Great Art I Want to Steal. Part 1: The Tomb of the Diver at Paestum

The Tomb of the Diver, painted roof slab, in travertine, Paestum, Loc. Tempa del Prete (Sa), 480 a.C. Archaeological Park of Paestum and Velia. Photo by Francesco Valletta e Giovanni Grippo.

This story does not begin with a celebration. It opens like a wound.

Sybaris has fallen and the war is at an end. A family in Poseidonia, now known as Paestum, receive their cherished son, who has made his way back to them from the fields of Kroton. But he is cold.

Sounds are extinguished and grief invites itself into their home. Instead of settling, it coils around them with its hushed imagery, the colourful impressions that linger long in the mind of what their boy once was. Father calls servants to plant beans in the rocky soil but his heart is not in it.

Mother loses herself in abstractions to put off the moment of laying him out for washing. The boy only completed his initiation into the Mysteries of Orpheus a few seasons ago and here he was, unmoving and her without consolation.

His tiny sister brings to him as a gift her most valued possession, the clay figurine of a doll in a dotted headdress which came to her traded from Corinth. Their men often sailed the Tyrrhenean Sea to the Etruscan coast to trade for metal but Corinthian toys came rarely. Yes, she tore the clothes into ribbons and smudged them in soot. An act of sacrilege because she knew who this figure was; Athena, the Protectress. She had been too late though, too busy to blunt the only moving spear that mattered; the one which had reached so far across the water that it had skewered her family.

The boy had been swift of foot and brave, the first to step forward, but he’d given away his future for the sake of an aristocratic squabble that did not affect his own people. He only wanted to be there, to be part of something greater — and take to a ship at last, instead of just climbing the rocky headlands and diving deep into the water. He must have known the worst could happen but he never thought it could happen to him.

His mother becomes the first to wake up and move. Decorum est, a paragon of duty. Without fuss, she gathers the season’s earliest roses, famed by Virgil the Eloquent for their perfume and fertility. She enters the chamber and presses their cool petals over her son’s closed eyes, as though scent might summon back his perception. Then, with hands which once braided his hair for the festivals and scolded when he spilt milk from the oinochoe jug, she rests upon his chest a musical instrument which will never again be played, its resonance born of a turtle’s shell, sea green and still faintly gleaming as though tuned to another world.

At first light, before the gates are fully opened and the dew has burned off from the wheat fields, the father reaches under the boards of the floor and makes a long arm longer until he feels the lip of a terracotta pot filled with obols, the coin of the realm with its stamp of an owl. His son’s domain will be rock, he knew that, he accepted it. All the good growing land which would have been the boy’s will now go to his little sister’s husband. She will make a fine match for someone after that happens.

As the day progresses, the desolate man walks beyond the city walls alone, eyes misted. Through the crunch underfoot of a pistachio grove he goes without looking, then out beyond the indigo blue and tortured shapes of olive trees that mark the track toward higher ground. His purpose is absolute. No modest rite will do. He will make for the boy a tomb worthy not merely of his rank as a volunteer soldier and heir, but worthy of a soul that deserves to dance with the divine. He will choose a spot around the caves, claim it and then summon the most masterful painters, those whose pigments invoke the freshest breeze of life well lived and the longing of passage.

What follows is no mere bleak shroud of mourning or following of funerary practices but the stamp of a person who was adored in life crossing an imposing threshold without fear: a vision of death not as deletion but as a vibrant and stylish leap to an unending horizon of the soul.

Around 470 BC during the Archaic Period in Paestum, on the Gulf of Solerno in southern Italy, an unknown family built and decorated a Greek-style burial chamber which is now known as The Tomb of the Diver. In the nearby countryside, three Doric temples once stood. The tomb itself is not only a room steeped in art, with its luxurious painted fresco, but it is also heavily symbolic.

2,500 years later, in 1968, the archaeologist Mario Napoli was working at this location, where Jacques-Germain Soufflot had found inspiration from the Temple of Neptune to build The Pantheon in Paris. When Mario entered the fourth tomb of his excavation he, in the manner of opening a mystery box, brought the light of day back to those untouched paintings. It was his Howard Carter moment.

He saw a sepulchre of five limestone slabs and the eponymous scene of the Tomb of the Diver: ”a young man diving towards the curling waves in the waters below”. Thousands of Greek tombs are known from this 300-year-long period but this is the only one decorated with frescoes depicting mortal humans. There are said to have been paintings of Zeuxis, Apelles and Parrhasius which showed humans in minimalist context, from narrative legend and in the writings of Roman historians, but we have never actually seen them.

The grave itself contained the body of a man who had died long before his time, a lyre in which the wood had decayed, a turtle shell and an Attic lekythos vase in traditional black-figure technique, which was later used to establish the internment date.

The primary fresco depicts a young man diving from a height into water. This is one of the few surviving examples of Greek painting on plaster (not vases) from the Archaic period — or from the Orientalising and Classical periods either. We see the youth’s body arched in the joyful abandon of a dive, symbolising being committed to a journey from life into the afterlife. The image is interpreted as describing a mythological or ritualistic view of death, where the soul transforms and is forever freed.

Decorated ceilings are unknown from Greek burials of this period. The scene on the ceiling in The Tomb of the Diver faces the gaze of the dead youth. It is intended for him alone. His cliff face ‘diving board’ is depicted with stone pillars and, apart from two trees, the background is beautifully uncluttered. This panel is solitary in essence. You only have to look at the frieze of The Parthenon to see how the ancient Greeks crammed the postures of figures into every available corner, but not here. He falls alone.

In many cultures (Greek, Roman, Celtic, Norse, Mayan), water represents both a mirror boundary and a form of purification, suggesting that the tomb’s occupant is passing into a spiritual existence. As an unseen extension to the imagery, his family remain on the cliff behind him, or laboriously still climbing it, waiting for the days when each of them will have the courage to follow the boy over the divide, willingly or not. The imagery of the dive might also hint at a coming opportunity for rebirth after the soul is washed and freed of earthly cares and considerations.

In addition to the central fresco of the diver, the walls of the tomb feature a banquet and celebratory atmosphere, which is a common Bacchus trope in Greek funerary practices. There are bare-chested young men wearing laurel garlands reclining on sofas, partying, dancing, drinking wine, playing lyres, playing games and playing at love. The reward for exertion and living a good life shown here is to share a party feast with the immortals, where the cups never run dry. Otherwise, it might represent the enjoyment of a sweeter existence after death. The Greek tradition of celebrating the dead with commemorative rituals is echoed here, where the dead celebrate living. These were the bored, mountain-dwelling gods of Olympus, keen on entertainment and casually fucking the servants, blissfully unaware of (or sadistically adding to) earthly suffering. Elsewhere, the concept of Hades is typically a place where departed souls eke out a dismal, monochrome existence as they envy the living (see the stories of Tiresius, Orpheus etc.), but there’s none of that here. Maybe they reserve a different fate for athletes and heroes. Maybe it’s a false hope and he’s about to find out.

The notion of a divine or eternal soul (psyche) was becoming more prominent during the period of the tomb’s construction. The tomb may represent an early and less formal belief in the immortality of the soul, where the focus was not on judgment or divine reward, but only on the unencumbered soul’s new place of abode. It’s obviously a one-way trip.

The tomb is also significant because it is unique, the only known example of this kind of imagery. Paestum was an ancient Greek colony in modern-day Italy, which adds an element of cultural crossover. The Etruscans, who also inhabited the region, had a different approach to the afterlife which may have influenced a family of Greek heritage, so the Tomb of the Diver may represent an interaction between Greek and now lost Etruscan beliefs, an example of cross-cultural influence in the ancient Mediterranean world where trade routes were being travelled.

This grave is a time capsule and not just for one month in Etruscan history. It freezes in the air a moment when the soul is liberated from the body and it performs the feat in a perfect setting which the boy would have known in life and was leaving behind. The room then takes on the cloak of a shrine which, in common with sealed Egyptian tombs, faces its magnificence toward the unlit inside, where no living person is ever intended to see it.

The Tomb of the Diver is undoubtedly a powerfully stylish symbol of life and death, reflecting Greek philosophical and religious views of the afterlife. The diving figure, along with the other elements of the tomb, exemplifies the human conundrum, coupled with the act of willing-on the continuation of the soul.

As an unmarried woman of 28, I’d like to take that dive but always hesitate. In the meantime, I think this is one of the best and certainly the most inspiring of all archaeological finds from the Archaic Greek world. You can keep your sculptures.

It’s not only me that likes this technique. When Pliny viewed the Zeuxis panel at Caesar’s Palace on the Palatine in Rome, he wrote: “Upon its vast surface it contained nothing whatever except the three outlines, so remarkably fine as to escape the sight: among the most elaborate works of numerous other artists it had all the appearance of a blank space; and yet by that very fact it attracted the notice of every one and was held in higher estimation than any other painting there.” Therefore, my colleague Pliny and I concur that if you hang the fresco of The Diver in your gallery, you should not fear to place it amongst the masterworks.

The frescoes are now on display at the Museum of Paestum in Campania which, from a cursory examination, appears to have made only a token investment in security.