Word: etruscans
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...story on Pablo Picasso and the artist's big retrospective show at the Louvre. This traveler said he intended to head for the Louvre as soon as he hits Paris. Another reader, a friend of one of our editors, just returned from Italy with a replica of an Etruscan figurine he bought after reading TIME'S story (Sept. 6, 1954) on Etruscan ruins...
Behind the Smile. The Etruscans' assurance of life after death, which amused the early Romans, gave Etruscan art one of the sunniest outlooks in history. Early Etruscan warriors were turned out in some of the handsomest armor ever made, and the statues which preserve them for posterity show them wearing an enigmatic antique smile...
This same cheerful camaraderie with life in all its forms, conveyed by exquisitely styled sheep and high-prancing goats, made the Etruscans outstanding animal sculptors as well. To adorn wooden chests they carved gay mermaids, as delightful to Etruscan sailors as the Sirens were terrifying to Greek oarsmen. Even their demons, carved on drinking cups, were closer to Pan than to fire...
Before Surrealism. Occasionally, an Etruscan work seems to leap centuries into the future. Etruscan art, in turn influenced by Greek and Roman art, even went through a surrealist stage. Etruscan artists turned out long, sticklike figurines with just a suggestion of head, breasts, knees and feet. They could pass for the current work of modern Swiss Sculptor Alberto Giacometti...
Terra cotta was the favorite medium of Vulca of Veii, who lived about 500 B.C., the only Etruscan artist whose name has come down. A head of Hermes, perhaps his masterpiece, is so good that classic scholars once thought it must be Greek. But its smiling features, looking out on a benevolent world with a typically Etruscan expression, are alien both to Roman sternness and Greek idealized classicism. More than anything else, it was this carefree attitude toward life as well as death that gave the Etruscan works their unexpected appeal. Rather than visiting a dead civilization, visitors...