Ramayana in Archaic Greek and Etruscan Art at Caere, Part III

Description (Main Presentation, Part III):

Anatomical Complexity in renderings of the figures on the Caeretan hydria prove the importance of the characters displayed on this vase in Boston. Rama, Sita, Laksmana, and Ravana are thus depicted with the same care and effort as Greek mythological characters such as Heracles. Sita's physical distress is also illustrated in the anatomical rendering of her right hand. The figure of Sita is featured multiple times in both the Caeretan hydria and the Campana plaques. Another Campana panel is examined, in which the characters of Queen Kaikeyi and King Dasaratha, father of Rama, are identified from the epic Ramayana. We then demonstrate that the production of Caeretan vases, especially the one in Boston, and the Campana slabs are intimately connected - both were the work of Ionian artists in Cerveteri during the third quarter of the 6th century BCE.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zM3WuJw0UhY

Transcript (Main Presentation, Part III):

So the elaborate complexity of the dresses of the maenads has already been discussed and now we move on to the anatomical complexity on select examples. Jaap Hemelrijk specifically compares No. 21 and No. 2, which are Heracles attacking Alcyoneus and of course, the one that we are already discussing, the Boston deer hunt and the satyr abduction of Sita by Ravana. So he states: “However, even more advanced than these fine dresses of the maenads are the anatomical renderings on this same vase No. 2 and on No. 21, ‘Rome Alcyoneus’: the arms, hands, legs and feet of the ladies and satyrs of No. 2 and of its nude hunters and those of Heracles and his victim Alcyoneus on No. 21 display a surprising anatomical knowledge of the bones and muscles of these parts.” (pg. 65, More About Caeretan Hydriae: Addenda e Clarificanda). 

And if you look on the left side here in color you can see the Caeretan hydria where Heracles attacks Alcyoneus, the giant demon, and Heracles is nude and he has the bow in his left hand, much like Rama and Laksmana in the No. 2 hydria. And you also have Hermes on the left, watching as a witness. So the similarity in terms of the anatomical complexity is a hint that if No. 21 has famous mythical characters such as Heracles and Alcyoneus, then No. 2 must also have a myth with characters who are just as famous and should be something or someone we can name. 

Tityos, for example, who tries to rape Apollo’s mother Leto, and Alcyoneus are satyrs who are connected stylistically and anatomically to the satyr in the No. 2 hydria, and that confirms that Ravana is an analogue to those two and therefore likewise, Rama and Laksmana are counterparts to Heracles. So it shouldn’t be difficult to accept that if the characters on the No. 21 are anatomically well-depicted, and so are the No. 2 (characters), then they both must have explicitly nameable characters.

The anatomical rendering of Sita’s hand also tells us about her level of physical distress. And continuing his discussion on anatomy, the author Hemelrijk remarks about “the wonderful hand of the girl of the early vase No. 2, who is carried off, not unwillingly, by her brutish lover. Note the slight bend in the little finger and the subtle swelling of the articulations in the other fingers.” (pg. 66). So what does this quote really tell us? Well, “her brutish lover” is definitely Ravana. That’s a correct description, but the “not unwillingly” seems again a bit incorrect and also confused. And so we’ll get back to that in a second. What I would say here in my description is that Sita’s right hand, as you see on the right, is loose and pointed down, indicating her resignation at being taken to an unknown place - a clear contrast to her left hand, the fist that she makes in the scene on the right side. Resignation in defeat, in my opinion, is obviously not the same as the willingness to be taken away. So that kind of rules out the “not unwillingly” part, which I think is not accurate, but “the brutish lover” part is accurate.

Now the next point is that when Rama carries Sita in the Campana plaque, neither one of her arms is shown, because she has no desire to resist and is willingly cradled in his arms like a baby. I think the author’s conclusion of willing abduction is mainly due to the ignorance of the sequential nature of the mythological scenes in the No. 2 hydria. He fails to associate the two maenads and the two satyrs with one another and recognize that they are the same person, and that’s why he doesn’t see the sequential nature of the mythological story, or the connected narrative that is there. And what’s funny and ironic is that later on we’ll see that he wants to see a more connected narrative for the No. 3 hydria, which is about Hermes and Apollo, and the stealing of cattle, but he doesn’t recognize the connected narrative that is clearly in this hydria.

So what is the connected narrative here or the sequence? Well, the first event is on the front side (on the obverse), which is the hunting of the golden deer, or Maricha in the form of a stag, by the two nude youths Rama and Laksmana. The second part of the sequence is Ravana approaching Sita with unwanted sexual advances, which is on the right side of the back side. And then on the left side of the reverse side, we have the third part of the sequence, Ravana carrying Sita away to Lanka. So if the author had recognized the fact that the characters Ravana and Sita are the same - the satyr and maenad on both sides of the reverse side - he would have realized perhaps the sequential nature of it. And he would not have made the incorrect statement of “not unwillingly”, because she’s clearly unwilling to be taken, but in the left scene (third scene) Sita has become resigned to her fate and does not resist any longer.

Now my conclusion would be that both maenads represent Sita in the Boston hydria from Caere. But what about the Campana panels, the painted terracotta plaques? Well, in those also, similarly all three women that are painted on those panels are representations of Sita (in my opinion), who is the wife of Rama. If you look at zoomed-in photos of the two maenads for comparison of facial appearance, arms, and dress, you’ll notice a lot of similarity. There is looser hair seen on the left maenad because she has quit resisting Ravana’s control, in my eyes from what I’m seeing. 

Now with regard to the Campana panels - Mario A. Del Chiaro, in his article Two Etruscan Painted Terracotta Panels, from the J. Paul Getty Museum Journal, Volume 11, in 1983: He explicitly notices that there are “essentially congruent profile heads exhibited by the women depicted on three of the Campana panels,” which are also dated 530 to 520 BCE in his journal article (pg. 132). So I mean he’s practically telling us that these three women on the Campana panels are the same person. He’s practically admitting it, and as far as I’m concerned, it’s quite obvious that they are all Sita, as we have discussed earlier. And not only that, you see the congruence in the dating as well. The Boston hydria and the Campana panels both originate in Caere circa 525 BCE. So really, there’s just too many coincidences here for them to be just random coincidences.

Finally, please look at the two images on the bottom, which are both from the Campana panels, and are the best examples of the face of Sita that you can find. And in the first one, we are pretty familiar with that. That’s the one in which she’s being carried off by Rama and rescued. In the other one, she’s walking with Rama and Laksmana in the middle (in between them) and she’s holding a plant, which is very typical in many ways of depictions of Rama and Sita and Laksmana walking in the forest in Indian artwork as well. And you can see the face is almost identical in both of these two scenes, which are both from the Campana series.

So the first thing I want to discuss on this slide is the painting on the right, which is another Campana panel among the five that are existent. And in this, one can see three different figures - a winged female figure on the right (in the top right corner) and then a bearded man with black hair sitting on the right pensively with his knuckles on his chin. And then you have the even older man with grey hair on the left holding a stick, who’s probably giving him some kind of advice. In my opinion, this is King Dasaratha on the right sitting pensively and consulting his counselor, the elderly Vashishta, who was the royal advisor in the household in the kingdom of Ayodhya in the Indian epic Ramayana. And the winged female figure above is about to attack them or strike them, especially Dasaratha on the right, as she’s flying directly above him.

This is basically a depiction of the very important event in the Ramayana where Kaikeyi requests boons that cause Rama to be exiled and her own son Bharata to be crowned king temporarily. And Bharata is her own son whereas Rama is her stepson from another wife of Dasaratha. And so this scene basically, metaphorically, or figuratively depicts Kaikeyi killing Dasaratha the king, even though in reality she does it in a less dramatic way (by using her boons as leverage, she makes Dasaratha helpless because as king he must honor his promise to fulfill her requests in Vedic culture).

The renowned Italian scholar Massimo Pallottino in his book Etruscan Painting, describes the same scene and he says, “Two bearded elderly men are seated on folding chairs facing each other. They are wearing Greek tunics, mantles, and peaked shoes. One of them holds a scepter (not spectre). The other is resting his head on his hand in an attitude of pensive sadness. Above them on the right, a winged female figure is shooting arrows towards them.” (pg. 33). So clearly he agrees with my assessment and description as well. And it’s quite obvious that the Queen Kaikeyi is the winged female figure who is ruining King Dasaratha’s plans to crown his own eldest son Rama king, and instead forces him to send his dearest son Rama into exile, thereby killing the king because of heartbreak.

So the Caeretan hydria with the deer hunt and the abduction, and the Campana panels which show Rama and Sita and Laksmana, are both Ramayana scenes. And unfortunately they are kept far apart from each other in museums around the world. One of them is kept in the Boston Museum of Fine Arts (the hydria). And then the Campana panels, which are five of them, are kept in the Louvre Museum in Paris. But even though they are far apart in terms of where they are kept in the modern world, they’re actually intimately related and they certainly were produced in the same region of Caere.

So the Campana painted terracotta panels are likely the work of painters in the same workshop that produced Caeretan hydriae. So either the artists from the Caeretan hydria workshop were the same artists who painted the terracotta panels that we see in the Campana series, or they collaborated with other Ionian artists who painted those terracotta panels. Jaap Hemelrijk has repeatedly emphasized that Ionian immigrants, probably from Phocaea, probably specialized in both architectural terracottas and/or panel painting, along with the pottery that we see from the Caeretan hydria workshop. And he repeats this over and over again in his book Caeretan Hydriae.

Now moving on from that issue, I also want to add in some commentary about the panels themselves. In an article “In Search of Etruscan Colours: A Spectroscopic Study of a Painted Terracotta Slab from Ceri”, you see that the Italian authors also make some good observations here. They say: “Essentially documented in Cerveteri… series of these (painted terracotta) panels, fixed in succession using strong nails to a wooden frame mounted on the wall, adorned the internal spaces of temples, patrician houses and aristocratic tombs.” (pg. 87). 

So the Italian authors acknowledge the importance of these terracotta panels, given their placement in temples and aristocratic homes and tombs. But they also acknowledge, and we can quote them here, that “painted terracotta slabs, which are characteristic of Etruscan art, are much less known than the funerary frescoes of the Etruscan necropolis, and have never been studied by advanced diagnostic techniques.” (pg. 87). So, this tells us that they haven’t done enough research about these painted terracotta panels and that includes the Campana series.

Continuing with our discussion of how the Caeretan painted panels are directly connected to the Caeretan hydriae, we have an even more revealing quote here from the same Italian authors in the article that we just quoted on the previous slide - “In Search of Etruscan Colours: A Spectroscopic Study of a Painted Terracotta Slab…” These Italian scholars add on the next page (pg. 88) that “refined stylistic analyses have shown that a group of panels with a high aesthetic quality recovered from the Cerveteri urban site was manufactured by craftsmen who moved from eastern Greece to Etruria (that is, Ionia to Etruria), and to whom the particular type of pottery called idrie ceretane (i.e. Caeretan hydria) is generally ascribed… The iconographic repertoire comprises scenes representing epic and mythological subjects… These painted panels constitute one of the most important examples of Hellenic-style and, at the same time, original products of Etruscan artistic culture.” 

This is a pretty loaded quote here. And clearly they’re making a direct connection here between the painted terracotta panels in Cerveteri to the Caeretan hydriae. And they’re also connecting the Ionian immigrant artists to both. They’re also acknowledging the epic and mythological content or subject matter in both of the works. And they’re also recognizing the importance of them. And yet, they haven’t been properly understood or studied and explained, which is a travesty.

The Italian author Raffaella Bonaudo confirms this connection, specifically between the Campana slabs and the Caeretan hydriae. She writes (pgs. 26-27): “Already in 1962 K. Friis Johansen highlighted the very strong influence of Etruscan art on the workshop of the Caeretan Hydriae, emphasizing in particular the relationships that unite them to the production of Campana slabs, and deduced that the ceramic workshop must have been located in Caere…” She also adds and summarizes that “in the same years, Francisco Roncalli tackled the study of the painted slabs from Caere, identifying a series which presents for the first time the ‘absolute dominance of those Ionic influences’, already highlighted sporadically in other examples and leads one to imagine ‘the direct settlement of Greek-oriental artists, and first of all of the Master of the Idrie (the Caeretan Hydria), which had already taken place in Etruria and in Cerveteri in particular.’” (La Culla di Hermes, pgs. 26-27)

So she again is summarizing all of this evidence that connects not only the painted terracotta panels from Caere to the Caeretan hydria, but also specifically the Campana slabs themselves, which as I’ve already demonstrated, are clearly depicting Ramayanic episodes from the Indian legend, which is clearly of eastern origin obviously. And therefore it’s not a Greek myth. I want to specifically point out now that the Caeretan hydria No. 2 in Boston, which is the deer hunt and the abduction, is more closely related to the Campana panels than any other existing hydriae. So all the other Caeretan Hydriae may be artistically (stylistically) somewhat similar to the Campana panels. But this specific hydria No. 2 has not only a similarity in artistic style, but also they share the same subject matter, which is the epic mythology of the Indian Ramayana, especially the stories from the plot of the third book (Book of the Forest) in the Ramayana, which is called the Aranya Kanda. 

What is the evidence that proves that the Caeretan hydria No. 2 is the most closely related to the Campana panels of all the hydriae? Well, the early dating of the Caeretan hydria No. 2, which is circa 525 BC, should be seen as a clue to its intimate relationship to the Campana panels, which date to the same period. Later hydriae produced in the Caeretan workshop are not as intimately related, as they are quite a bit further produced in future years, you know, in later years. If you go by Hemelrijk, he uses the No. 2 vase as kind of a reference point because of the fact that it’s such an early vase. He says that “it seems likely that the latest hydriae were made fifteen to twenty years after No. 2” (pg. 157), and therefore probably are not related to the Campana panels at all, at least not when it comes to subject matter.

Now the next point I’m saying is that the scholars have recognized that the Caeretan hydriae, as we have shown on the previous slides, are generally related to the Campana panels artistically, but they have not specifically identified which ones share the same subject matter or mythological content, as I have. Now another quote I’m going to give you here is from the scholar M. Cristofani: “After analyzing the contributions of the northern Ionian ceramists in Etruria from about 530 BCE,” he traced the Caeretan pinakes (which are the painted terracotta panels) to the workshop of the Caeretan hydriae. So he made the same match there and he also “recognizes a production less conditioned by Attic (from Athens) and Clazomenian ceramography,” and one that’s “freer in its expressive forms, with a predilection for narration,” which is what we see in both the Campana plaques and the Caeretan hydria No. 2 (see La Culla di Hermes pg. 27, by Raffaella Bonaudo). We see a predilection for narration of a certain episode - not just one event at one time, but multiple events happening in a sequence.