Duel - Tomb Painting, Andriuolo Tomb 4

Duel - Andriuolo Tomb 4, late 4th century BC.jpg
Duel, detail - Andriuolo Tomb 4 , late 4th century BC.jpg

Dublin Core

Title

Duel - Tomb Painting, Andriuolo Tomb 4

Description

Location: National Archaeological Museum of Paestum
Date: late 4th century BC

Details: The tomb frescoes of fourth century Paestum vividly express a mixture of cultures, drawing from Greek, Lucanian/south Italic, and Etruscan traditions. 
Funerary games, such as dueling, boxing, and chariot racing, are commonly depicted in these paintings, celebrating the lives of the deceased and the martial virtues valued by Lucanian society. Images of dueling and gladiatorial combat, as pictured in this tomb, seem to have their origins particularly in Italic funerary traditions. However, note that the combatants pictured here wield both Greek and Italic military equipment. The combatant on the left appears to wear an Attic helmet, popular in the Greek east, while his opponent on the right wears an Italo-Corinthian helmet was used in Italy. Both wield a large hoplite shield (hoplon) and seem to wear the type of linen armor (linothorax) used in Greece and Macedonia.
Greek and Etruscan traditions peak out elsewhere: the thick red border at the bottom of the image (called a "dado") is well known from Etruscan art, where it was employed to mark off the base of walls; on the other hand, the red spheres hanging around the fighters are almost certainly pomegranates, which were "associated with death and rebirth in Greek iconongraphy as in the story of Persephone eating pomegranate in the underworld" (Tuck, 57).

Further reading:
Tuck, Steven L. A History of Roman Art. Wiley-Blackwell, 2015.

Creator

Gabriel Baker

Rights

Shared under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License

Citation

Gabriel Baker , “Duel - Tomb Painting, Andriuolo Tomb 4,” Archaeology, Artifacts, & Landscapes, accessed March 28, 2024, https://gabrieldavidbaker.com/digital-exhibit/items/show/19.

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