DOI Page / Citation link:
https://doi.org/10.11588/diglit.847#0273
252
TARQUINIA.
remains no more.
account of them, we could with the utmost facility
have copied the whole. Avolta would have given me
the old drawings of the temple of Iside, could he have
found them; but they still exist, though in private
hands. The facial line, mentioned by Gell, is cer-
tainly a mistake, except in the case of the evil genii,
who are represented with negro features ; all the
others are in either the almost straight Egyptian
or the straight Greek. Gell gives the following
sketch of one of the tumuli, the remaining walls of
which we saw, but the structure of which, to the
disgrace of those who ought to have preserved it,
He says it was constructed on
the same principle as the trea-
suries of Atreus and Minyas in
Greece, by stones approaching
each other, and that the dia-
meter of the dome was eighteen
feet, and its height almost the
same.
The figures in the tombs which we saw, so far
from having been improved by modern draftsmen,
are provokingly mangled in the copies—I should
say are common-placed and grotesqued. Gell's mea-
surement of the chambers is too large, except in a
few instances. The boots of green leather must
mean blue—at least we saw no green colour in any
Etruscan tomb.
The painted tomb of which Avolta told us, con-
taining an elephant, could not be earlier than a. e.
474, about three hundred years before Christ, be-
TARQUINIA.
remains no more.
account of them, we could with the utmost facility
have copied the whole. Avolta would have given me
the old drawings of the temple of Iside, could he have
found them; but they still exist, though in private
hands. The facial line, mentioned by Gell, is cer-
tainly a mistake, except in the case of the evil genii,
who are represented with negro features ; all the
others are in either the almost straight Egyptian
or the straight Greek. Gell gives the following
sketch of one of the tumuli, the remaining walls of
which we saw, but the structure of which, to the
disgrace of those who ought to have preserved it,
He says it was constructed on
the same principle as the trea-
suries of Atreus and Minyas in
Greece, by stones approaching
each other, and that the dia-
meter of the dome was eighteen
feet, and its height almost the
same.
The figures in the tombs which we saw, so far
from having been improved by modern draftsmen,
are provokingly mangled in the copies—I should
say are common-placed and grotesqued. Gell's mea-
surement of the chambers is too large, except in a
few instances. The boots of green leather must
mean blue—at least we saw no green colour in any
Etruscan tomb.
The painted tomb of which Avolta told us, con-
taining an elephant, could not be earlier than a. e.
474, about three hundred years before Christ, be-