Painting Death with the Colors of Life: Funerary Wall Painting in South Italy (IV-II BCE)

This dissertation examines the cultural, political, and artistic role of polychrome wall painting from funerary contexts in South Italy during the critical period that spans the crisis of Greek hegemony and the consolidation of Roman power. Numerous painted tombs were built between the late fifth and the early second centuries BCE for local as well as Greek elite groups across Southern Italy. I investigate the ways in which the wall paintings, with their colors, iconographies, and technical features were both the expression of indigenous cultures and local artistic trends, and a part of a wider and more complex phenomenon, that is the diffusion of funerary wall painting in the Mediterranean during the late Classical and Hellenistic period. Why did polychromy become a crucial component in articulating funerary space in South Italy towards the end of the fifth century BCE, and how did this experience develop in the regions of Campania, Lucania, and Apulia, respectively? Ever since the South Italian painted tombs were discovered in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, scholars have interpreted their decoration as ideal representations of the deceased, their funerary ceremony, or their journey to the Underworld. They have focused on the relationship between the images and the individual deceased buried in the tomb or the restricted group of their family/clan. In my study, I seek to restore the polysemic character of the wall paintings. Each chapter analyzes the paintings from a different perspective and with a particular methodological approach, combining archaeological, anthropological, topographic, historical, and artistic evidence. I argue that the tombs with their painted decoration served to build and articulate collective memory, elaborating a message which was supposed to address the local community. I propose that the figural scenes depicted on the tomb walls staged ritual activities and initiation ceremonies which marked the life of the whole community. I also reconsider the artistic development of funerary painting in Southern Italy, showing that this phenomenon did not derive from globalizing trends of "Hellenization" or "Romanization", as has often been suggested, but it was intimately connected to indigenous artistic traditions and local or regional socio-political dynamics.The Classic