The Boston Perry

THE NEW CRITERION, October 2024

The Boston Perry

On In the Company of Art: A Museum Director’s Private Journals by Perry T. Rathbone, edited by Belinda Rathbone.

Back before “connoisseurship” became a dirty word, a generation of museum directors learned to “know by the senses” through a Harvard course prosaically titled “Museum Work and Museum Problems.” Created and taught by Paul Sachs (1878–1965), a scion of both Goldman and Sachs and a former Wall Street investor himself, the postgraduate course educated its “scholar-connoisseurs” on matters of quality through visits with art dealers in New York and object lessons and dinners at Sachs’s Cambridge home Shady Hill. The instruction was hands-on, from the study of Greek coinage, to the maintenance of an institution’s physical plant, to the cultivation of museum benefactors. In every case, students honed their powers of discernment while learning how to flip the coin, turn the switch, and seal the deal.

Perry T. Rathbone (1911–2000) was a Sachs graduate who applied these lessons con brio. In the Company of Art presents this museum director’s newly published “private journals” as selected and introduced by his daughter Belinda Rathbone. Beginning in the early 1950s, when he was the director of the Saint Louis Art Museum, but focused on his subsequent and transformative seventeen-year tenure at Boston’s Museum of Fine Arts, the journals and letters collected here find Rathbone “writing in earnest” as he took the helm of a large and luffing institution on the flood tide of postwar expansion. “What dreary galleries, what gloom! And what a behemoth it is!” he wrote to his wife, Euretta de Cosson Rathbone, a highborn British ski racer whom he variously addresses as Rettles, Ret, and Rett, upon arrival in Boston in May 1955.

The journals of many a not-for-profit manager might have limited appeal, even ones documenting important moments, but Rathbone’s were never weighed down with meetings and memos. “My father’s journals are filled with his feelings,” notes Belinda, a New Criterion contributor who has written about Sachs for these pages (“Museum work & museum problems,” December 2018). In the Company of Art locates her father “at the peak of his powers, at the crest of his career, old enough to look back as far as he could look forward.”

The journals convey the observations of a seasoned connoisseur—not just of art, but also of the many famous figures he encountered and occasionally even of himself. Attached to the “educated eye” Rathbone developed through Sachs was an aptitude for concision. Intended for his readership alone, these discerning journals impart their own literary lessons in the elegant powers of description.

Elegance is the stock-in-trade of museum directorship, of course, especially as it comes to the dark arts of benefaction, but Rathbone cut his high polish with just enough world-weariness to make his personality revealing. He drove a 1936 Ford Phaeton, a memento from his sandbox days as a curator in Detroit, well into the 1960s. “Trained in the courtship of the rich,” writes Belinda, “he also learned to see through them.”

Rathbone’s observations could be frank, but they were rarely biting, at least as selected here in these breezy two hundred pages. The appreciation he showed for his own life’s good fortunes conveys an honest ease that grounded his judgment. “I know my life is rich,” he wrote on October 1, 1962, reflecting on “how omnivorous time swallows up the detail of our lives,” but, as he continues, “to read about it makes it seem richer than I could ever remember it to have been.”

Latter-day readers of these journals will be drawn to Rathbone’s character sketches, especially as they concern the notable and quotable. (As the editor, Belinda provides footnotes to better our understanding of person and place.) “After giving him the benefit of the doubt for two days, decided he was a man of limited intelligence,” he writes of Willem de Kooning, after serving on an awards jury with the painter at the Chicago Art Institute. “Quite expressionless. And a staccato monotony of speech I found rather tiring” (October 1, 1953).

“His quite unassuming behavior won me at once, never permitting me to feel odd or even self-conscious,” he notes of a visit to the museum by Aldous Huxley. “He walks with a curious bending gait, a sort of lope, and he looks at the world through the palest of blue eyes, almost as if veiled with mist” (October 14, 1960).

“He’s a sharp observer and a quick, rather tart, talker,” he says of his time with Kenneth Clark, the wartime director of London’s National Gallery and soon to become the television host of Civilisation. “He does look extraordinarily like a turtle . . . not only round the nose and mouth, but even in the eye. And he’s a bit snappy too; even knows and admits he’s been rude” (April 4, 1962).

“Picasso’s eyes are unforgettable and also his delicate tapered fingers,” he writes to Ret from Peggy Guggenheim’s Palazzo Venier dei Leoni in Venice, after a visit to Cannes. “He was like a child in the studio, following all our interests and enthusiasms and bringing out his special treasures for us to enjoy—Degas pastels and the two tiny portraits by Douanier Rousseau” (July 6, 1964).

“Of all the sculptors I have known—Moore, Marini, Calder, Milles, Lipchitz, Marcks,” he notes on a visit to Japan, “Noguchi is the only one who lacks basic kindliness” (March 26–April 14, 1974).

Along the way, we learn about the sticky business of museum acquisition (“a repellant creature,” he writes of one dealer who tried to cut him in on a sale, which he declines, “but he cannot be ignored”; October 18, 1953). There are the expected grievances around the museum board (“an admirable man of the law but possessing not a fiber of aesthetic sensibility,” he says of one trustee; October 13, 1960). Difficult donors conspire to take up his time (“She has a way of detaining her guests—more like a jailer than a hostess”; letter to Ret, June 20, 1964). Museum renovations keep him awake at night (“I can see these galleries as if I were in them, every detail. It is inimical to sleep”; October 26, 1961). Loans are to be pursued even if beyond reach (“Seems to be no hope of bringing the Gioconda to Boston, but at least the effort has been made. . . . Now we can relax”; December 19, 1962). At the same time, the prerogatives of modern art confound him (“I am more at sea than ever over how to formulate a policy of acquisition in the field of modern art for a great museum of historical art like the MFA”; January 31, 1964).

Readers might appreciate Rathbone’s astringent comments on modern architects and urban planners, especially as compared to the lust for anti-contextual additions at today’s institutions. “Americans in the middle of the twentieth century live at the mercy of highway engineers and ‘traffic experts,’” he laments (January 31, 1964). Meanwhile, “Harvard only builds ‘centers’ today,” he writes of the university’s brutalist new home for contemporary art, which features a highway-like ramp. “Nor has this tortured pile of concrete designed by Corbusier any apparent logic within or without” (December 18, 1962).

At the crux of this volume are Rathbone’s interactions with the Kennedy administration and in particular his time with the First Lady. For this head of Massachusetts’s flagship museum, Camelot came calling in a way that might otherwise have been reserved for Washington’s National Gallery. At first, Rathbone begs off his invitation to the inauguration. “Who wants to be swallowed up amidst thousands”? (January 16, 1961). In the end, a blizzard and a railroad strike conspire to keep him away. Nevertheless, three weeks later, “Mrs. Kennedy telephoned me this morning from the White House! I couldn’t have been more surprised and thought for an instant that someone was pulling my leg” (February 4, 1961).

After lending a suite of American watercolors, the Rathbones travel to the White House to see these works by Sargent, Homer, Prendergast, and Hopper hanging in the West Sitting Room. “The charming Mrs. Kennedy soon appeared. Her ultra simple attire made me feel that I belonged to a different generation. In a way it stated the triumph of the proletariat” (April 18, 1961). Later that year, Rathbone returns for a concert in the East Room by Pablo Casals: “a glittering company all around absorbing great sonorous music from a great artist, I was conscious of my privilege every moment” (November 17, 1961).

Museum directors must be acquisitive by nature, especially those leading American institutions in times of growth. Rathbone was a treasure hunter out of necessity, a swashbuckler who enjoyed collecting personalities and far-flung experiences perhaps even more than the art itself, at least judging by the attention paid to each in these journals. “I am always surprised at my success” (October 1, 1960).

The happy disposition revealed here conveys an innocence on the subject of Rathbone’s ultimate denouement and serves in part to exonerate his fateful lapse in judgment. The matter concerned “The Boston Raphael,” the title of Belinda’s previous book on her father and the cause of his resignation from the MFA. Charged with landing the big one in honor of his museum’s centenary year, Rathbone acquired a Raphael portrait from Italy that proved to be anything but—“maybe Lorenzo Costa on a good day,” said one expert. After much fanfare, the means of its acquisition were challenged and the painting restituted to Italy, where it now resides off-view.

Of this “greatest of all adventures,” he writes to Rett in the days after negotiating its purchase on the Italian Riviera, “I spent the afternoon sunbathing and I swam and swam again from the rocks.” Although he lived for another thirty years after this letter from the Hotel Porta Rossa, Firenze, of July 15, 1969, Rathbone’s charmed journals, at least as collected here, had just about reached their end.

The Prophet of Imprudence

THE UNIVERSITY BOOKMAN

The Prophet of Imprudence.

A review of “The Politics of Prudence,” by Russell Kirk, Introduction by Michael P. Federici; Regnery Gateway, 314 pages, $19.99.

The early 1990s appeared to many in America as a moment of conservative ascendancy. Forty years had passed since Russell Kirk published The Conservative Mind, in 1953, a book that was originally titled The Conservative Rout. Now it was the progressives who were the ones seemingly being routed. Conservative pundits, publications, and foundations were pushing conservative policy in the onetime liberal redoubts of Washington and New York. Ronald Reagan had won an unprecedented forty-nine states to secure his reelection in 1984; his triumphant presidency paved the way for the election of his vice-president George H. W. Bush in 1992 and another four years of Republican administration. In Britain, Margaret Thatcher had reflected the spread of the conservative mind abroad. Meanwhile, and most astonishingly, the onetime colossus of the Soviet Union had lost its grip on Europe and had been vanquished—its ideological boot lifted from all but a few of the world’s backwaters and faculty lounges.

And yet, the thinker who had put the conservative mind in motion was not declaring victory. In 1993, a year before his death, Kirk published The Politics of Prudence. The collection of eighteen of his lectures given over five years—seventeen delivered at The Heritage Foundation, one at Hillsdale College—was more than a restatement of the moral imagination. It was also a conservative remonstrance to the movement that claimed its mantle. Thirty years on, Gateway Editions has now published a new edition of this collection that seems nothing if not prophetic. As the conservative mind is again on the defensive in America, or at the very least in a state of mental confusion, The Politics of Prudence suggests that no less than the imprudence of conservatives is much to blame for the latest rout. Thirty years ago, few conservatives wanted to hear such a message. Today it calls out as a testament to what went wrong and a corrective for what’s to come.

Conservatism, Kirk argued, is a “disposition of character rather than a collection of reified, abstract political doctrines,” as Michael P. Federici explains in this edition’s new introduction. “It is the rejection of ideology rather than the exercise of it.” The conservative mind, like the book The Conservative Mind, Federici continues, begins with Edmund Burke and the Burkean “opposition to the French Revolution and the rise of radical and revolutionary ideological movements that centralize power as a means to escape the limits of the human condition.”

In his opening chapter, Kirk lays into what he calls the “errors of ideology.” Quoting the American historian H. Stuart Hughes, Kirk writes, conservatism must be the “negation of ideology,” since “all ideologies work mischief.” An ideological false faith in “mystical Progress, with a Roman P” only leads to a “dubious Terrestrial Paradise…. that always, in reality, has turned out to be an Earthly Hell.” This “cult of progress, whose votaries believe that everything new necessarily is superior to everything old,” sends us on a “march toward Utopia,” where the “ideologue is merciless.” In the place of true faith, “Ideology provides sham religion and sham philosophy.” 

Absent such an ideology, the conservative must rely on prudence, one that is “judicious, cautious, sagacious,” Kirk explains. “Plato, and later, Burke, instruct us that in the statesman, prudence is the first of the virtues.” Since “‘conservatism’ possesses no Holy Writ and no Das Kapital to provide dogmata,” the prudential conservative instead looks to “custom, convention, continuity.” Disciplined in a “state of mind, a type of character, a way of looking at the civil social order,” the conservative understands “variety,” “imperfectability,” and “voluntary community.” A close link exists between “freedom and property,” and power is best retrained and decentralized in the pursuit of genuinely “prudent change.” It was just such “old restraints upon power,” Kirk reminds us, that the “French and Russian revolutionaries abolished,” and which progressives still pursue.   

Delivered late in life, The Politics of Prudence in part serves as a welcome restatement of The Conservative Mind of forty years prior and something of a summary of Kirk’s life work. We are reminded of The American Republic by Orestes Brownson, Richard Weaver’s Ideas Have Consequences, and I’ll Take my Stand: the South and the Agrarian Tradition. Marcus Aurelius, Ambrose of Milan (“it has not pleased God that man should be saved through logic”), and G.K. Chesteron’s elevation of the “democracy of the dead” all make welcome appearances. T. S. Eliot, the subject of the final chapter in The Conservative Mind and a friend of Kirk’s, also returns here with the wisdom of his Notes towards the Definition of Culture: “one thing to ascertain is the limits of the plannable.” Further chapters reacquaint us with the German economist Wilhelm Röpke (“the age of immaturity, of restless experiment, of youth, has in our time become the object of the most preposterous overestimation”) and the British social critic Malcolm Muggeridge (“the enthronement of the gospel of progress necessarily required the final discrediting of the gospel of Christ”).

As the book continues, just like the lectures these chapters are based upon, what becomes apparent is that such reminders and restatements are also rebukes, intended not for progressive ideologues but for a self-professed conservative audience. In these later chapters, Kirk takes aim at what he sees as an emergent and dangerous conservative ideology, one based in populism, libertarianism, and neoconservatism. In the chapter “Popular Conservatism,” for example, Kirk shows little patience for the wisdom of the masses: “a Populist, whose basic conviction is that the cure for democracy is more democracy, conserves nothing.” 

Libertarianism gets an ever greater drubbing in the following chapter on “A Dispassionate Assessment of Libertarians.” “They might oppose centralized power, but they are also doctrinaires, contemptuous of our inheritance from our ancestors,” Kirk writes, as well as being a “crowd of political fanatics who ‘license they mean, when they cry liberty.’” Theirs is an “ideology of universal selfishness—at a time when the country needs more than ever before men and women who stand ready to subordinate their private interests, if need be, to the defense of the Permanent Things.” Through its shortcomings, Kirk concludes, “libertarianism, properly understood, is as alien to real American conservatives as is communism.”

Beyond these tart assessments, it is Kirk’s subsequent chapter on “The Neoconservative: An Endangered Species” that remains the book’s most heated and controversial. Questioning the power at one point of a “Zionist minority,” Kirk goes on to state that “not seldom it has seemed as if some eminent Neoconservatives mistook Tel Aviv for the capital of the United States.” At the time of its delivery, the historian Midge Decter labeled this remark a “bloody outrage, a piece of anti-Semitism by Kirk that impugns the loyalty of neoconservatives.” In hindsight, the quip was at best ill-chosen, as it isolated Kirk’s voice to the margins of the conservative conversation at the time while distracting from what we would now call his broader paleoconservative critique of neoconservative overreach, all coming at a time when it might have mattered most. 

As Kirk was that rare conservative opponent of the first Gulf War (“A war in Kuwait? A war for an oil-can”), we can only imagine what he might have said of the second. With the election of George W. Bush and the subsequent invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq, not to mention the consequences of NAFTA, the housing meltdown, and the hollowing out of the American middle classes, in the years after his death, many of the concerns that Kirk expressed over neoconservatism have only come into higher relief. 

It wasn’t “Zionism” or allegiance to “Tel Aviv” that proved the neoconservative undoing but rather an unquestioning faith for many in “fanciful democratic globalism” and “democratic capitalism,” as Kirk goes on to write, which he calls a “bit of neoconservative cant.” This “New World Order,” Kirk warns, would lead to an “inhumane economy—bent upon maximum productive efficiency, but heedless of personal order and public order.” Such a concern with the “gross national product and with ‘global wealth’” blinded such conservatives, Kirk argues, to the “swelling growth of a dismal urban proletariat, and the decay of the moral order.” 

“You and I are in the death of the Marxist ideology,” Kirk concludes. As the Soviet Leviathan came to an end, he believed it must not be replaced with some American-made Colossus coming out of the “puerile infatuation of the neoconservatives with ‘a new ideology’ or an ‘American ideology.’”  “Soviet hegemony ought not to be succeeded by American hegemony,” he writes. “Mr. Bush’s ‘New World Order’ may make the United States detested—beginning with the Arab peoples—more than even the Soviet empire was…. Increasingly, the states of Europe and the Levant may suspect that in rejecting Russian domination, they exchanged King Log for King Stork.” At the fall of the Evil Empire, Kirk feared most a rising imprudence in its conservative American vanquishers. “America soon is going to wipe out everything else; and in the dazzling delirious joy of that consummation, forgetting to ask what will happen afterward.” 

In one of the book’s final chapters, “Prospects for the Proletariat,” Kirk takes stock of the consequences of the New World Order in the fate of Detroit. The city was once the “arsenal of democracy.” Now it was falling into abandonment and decay. Could we see here the true result of unquestioning “democratic capitalism”: the uprooting of labor, the slicing up of the city’s fabric through public housing and Federal highway bills? An entire book might be written on Kirk’s critique of the automobile, which he called the “mechanical Jacobin.” Would America’s Rust Belt be any better today without a quarter century of adventurism abroad and “free minds and free markets” at home? Conservatives, Kirk warns, must not fall prey to a “latter-day Utilitarianism.” Free of ideology, conservatives should instead nurture a nation’s culture and the “complex of convictions, folkways, habits, arts, crafts, economic methods, laws, morals, political structures, and all the ways of living in community that have developed over the centuries.” Anything less, we might say, would be imprudent.

Italy Before Rome

THE NEW CRITERION, October 2023

Italy before Rome

On Greek colonies, Etruscan tombs & Italian origins.

The landing began eighty years ago at one minute past midnight. Loudspeakers on the American troopships approaching the coast of Italy gave the signal. In the first moments of September 9, 1943—an earlier D-Day of the Second World War, this one of Operation Avalanche—soldiers climbed over the gunwales and down the nets into their landing crafts. Their destination was the fortified beach at Paestum, a town in Campania along the sandy coast twenty-five miles south of Salerno.

Italy had surrendered to the Allies just a day before, but Nazi forces were dug in. The amphibious assault around the ankle of Italy was meant to free the boot of what was now German-occupied territory. Paestum was to serve as one of the beachheads for the American and British campaign north and west up the peninsula while isolating German troops to the south. By enabling the eventual capture of Naples and then Rome and beyond, the landing was another step in the liberation of Italy and the slow march on Germany; Operation Overlord and the Allied landing at Normandy were still nine months off.

At H-Hour—three-thirty in the morning—the landing crafts, or those that were able to find their way in the night, came together three miles out to sea. They then made their final approach towards the dark beach.

“Come on in and give up!” a German voice blared from loudspeakers on shore. “We have you covered.”

To achieve the element of surprise, the American generals had decided not to bomb the Tyrrhenian coastline leading up to the landing. A British diversionary assault then tried to draw German forces out of the area. The deceptions proved counterproductive. The waters were mined. The Paestum beach was defended with gun emplacements and wire. Eight divisions from the German Tenth Army, under the command of Heinrich von Vietinghoff, were stationed to counter the American assault. Against artillery, aerial, sniper, and machine gunfire, and a counterattack from the Sixteenth Panzer Division that nearly pushed them back into the sea, American forces stormed the beaches and fought to reach assembly points inland.

Photograph: Photographer unknown, National Archives, Washington D.C. 

As supplies and personnel began moving in from the beachheads, a Negro unit from Headquarters Company, 480th Port Battalion, established a temporary office in the ruins of a Greek temple just off the beach. These U.S. signal-corps soldiers unloaded their portable equipment and began their relay work among the ruins of what we now call the Temple of Hera II. They sat on wooden crates and rested their helmets and canteens atop their fold-out desks and typewriter boxes.

On September 22, an army photographer came upon their bivouac and recorded their field office. “A company of men has set up its office between the columns (Doric) of an ancient Greek temple of Neptune, built about 700 B.C.,” reads the caption on photograph 111-SC-181588, now in the National Archives. As the signal officers worked in a line at their makeshift desks on the temple platform, the scene of ancient and modern, of new arrivals communing with settled stones, became one of the more iconic photographs of the Second World War. Here were segregated American soldiers fighting the German Wehr-macht from a Greek temple on Italian soil. The uncanny confluence served as a reminder that the Apennine Peninsula has long been contested by waves of warring nations. There was even an Italy before Rome.

Twenty-five hundred years before, in this low tidal area near the mouth of the Sele River, ancient Greek mariners had created their own Italian beachhead at the same spot. They called their outpost Poseidonia, after the ocean god Poseidon. They carved out streets and houses and built a row of temples out of the local iron-rich stone, which, unlike their native Greek marble, turned red in the salt air.

Human settlement here dates back to the Stone Age. The nearby rivers, fed by steep mountains to the east, produce a fertile floodplain. The Greek colony was founded in the mid-seventh century B.C., one in that constellation of Hellenic settlements the Romans later called Magna Graecia. But this was still some fifty years before the village of Rome—then just a small settlement clinging to a handful of rises above the Tiber River—has drained the land for its Forum between the Capitoline and Palatine Hills.

At the time, the Etruscans, competitors and occasional overlords of the Latin tribes, were gaining power in the area. This Greek outpost, like the American beachhead, was intended to forestall enemy expansion and protect friendly settlements to the south. Over the next few hundred years after its founding, the town fell to the Italic Lucanians, then returned to the Greeks, then the Lucanians again. In 273 B.C. Poseidonia finally succumbed to the expanding dominion of Rome. The Romans renamed it Paestum. They built their forum, replacing the Greek agora or marketplace at the center of town, and laid down their Roman roads around the Greek constructions.

The Great Temple at Paestum, 1897. Photograph: Photographer unknown, New York Public Library.

The town lasted another thousand years, well into the Christian era, before malarial swamps finally reclaimed it. From the middle ages until the nineteenth century, when the Sele River was re-channeled and the area re-drained, the abandoned settlement remained overgrown, even dangerous to visit. The site was only excavated starting in 1907, a process that is still ongoing. Paestum’s long-abandoned state means that its two monumental temples dating from the sixth and fifth centuries B.C., at first thought to honor Poseidon/Neptune but now believed to be dedicated to the goddess Hera/Juno, are some of the best preserved ancient Greek structures in the world. A smaller third temple, dedicated to Athena and dating from the same era, also stands today.

Acentury ago, in the late 1920s, D. H. Lawrence toured his own pre-Roman sites with his American friend Earl Brewster, a painter and a scholar of Buddhism. Lawrence then wrote a paean to the pre-Roman people in “Etruscan Places,” an essay first published along with his other Italian travel writing in 1932, two years after his death.

The fate of Rome’s closest neighbors—who were among its earliest conquests—has long intrigued artists and perplexed historians. Michelangelo sketched the Etruscan tombs at Tarquinia. Piranesi composed an etching based on the Etruscan ruins at Chiusi. Robert Adam decorated the state dressing room of West London’s Osterley Park estate in Etruscan-style fresco. Johann Joachim Winckelmann made a study of Etruscan civilization along with the Egyptians, Greeks, and Romans. Meanwhile the Society of the Dilettanti in London discussed the Etruscans’ lack of facial hair as compared to the Greeks—a habit of grooming, they surmised, that the Etruscans must have passed down to the Latins.

D.H. Lawrence beneath an olive tree at Villa Mirenda, San Polo Mosciano, ca. 1926–27. Manuscripts and Special Collections, The University of Nottingham. Photograph: Photographer unknown.

Veii, a southern town of Etruria just ten miles north of Rome, supposedly fell to the Roman Republic in 396 B.C. after a ten-year siege. Despite their proximity to Rome, the Etruscans spoke a language that was non-Indo-European, like Hungarian or Basque, and which today remains largely elusive. Their origins have been debated since ancient times; the eyewitness records of Rome’s own early interactions with Etruria’s hilltop settlements may have been destroyed in Brennus’s Gallic sack of Rome in 387 B.C. We do not know for certain how Etruria came to mix with its Latin neighbors to the south. Before the establishment of the Roman Republic in 509 B.C., three of Rome’s seven ancient kings—Lucius Tarquinius Priscus, Servius Tullius, and Lucius Tarquinius Superbus—were supposedly Etruscan. The rape of Lucretia by Sextus Tarquinius, the Tarquin prince, precipitated the Roman overthrow of the Etruscan monarchy. As told by Livy and recounted by Ovid, the legend of Lucretia’s rape and suicide was used in ancient times to justify the Etruscans’ demise and has been widely depicted in Western art since the Renaissance, taken up by Shakespeare, Titian, and Benjamin Britten, among many others.

What mainly remains of Etruria itself are its tombs, which are open to exploration today much as D. H. Lawrence found them in the 1920s (I first visited the sites some thirty years ago as an undergraduate). These necropoli are indeed “cities of the dead.” The Etruscans carved, built, and painted their tumuli as second homes, hillside condominiums for the afterlife. To complicate the historical record, some of their decorations were Greek-inspired if not Greek-made—a reflection of Near Eastern influences under Etruria’s “orientalizing” period, which reached a high point in the seventh century B.C. While it was long thought that these tombs depicting the characters of Greek myth revealed the Greek ancestry of the Etruscans, archaeological consensus now links the Etruscans to Italy’s Iron Age Villanovans. Here are central Italy’s aborigines—ab origine, Latin for “from the beginning.”

In “Etruscan Places,” Lawrence took up the history of these ancient people in part to slight their Roman successors—and, by extension, the Italian fascists drawing their authority at the time from classical antiquity, following Benito Mussolini’s March on Rome in 1922.

Lawrence was not the only writer of his time to use Etruria’s ancient backdrops for modern commentary. In “Roman Fever,” her sensational short story first published in Liberty magazine in 1934, Edith Wharton alludes to Italian aviators flying two American daughters from Rome to Tarquinia for a fraught moonlit tour of the site. What distinguishes Lawrence’s writing is his first-person account of the Etruscan tombs of Cerveteri, Tarquinia, Vulci, and Volterra, intermixed with grand pronouncements and often absurd speculation. As Lawrence began:

The Etruscans, as everyone knows, were the people who occupied the middle of Italy in early Roman days, and whom the Romans, in their usual neighborly fashion, wiped out entirely in order to make room for Rome with a very big R. They couldn’t have wiped them all out, there were too many of them. But they did wipe out the Etruscan existence as a nation and a people. However, this seems to be the inevitable result of expansion with a big E, which is the sole raison d’être of people like the Romans.

In a certain way, Lawrence’s literary achievement was his ability to write, even in his twilight years, like a petulant adolescent. His analysis may be overblown. He also committed the sin of reading contemporary politics into historical events. His rhetorical deployment of the “Etruscans” could be just as facile as Il Duce’s “Romans.” At the same time, what makes his Italian travel writing compelling is the often inadvertent humor of this celebrity-radical raiding tombs among the poor paesani. “Impossible to leave an unlocked small hold-all at the station,” he bemoans at one point, when the local station attendant at Palo refuses to hold on to his luggage for him. “B. and I are two very quiet-mannered harmless men,” he elsewhere laments, when a fourteen-year-old child declines to take these two strangers to the tombs at Cerveteri: “But that first boy could not have borne to go alone with us. Not alone!” “The Etruscans had a passion for music, and an inner carelessness the modern Italians have lost,” he gathers upon seeing the painted tombs of Tarquinia. “It is different now. The drab peasants, muffled in ugly clothing, straggle in across the waste bit of space, and trail home, songless and meaningless.”

Writing an appreciation of the book for The Washington Post two years ago, Walter Nicklin maintained that Lawrence “seamlessly mixes closely observed, naturalistic details with the kind of inward reflections found in essays and memoirs. Adding spice to the mix, he never feared to offend with his sharp historical analysis sprinkled with cultural and social criticisms.”

At Cerveteri, for example, with its cylindrical mausolea carved out of the bedrock, Lawrence wrote of “the natural beauty of proportion of the phallic consciousness, contrasted with the more studied or ecstatic proportion of the mental and spiritual Consciousness we are accustomed to.” The Romans, meanwhile, “hated the phallus and the ark [womb], because they wanted empire and dominion and, above all, riches: social gain. You cannot dance gaily to the double flute and at the same time conquer nations or rake in large sums of money.”

Achilles ambushing Troilus (on horseback) Etruscan fresco, Tomb of the Bulls, Tarquinia. Photograph: Mary Harrsch.

Encountering the tomb figures of Tarquinia, Lawence likened the “sun painted” Etruscans to “Red Indians” and remarked on the visceral effect of vermillion among animistic people: “They know the gods in their very finger-tips.” It was Greek skepticism and Greek rationalism, Lawrence deduced, that “more or less took the place of the old Etruscan symbolic thought.” Finally, under Roman rule, the “Etruscan princes became fat and inert. . . . The Etruscan people became expressionless and meaningless.” He concluded: “For all of the Italian people that ever lived, the Etruscans were surely the least Roman. Just as, of all the people that ever rose up in Italy, the Romans of ancient Rome were surely the most un-Italian, judging from the natives of to-day.”

What is perhaps most telling about Etruscan tombs is how varied they could be from town to town, something Lawrence rightly noted. Some were carved into the hillside. Others were constructed in mushroom-shaped mounds. Inhumation was practiced in one place while cremation was common in another. Lawrence observed how

the Etruscans carried out perfectly what seems to be the Italian instinct: to have single, independent cities, with a certain surrounding territory, each district speaking its own dialect and feeling at home in its own little capital, yet the whole confederacy of city-states loosely linked together by a common religion and a more-or-less common interest.

To follow on Lawrence’s point, it was this regional variation that ran counter to the Roman mindset, which went on to express its astonishing power by laying down the same roads and aqueducts and temples from Africa to Judea to Britain to the Caspian Sea. Latin legend has long held that the Romans emerged from something beyond the native Italic. This was the story most famously expressed in the twelve books of Virgil’s Aeneid, connecting Aeneas’s escape from the destruction of Troy to the founding of Rome and even to the ancestry of the Caesars.

As it happens, clay figurines depicting the story of Aeneas carrying his father Anchises on his back out of Troy have been discovered in Veii. Whether these figures date from before or after Rome’s conquest of the town in 396 B.C. remains an open question. It could be that the Aeneas myth reached Rome through Etruria, or that both the Latins and the Etruscans received it from Greek sources, or that the story in fact reveals some ancestral Hellenic connection between one group or another. It could also be that the origin myth of the Latins was just that, a myth, and that the Latin stock was just as proto-Villanovan as that of the Etruscans.

What matters is that the descendants of one of these Latin settlements managed to dominate the others, and in short order the rest of the Western world. Here is a story so extraordinary that it might as well have started with the twins Romulus and Remus suckling a she-wolf in a cave after they were cast out of the town of Alba Longa. For all of the interest in Italy before Rome, Rome’s remaking of Italy remains the defining story of the peninsula. The Etruscans and Greeks and everyone else serve as supporting characters to this main event. The Etruscans may have been “dancing in their colored wraps with massive yet exuberant naked limbs,” as Lawrence enthused, “ruddy from the air and the sea-light, dancing and fluting along through the little olive trees, out in the fresh day.” Meanwhile, the Romans just down the block were out to make history.