The Etruscans, a revenant and unusual people, had an Italian empire
before the Greeks and Romans did. By the start of the Christian era
their wooden temples and writings had vanished, the Romans and the early
church had melted their bronze statues, and the people had assimilated.
After the last Etruscan augur served the Romans as they fought back the
Visigoths in 408 CE, the civilization disappeared but for ruins, tombs,
art, and vases. No other lost culture disappeared as completely and then
returned to the same extent as the Etruscans. Indeed, no other ancient
Mediterranean people was as controversial both in its time and in
posterity. Though the Greeks and Romans tarred them as superstitious and
decadent, D.H. Lawrence praised their way of life as offering an
alternative to modernity. In The Etruscans in the Modern Imagination Sam
Solecki chronicles their unexpected return to intellectual and cultural
history, beginning with eighteenth-century scholars, collectors, and
archaeologists. The resurrection of this vanished kingdom occurred with
remarkable vigour in philosophy, literature, music, history, mythology,
and the plastic arts. From Wedgwood to Picasso, Proust to Lawrence,
Emily Dickinson to Anne Carson, Solecki reads the disembodied traces of
Etruscan culture for what they tell us about cultural knowledge and
mindsets in different times and places, for the way that ideas about the
Etruscans can serve as a reflection or foil to a particular cultural
moment, and for the creative alchemy whereby artists turn to the past
for the raw materials of contemporary creation. The Etruscans are a
cultural curiosity because of their disputed origin, unique language,
and distinctive religion and customs, but their destination is no less
worthy of our curiosity. The Etruscans in the Modern Imagination
provides a fascinating meditation on cultural transmission between
ancient and modern civilizations.
