When D. H. Lawrence came to Vulci in search of his beloved Etruscans, all he found was diseased desolation. For centuries, the Etruscan town of Velch was one of the greatest city-states of Etruria, renowned for its wealth, cosmopolitanism, and cultural refinement, but by the time Lawrence visited in 1927, that was ancient history. The flat maritime plain in which the city thrived, known as the Maremma, had been transformed since antiquity into a vast marshy breeding ground for mosquitoes. Malaria consumed the land and its people, whose moribund lethargy both fascinated and horrified Lawrence. He found the tombs of the Etruscan dead as miserable as the countenances of the living: “the openings of the tombs,” he wrote, “were cut into the face of the rock, and must have been a fine row once, like a row of rock-houses with a pleasant road outside, along the ravine. But now they are gloomy holes down which one must clamber through the excavated earth. . . . There was nothing to see but these black, damp chambers, sometimes cleared, sometimes with coarse great sarcophagi and broken rubbish and excavation-rubble left behind in the damp-grisly darkness.”

Lamenting the sorry spectacle of “the rifled urn, the violated mound” has been a staple of literary travelogues since Lord Byron. In the case of Vulci, Lawrence blamed one man above all for the despoilment: Lucien Bonaparte, prince of Canino. Plundering Italy was a family tradition, but unlike his more prominent older brother, Lucien directed his efforts underground. In 1828 the prince realized that he was sitting on a gold mine: his estates, which encompassed the site of Vulci, contained countless Etruscan graves, which could be mined for their valuable painted vases. Excavations began, and a catalog of the thousands of freshly unearthed vases was published in 1829 to drum up publicity for the auctions to follow. Unwittingly, Bonaparte precipitated an art-historical breakthrough. Analysis of the vases’ Greek inscriptions proved conclusively that these vessels were not, as had long been assumed, Etruscan, but were actually manufactured in Athens and then exported to Etruria. After more than two thousand years of remaining in their final resting place, the Canino vases were sold off piecemeal and ended up, in Lawrence’s words, “everywhere except at Vulci.”

There was one tomb in Vulci, however, that escaped Bonaparte’s notice, and it was one that Lawrence was particularly keen to see. Unlike the endless “gloomy holes” that could only be entered by crawling, this tomb had a stately eighty-foot dromos (entrance corridor) leading inward. It was also one of the very few tombs in Vulci to be painted, and it had a name, too: the François Tomb, after the Italian archaeologist Alessandro François, who in 1857 explored it with his colleague Adolphe Noël des Vergers. Des Vergers left a detailed account of the discovery, written in the supercharged Romantic idiom of the day:

At the last blow of the pickaxe, the stone which sealed the entrance of the crypt gave way, and the light of our torches lit those hollow rooms whose silence and darkness had not been troubled for more than twenty centuries. Everything was still the way it had been on the day the entrance had been closed, and ancient Etruria appeared to us just as when it was in its glory. On their funeral couches, warriors, covered by their armor, seemed to be resting from the battles they had been waging against the Romans and our ancestors the Gauls. Shapes, garments, cloth, color, all were clearly distinguished for some minutes, then everything disappeared as the outside air came into the underground chamber, where our flickering torches were almost blown out. The past which had been conjured up lasted no longer than a dream, and disappeared, as though to punish us for our foolhardy curiosity.

The François Tomb, with its beautifully conserved frescoes, was an even greater revelation than Bonaparte’s vases. There were other well-preserved Etruscan frescoes, most notably in the necropolis of Tarquinia, but those paintings largely showed aspects of daily life and were not as obviously narrative as the scenes in the François Tomb. As the value of the Vulci frescoes became clear, Prince Alessandro Torlonia, on whose land the tomb was found, detached them from the walls and packed them off to his Roman palazzo, the Villa Albani. The panels remained in the Torlonia family’s private collection until May of this year, when the Italian government bought the paintings. Now, for the first time in their history, the François Tomb frescoes are on public view.

Like other princely Etruscan burials, the François Tomb resembled an aristocratic home where the deceased could enjoy all the creature comforts he had grown used to in life. Like later Roman houses, the tomb was organized around a central rectangular atrium that opened onto seven burial chambers conceived as bedrooms, with the sarcophagi of the deceased placed on stone couches. The Etruscans conceptualized the afterlife as a never-ending banquet, and so they filled their tombs with thousands of Attic drinking vessels: the dead, often depicted on sarcophagi lids in a recumbent position, lay on their beds and drank from the same vases they used in life. The François Tomb was no different, as the exhibition makes clear by including an array of Attic vases that came from the sepulchre, on loan from several different European museums. A particular highlight is a red-figure amphora by the Syleus Painter with a splendid portrayal of a Centauromachy. The vase dates to the early fifth century B.C., predating the construction of the tomb by more than a century. The amphora may have been a family heirloom, passed on from generation to generation before being deposited in the clan’s crypt.

One member of the honored family is prominently depicted in one of the frescoes on view. He is identified in Etruscan script as Vel Saties and wears a sumptuous purple toga with embroidered images of dancers (or possibly warriors). Together with the ceremonial garb, his crown indicates that Saties is being shown in the guise of a victorious general. He is almost certainly the commissioner of the tomb, and his image is one of the first full-length painted portraits in the history of Western art.

Beside Saties stands a much shorter figure, identified as Arnza, in all likelihood a slave. He holds a bird by a string and seems about to release it. Its flight will be interpreted by Saties, who is shown taking the auspices in his capacity as a magistrate; augury, like many other quintessentially “Roman” religious and cultural institutions, was originally an Etruscan practice, and Etruscans remained famous for their proficiency in divination even centuries after the Roman conquest of Tuscany.

Despite the Etruscan context, upon entering the tomb gallery, which replicates the reverse-T-shaped layout of the central atrium, one is first struck by how thoroughly Greek the iconography is: many of the paintings depict Greek heroes, shown in full heroic nudity and helpfully labeled in Etruscan script. Although several of the mythological panels, showing scenes such as Ajax slaying Cassandra and Sisyphus carrying his rock, are badly damaged, other frescoes retain their tragic power, such as the panel showing the fratricidal duel between the Theban princes Polyneices and Eteocles.

Take a closer look at the rear room of the atrium, however, and the veneer of Hellenism starts to fracture. One extensive fresco, the best preserved of the lot, shows a famous scene from Book Twenty-Three of the Iliad, in which Achilles sacrifices Trojan prisoners to avenge his fallen comrade Patroclus. The wrathful hero is at the center of the composition, bending down to cut the throat of a Trojan, while Agamemnon and Ajax bring in more bound prisoners to be slaughtered. Meanwhile, the shade of Patroclus watches the grisly scene from the side. It is not, however, the Homeric heroes who stand out, but the winged woman and a blue-skinned man holding a hammer who capture the viewer’s attention. These two ghostly figures surrounding Achilles are the Etruscan death demons Vanth and Charun, who will escort the souls of the Trojans into the underworld. Soon after these impious actions, they will return to fetch Achilles himself.

Facing this disturbing scene on the other side of the room is an equally bloody fresco depicting a battle between two groups of Etruscan heroes. Such narrative battle sequences are rare enough in Etruscan art, but it was the labels identifying the combatants that made the François Tomb an international sensation. On the far left of the panel, a nude hero called Mastarna is shown cutting the bonds of a certain Caile Vipinas. Historians quickly realized that this pair matches two historical figures mentioned by the emperor Claudius, who in A.D. 48 spoke before the Roman Senate advocating for the inclusion of Gallo-Roman aristocrats into the Senate. In the oration, which was preserved on a bronze tablet in the Roman city of Lugdunum (Lyon), Claudius, notorious for his pedantic digressions, recounts the early history of Rome, when the city was still ruled by kings. In his account, the Etruscophile emperor argues that the sixth king of Rome, Servius Tullius, was not, as most Roman historians maintained, ethnically Latin but Etruscan, going by the name Mastarna. Claudius also mentions that Mastarna’s closest friend and ally was the Etruscan Caelius Vibenna (the Latinized form of Caile Vipinas) and that together they occupied Rome’s Caelian Hill, which got its name from the hero. Mastarna eventually changed his name to Servius Tullius and became the king of Rome.

Ever since the advent of rigorous modern historiography à l’allemande in the nineteenth century, Roman accounts of the early history of their urbs have largely been dismissed on the grounds that these “mythistories” were written six or seven hundred years after the events they purport to describe. But the François Tomb’s portrayal of Mastarna and Caelius Vibenna, predating Claudius’s account by almost four centuries, conforms with the emperor’s version of events and confirms the historicity of Servius Tullius, thus becoming the earliest known artistic representation of a Roman. Even more tantalizingly, the frescoes, read in conjunction with Claudius’s speech, suggest that early Rome may have been conquered by a roving band of Etruscan warriors led by Mastarna, Caelius Vibenna, and his twin brother Aulus, who is depicted in the frescoes and also attested in later Roman sources.

Of course, there is nothing in the battle sequence itself that can be specifically tied to Rome. But the François Tomb does contain one unambiguous reference to the city, which comes in the form of a duel painted on a wall adjoining the battle scene. The fresco shows a heroically nude warrior named Marce Camitlnas slaying Gneve Tarchunies Rumach, that is, Gnaeus Tarquinius of Rome. Unfortunately, while Rome is supposed to have had two Etruscan kings called Tarquin, in both cases their first name was Lucius, not Gnaeus. Likewise, the identity of Marce Camitlnas remains a mystery, although he is presumably an Etruscan. While we may never know who these two men are, we can speculate that the fresco is commemorating some kind of Etruscan victory over Rome.

This enigmatic panel raises the question of how the different scenes from the François Tomb interrelate. Scholars have debated endlessly whether the frescoes form a unified decorative program with one underlying anti-Roman theme or are a disparate assortment of popular Etruscan myths and motifs. What is clear, however, is that the paintings form a bridge between the mythical past, represented by the feats of Greek and Etruscan heroes, and the present, embodied by Vel Saties; judging by the company he keeps, he must have been a formidable man.

All this noble bloodshed brings to mind Lawrence’s remark that “there is something gloomy, if rather wonderful, about Vulci.” The gloom of the François Tomb derives not just from the demons and fratricide but also from a sense of fleeting glory. The frescoes are one of the last great achievements of Etruscan funerary painting, a tradition that died out by the end of the third century B.C., when Rome tightened its grip on Etruria. At the same time, it is wonderful to admire the relics of this silenced Hellenophile civilization, which, even before conquered Greece, first brought the arts to rustic Latium.