescoes, vases, reliefs, arms such as spears and swords, household utensils, and, because tomb contents reflected a family’s wealth or social status, gold jewelry.
Cerveteri is massive, but there is an entire city, Tarquinia (further north still, and more inland near Lake Bracciano), that is much more fanciful. A thriving center of business and trade, it also housed 6,000 tombs reached by elaborate underground staircases. Two hundred of the 6,000 are particularly famous for being painted, the earliest of which dates from the seventh century BC. Officially, they are opened in rotation, so that the delicate wall paintings that adorn them will be better preserved. Without Tarquinia and its wall paintings, we wouldn’t know what ancient Etruscan daily life was like.
Vulci is about twenty miles away, near Canino. This has more tombs but is better known for its ancient castle and its bridge, one of the first examples of the arch. Active as early as the eighth century BC, Vulci was famous in antiquity for its production of handicrafts and for its agriculture. Strengthened by the presence of Greek labor, Vulci became equally famous for its ceramics, sculpture, and objects in bronze, and for the quality of its workmanship, which reached markets throughout the Mediterranean. At least four necropolises were built at Vulci, where there was a practice of placing statues of imaginary animals to guard the tombs. Immensely rich burial treasures have been found in these tombs, in particular a large number of ceramics of Greek production and bronze objects of local production. Other tombs had paintings showing the Greek myths intermingled with Etruscan myths.
There are several reasons Greek vases are as esteemed as they are. In the first place, the making of ceramics—objects made of clay by firing in an oven—is one of the defining practices of civilization. In the Middle East, the first pots were produced around 6700 BC. They were simple at first, and undecorated, but they enabled dry goods like grain and other seeds to be stored away from rats or birds; they allowed liquids to be stored with a minimum of evaporation, encouraging the development of beer and wine; and they made the transport of goods easier, encouraging trade. As the centuries passed, ceramics grew ever more elaborate, in shape, function, and decoration. And it was in Greece in classical times that this area of human activity culminated.
Our word “ceramic” comes from the Greek keramikos, meaning clay. The area of Athens where the ceramies, or community of potters, lived was known as Ceramicus, occupying an area bordering the Agora, along the banks of the Eridanos River. The fine clay of Ceramicus, combined with the brilliant technique of many Greek potters, resulted in the creation of multifarious shapes for vases, according to their function. Scholars and collectors who share a passion for Greek vases now recognize about a hundred different shapes for them, each of which has its own name. An amphora, for instance, is a two-handled vase used for storage and transport. The word krater, meaning “mixing bowl,” describes a large vase. An oinochoe is a small pitcher used for dipping into the krater and pouring the (watered) wine into a drinking cup, or kylix. The kylix is sometimes called a “symposium-vase” because it is often shown in the paintings on vases, being widely used in the evening dinner parties in classical Athens, where serious conversations were the main attraction. Other common names for Greek vases are hydria, which are three-handled vases that had a variety of uses: for drawing water, as ballot boxes in votes for the Assembly, and to hold the ashes of the dead. The word psykter means “cooler,” and this vase, filled with water and wine mixed, would be placed in a krater that had been filled with cool water, thus cooling the wine in turn. A lekythos is a flask that was used for toilet oils, perfumes, or condiments. It was also used in a funerary context, to pour libations over the dead. An aryballos, a small circular flask with a narrow neck, was used to hold and pour oil. It is often shown in Attic vase painting as suspended from the wrist of an athlete. An alabastron is a small, ovoid jar for perfumes, no more than four to six inches high. Although about a hundred types of vase are known, in practice only about twenty were in constant use.
The third—and crowning—aspect of Greek vases is their decoration. Many archaeologists and art historians believe that after the very beautiful but very mysterious cave paintings produced by early man, mainly in Europe about 30,000 years ago, Greek vase paintings are the highest achievement of human art until at least the great cathedrals of the High Middle Ages more than a millennium later. It is one of the reasons the ancient Greeks are held in such esteem. As Sir Peter Hall puts it in his book Cities in Civilisation(1998), in a chapter on ancient Athens that he calls “The Fountainhead”:
The crucial point about Athens is that it was first. And first in no small sense: first in so many of the things that have mattered, ever since, to western civilisation and its meaning. Athens in the fifth century BC gave us democracy, in a form as pure as we are likely to see.... It gave us philosophy, including political philosophy, in a form so rounded, so complete, that hardly anyone added anything of moment to it for well over a millennium. It gave us the world’s first systematic written history. It systematized medical and scientific knowledge, and for the first time began to base them on generalisations from empirical observation. It gave us the first lyric poetry and then comedy and tragedy, all again at so completely an extraordinary pitch of sophistication and maturity, such that they might have been germinating under the Greek sun for hundreds of years. It left us the first naturalistic art; for the first time, human beings caught and registered for ever the breath of a wind, the quality of a smile.
This is what evokes a passion for Greek vases in so many people.
Painted Greek vases are known from the second millennium BC until almost the end of the first century BC. In the beginning of the period there were many local styles, but by the middle of the sixth century the vases of Attica, in particular its capital Athens, exceeded in quantity and quality those of its nearest rival, Corinth. This Attic supremacy was never surpassed and lasted until the disastrous Peloponnesian War ended in 404 BC, which robbed Athens of its profitable markets. After this, Attic vase painting went into decline, though it survived in other parts of the Greek world, especially Sicily and southern Italy.
At first, the main motifs were taken from sea life. These works were followed by a period when orderly patterns were drawn on the surface of the vases with a compass or ruler (the “geometric” style). Human figures appear in the eighth century BC, together with ideas from the East—floral ornaments, exotic beasts, and monsters. At this time, however, in Corinth, a decisive breakthrough was made, in the establishment of the so-called black-figure technique, often enhanced with incised lines in red and white. In the second half of the seventh century, this style spread to Athens, where from the very beginning the skill demanded by the engraving encouraged artists to develop their own styles. It is from this period on that the personal variation of the artists marks their creativity and individuality and an emphasis on human figures becomes the overriding principle that governs vase painting in its highest stage.
Many of the scenes on these vases come from Greek mythology, though they are not “book illustrations” in the modern sense of that term—the artist was left free to create as he wished, and in this way the first of the really great painters emerged. Nearly 900 vase painters are recognized through connoisseurship, accounting for about half the surviving vases, but only forty have left us their real names, with the rest being identified by a particular masterpiece. Among the great masters of Attic black-figure vases were Sophilos, Kleitias, Nearchos, Lydos, Exekias, and the Amasis Painter.
It is at this point that the scenes on Greek vases begin to achieve the special quality of personal experience, which makes them so easy for us, 2,500 years later, to relate to. The painting on Greek vases is naturalistic. The individuals are dressed as ancient Greeks, they do the things that ancient Greeks did, but we recognize ourselves in them: They gossip at the well, their dogs are a nuisance, they smack recalcitrant children, old men lust after young women, young women smile shyly as young athletes pass by. These are real people, with their character showing in their expressions—slyness, embarrassment, sarcasm, disgust. We feel for the somber mourners at a funeral. The vases are often incomparably beautiful, but they are also documents, showing ancient life in all its glory but without pulling any punches. This is why these vases are important, and why it is important that we know where they were when they were found.
Toward the end of the sixth century, the limitations of the black-figure technique, with its unrealistic color scheme, began to circumscribe artists and the new technique of red-figure vases emerged: the figures were left the color of the clay (and so turned red when the vase was fired), and detail was indicated by fine lines drawn in black glaze or in lines of diluted glaze, which fired as dark brown or translucent yellow. The entire background was a luminous black. This gave the figures much the same appearance as if lit by modern theatrical lighting, making them more dramatic and far more realistic.
And it was now that the truly fine artists began to produce the really great masterpieces, with new subjects matching closely the contours of the vases, which themselves were developing new shapes as well, to match the sophisticated life that then obtained in Periclean Athens—its golden age under its great general and leader, Pericles (c. 495–429). The greatest generation of vase painters was known as the Pioneers (because they experimented with new techniques), and the three greatest names among them were Euphronios, Euthymides, and Phintias. Euphronios (fl. c. 520–c. 500 BC) signed eight Attic vases as painter and, later in his life, signed twelve cups as potter, decorated by other artists. He was particularly interested in showing the human body and experimented with foreshortening to give his compositions greater depth. He also produced a pillar monument on the Athenian Acropolis. Euthymides (fl. c. 515–c. 500 BC) signed eight Athenian vases, six as painter, the other two as potter. There is an inscription on an amphora by him in Munich that reads: “Euphronios never did anything this good,” generally interpreted as a playful challenge to the younger artist rather than a taunt. But it shows that artists were aware of each other’s work. Phintias (fl. 520–500 BC) signed six vases as painter and three as potter. The spelling of his names varies, as he was not especially literate.
This period has been described as a primavera (a springtime) that painting would not see again until the Italian Renaissance. In other words, Euphronios, Euthymides, and Phintias are rightly to be regarded as the equivalent of Raphael, Michelangelo, and Leonardo da Vinci: They established the definition of excellence.
The next phase of Attic red-figure painters opened with the Berlin Painter and the Kleophrades Painter. The Berlin Painter is named after a large amphora in the Anitkensammlung (the Museum for Classical Antiquities) in Berlin. His figures so carefully match the shape of his vases that many scholars believe he must have been the potter as well as the painter. Moreover, these figures have that clean simplicity and grace that we now call “classical.” The Kleophrades Painter (fl. c. 505–c. 475 BC) is named after the potter Kleophrades, son of (the black-figure painter) Amasis, whose signature appears on a large red-figure cup now in the Bibliothèque Nationale in Paris. In this period, scenes are lightened in style, with playful borders, and there are fewer figures. It was also about now that cup painters begin to be distinguished from pot painters. Cup, or kylix, painting was perhaps the most intimate of all forms, given the vessel’s use in symposia. The great cup painters were Onesimos, Douris (who produced 280 vases, signing forty), and the Brygos Painter.
Toward the end of the fifth century BC, vase painting underwent yet another change, in that there arose a predilection for new compositions and certain mythological subjects. Scholars now think this was as a response to a great efflorescence of wall painting in Athens, which has been lost. This is thus an added reason for the importance of vase painting of this late period. A favorite subject was the battle between the Athenians and the Amazons, a mythical precursor of the more recent victory of the Athenians over the Persians. In this new stylistic period, the human body is shown in very varied, but very loose poses; there is much more foreshortening and drapery folds lose their rigidity, to both conceal and yet reveal the body beneath. (Much the same was happening in sculpture.)
Following the defeat of Athens in the Peloponnesian War in 404 BC, Athens lost its market in the West. This marks the point when local vase painting began to flourish elsewhere. Apulian and Gnathian painting (Gnathia was a town in Apulia, in southern Italy) became briefly fashionable. By the end of the fourth century BC, however, red-figure vase production came to an end in all parts of the ancient world.
Pottery is the most important material for the study of antiquity because it was produced in great quantities over several centuries and survives in abundance.
Paintings on vases tell us more about the Greeks, what they looked like, what they did, and what they believed in, than any single literary text. Thus even a vase with poor drawing often times takes on a special significance because of a story told for the first time, or a detail illuminated. . . . In this context the average does not take away from the best; rather, like the broad base of a pyramid, it directs the gaze to its summit and supports it.
This tribute to the “poorly drawn and average” vase was written by none other than Dietrich von Bothmer.
Among the first connoisseurs to amass a major collection of vases was Sir William Hamilton. A member of the Society of Antiquaries, he was appointed the British plenipotentiary at the court in Naples, where he formed not one but two collections of Greek and Etruscan ceramics. The first collection, which consisted of 730 objects, was sold to the British Museum in 1772 for £8,400. His second collection was even finer than the first, consisting of vases recently excavated—and he sent it to England to be sold. Part was lost at sea, but the remainder reached London and was auctioned. This auction did much to influence taste in England, one man who fell under the spell being Joshua Wedgwood. He developed a modern version of Greek and Italian vases (at his plant called “Etruria”) that became so fashionable that at times they sold for three times as much as the real thing. Hamilton’s main rival in Italy was the Frenchman Vivant Denon, later to be instrumental in the creation of the Musée Napoleon, now the Louvre. His collection of Greek and Etruscan vases comprised 520 pieces. A tourist guide published in 1775 listed forty-two collections with vases around Europe, in eighteen cities.
The revival of interest in ancient Greece—stimulated by the excavations south of Naples and Winckelmann’s writings—was one of the main factors giving rise to the neo-classical movement in the arts that engulfed Europe around the turn of the nineteenth century. Romantics, too, were in thrall to the classical world, not just Byron but his fellow poet John Keats, who famously wrote his “Ode on a Grecian Urn,” containing the lines:
O Attic shape! . . . Cold Pastoral!
When old age shall this generation waste,
Thou shalt remain, in midst of other woe
Than ours, a friend to man, to whom thou say’st,
“Beauty is truth, truth beauty,—that is all
Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know.”
Thomas Hope, a Dutch connoisseur who settled in London in the late eighteenth century, had three rooms of his house in Duchess Street, Portland Place, filled with vases.
This interest continued to grow in the nineteenth century, fueled by excavations further north than Pompeii and Herculaneum. George Dennis’s book Cities and Cemeteries of Etruria, first published in 1848, celebrated the “sublime” and “perfect” quality of the vases that the excavations had uncovered, and collections in other European capitals, after Paris and London, began to make their appearance—in Berlin, Basel, Copenhagen, St. Petersburg, Vienna. In Munich, the collection of Ludwig I was exhibited at the Pinakothek as a “Prologue to the Renaissance.” The finds at Vulci, many of which were discovered on the land of Lucien Bonaparte, were exhibited with the inscription “The Raphaels of Antiquity.” The discoveries initiated what has been called “the golden age of vase collecting.” The collection of Marchese Gianpietro Campana was formed at this time and, at 3,791 pieces, was probably the largest ever assembled. The United States followed toward the end of the century. E. P. Warren was responsible for the vase collection in the Boston Museum of Fine Arts. He settled in Rome, one of several vase scholars resident at the end of the nineteenth century, where the Piazza Montanova became an antiquities market every Sunday. With the establishment of chairs of classical archaeology in universities across Europe and North America in the nineteenth century, many institutions acquired study collections. In 1898, Adolf Loos, the modernist designer in Vienna, wrote that “Greek vases are as beautiful as a machine, as beautiful as a bicycle.”
In the early twentieth century, connoisseurship took another step forward when the British academic J. D. Beazley introduced so-called Morellian techniques into the appreciation of Greek vases. Beazley, an Oxford scholar, was “much involved” with the poet James Elroy Flecker. He became Lincoln Professor of Classical Archaeology and an honorary fellow of the Met in New York. Giovanni Morelli was an Italian art historian of the late nineteenth century (he was a big influence on Bernard Berenson) who adapted Freudian techniques to connoisseurship. Originally involved in trying to understand early Renaissance painting, where many pictures are unsigned, he formed the view that painters betray their identity in what we might call the “unconscious” parts of their pictures—those areas such as the ears, eyebrows, or ankles, where they are perhaps not paying full attention or which do not form part of the main message of the work. These features, Morelli said, are invariably highly similar from one painting to another by the same artist. Beazley adapted this method to identifying Greek vases, and it enabled him to group them together, either by attributing them to painters who had signed a few vases or by assigning such titles as the Berlin Painter or the Villa Giulia Painter where there was no signature. In these cases the painter was named after his masterpiece. Over the years, these painters could be credited with an oeuvre, even a career, in which his painting style developed, matured, and (perhaps) declined. In providing names and identities in this way, Beazley gave new life to the market in vases. His accomplishment was a perfect scenario for collectors and dealers, helping transform an anonymous mass of objects into the archaeological equivalent of, say, the market in old masters. Other scholars subsequently did the same for vase painters in other areas of the classical world. This approach was so successful that George Dennis’s book Cities and Cemeteries of Etruria was republished in 1985.
Today, Greek and Etrurian vases still evoke great passion and are actively traded. Since World War II, seventy-one private collections have been sold at auction. In the United States, apart from Boston, the great vase collections are at the Metropolitan in New York (formed between 1906 and 1928 and added to in 1941 and 1956), the Duke University Classical Collection at Durham, North Carolina, and the San Antonio Museum (formed in the 1990s). Several major collections costing several million dollars each have been assembled since World War II. Among archaeologists the passions are no less strong, though they have to do with different matters—for example, with whether the vases in these collections have been illicitly excavated, and whether these vases were quite as valuable in ancient times as some people say. Either way, these ancient objects still have the power to evoke passionate emotions.
After Etruria and Greece, Rome. The Roman reverence for the Greek way of life, its thought and artistic achievements, was one of the dominant ideas throughout the long life of the Roman Empire. When we speak now of “the classics,” as often as not we mean Greek and Roman art and literature. But it was the Romans who invented the very notion of the classics, the idea that the best that has been thought, written, painted, and designed in the past is worth preserving and profiting from.
Also, the Romans had a notion of utilitas—by which they meant utility, unsentimentality, and pride in Roman achievements—and this had a major effect on innovation in the visual arts. Portraits had become more realistic in Greece, but they were still idealized, to an extent. Not so in Rome. The emperor might want his likeness to echo the dignity of his office, but for other families the more realistic, the better. There was a tradition in Rome, among patrician families at least, of keeping wax masks of one’s ancestors, to be worn by living members of the family at funerals. Out of this custom there developed the Roman tradition of bronze and stone busts that were, above all, realistic. This is why Roman sculpture is so vivid, valuable, and sought after.
In architecture the invention of cement made all the difference. Toward the end of the third century BC, possibly via Africa, it was found that a mixture of water, lime, and a gritty material like sand would set into a durable substance that could be used either to bond masonry or as a building material in its own right, and up to a point, could be shaped in a mold. This had two immediate consequences. First, it meant that major public buildings, such as baths or theaters, could be constructed in the center of the city. Large boulders did not need to be brought from far away. Instead, the sand and bricks could be brought in smaller, much more manageable loads, and far more complex infrastructures could be erected to accommodate larger numbers of people. Second, because bricks and concrete, when it was wet, could be shaped, they didn’t need to be carved, as stone did. Therefore, building could be done by less-skilled workmen, and even slaves could do the job. It was, in consequence, much cheaper. All this meant that monumental architecture could be practiced on a much larger scale than before, which is one reason Rome is the city of so many classical ruins today, beautiful brickwork bonded by mortar.
There was in Rome immense respect for Greek culture. From the first century BC on, Greek sculpture and copies of Greek sculpture were found in many upper-class homes in Rome. Many of these copies were very good, and today much of Greek sculpture is known only, or mainly, through Roman copies that are, of course, now very valuable in their own right. At first, Roman generals plundered what they could: In 264 BC, a Roman general took 2,000 statues from vanquished Volsinii. Greek artists quickly adjusted, and a thriving art market grew up in Athens (the so-called neo-Attic workshops), catering to the taste of Roman tourists. Later still, Greek artists set up shop along the Tiber River. Rome itself, in a way, was an amalgam of Greek ideas and Latin ambition, but thanks in part to concrete, there is much more left of it than Athens.
The antiquities Giacomo Medici was trading in included some of the finest objects ever produced by humankind—important historically, aesthetically, and intellectually. Many aspects of these important epochs of our past are still clouded in mystery. Virtually half of the history of Greek, Etruscan, and Roman culture in Italy has been stolen from us. The intellectual and artistic damage done by the looters has been immense. And Giacomo Medici played a bigger part in that destruction than anyone else.