An exquisite and instructive book about the historic site in Paestum, Italy, famous for the enigmatic frescoes that grace its walls, has been authored by a German archaeologist.
Fresco known as Il Tuffatore preserved in the archaeological museum of the city of Paestum, near Salerno.
A significant city in ancient Greece was Paestum. Its renowned ruins, which today include the Tomb of the Diver, are located in the southern Italian province of Salerno.
Five enormous stone slabs, each holding a fresco, were used to construct the tomb. They feature male couples, a supper, and a symposium. However, one of the most researched ancient artistic creations—and possibly the most unsettling—is the fresco on the ceiling.
A naked boy is seen diving into a body of water from a tower in the eye-catching sight. What exactly this scene represents—vigor, sensuality—remains a mystery. A burial context is inappropriate for the photograph.
Aside from the assumption that the deceased person was a male and young person, it is also unknown who was buried in the tomb. There are no inscriptions, and the only items buried with the body were basic ones like a tortoise shell and a fragment of a lyre. Any bones that might have been examined are long since vanished.
The tomb, which was constructed around 480 BC, was found in 1968 by Italian archaeologist Marco Napoli. Since then, there have been disagreements over what cultural lineage it originated from: some believe it came from ancient Greece, while others believe it originated with the much older Etruscan civilisation. While this is going on, the figure of the diver has been associated with religious traditions and is often seen as a metaphor for life as the space between birth and death, with birth denoting the jump and death denoting the water. Another scenario is the portrayal of suicide.
A reconstruction of the Tomb of the Diver.
A passionate essay about the swimmer of Paestum was written in 2009 by French filmmaker Claude Lanzmann, who is well known for producing the Holocaust documentary Shoah (1985). Along with Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir, he visited the ancient Greek city's ruins in the 1950s, but he didn't see the fresco until decades later:
“I would never have imagined being touched in the middle of my heart, upset in the deepest part of myself, as I was the day he [the diver] appeared to me, a perfect arc, as if endlessly plunging into the space between life and death.”
Professor Emeritus of Classical Archeology at Heidelberg University in Germany, Tonio Hölscher is an expert on the national buildings of Greece and Rome. He worked at the German Archaeological Institute in Rome and studied ancient city planning and Greek mythological images.
Hölscher, 82, issued a slim book titled The Swimmer of Paestum at the end of 2021, distancing the mural from symbolism. Instead, he suggests that the picture just shows a young man diving into water, as that is what it actually shows.
In a phone interview with EL PAS, Hölscher describes the book as "partly academic, but also designed for a wide audience, with attention to the emotion that paintings can arouse."
The academic highlights the need to situate the Paestum swimmer in a particularly Greek context:
“Young people were [seen as] the hope of society… in the universe of Ancient Greece, beauty [was] not only a physical trait, but also a spiritual and ethical one; the healthy and strong body is beautiful and an instrument of human excellence.” In this context, he proposes that the swimmer from Paestum is a realistic representation, “which does not imply a trivial one. It is quite significant.”
“The common opinion – until now – was that the young man didn’t simply jump into the sea, but made a transition from life to death. The sea was eternity, etcetera, etcetera. There was a general consensus surrounding that interpretation. To say that this image was simply [depicting] a jump has taken time to gain ground [as a legitimate interpretation], but has slowly convinced more scholars.”
For a long time, a popular claim in academia has been that the Ancient Greeks had a difficult relationship with the sea. Hölscher challenges this: “It was a very intense relationship, there was fear and fascination… but of course, although some scholars still deny it, the Greeks swam and liked to do so. In fact, there is a Greek proverb that equates not knowing how to swim to not knowing how to read.”
Tonio Hölscher, Professor of Classical Archeology at the University of Heidelberg.
Hölscher likewise disputes any Christian connotation or origin for the picture of the swimmer from Paestum. He maintains that the jump "portrays a young man – in transition to adulthood – demonstrating his athletic ability and courage by launching himself into the water, before the eyes of adult men who felt erotic attraction to the boys. The dive is, therefore, part of a rite of passage… but it’s not a metaphor, it’s a real image of a social activity." Therefore, the dive is a rite of passage. But it's a true representation of a social action; it's not a metaphor. He mentions that cliff-jumping competitions are being held today in the Italian region where the ruins are located for young people.
Hölscher emphasizes that the swimmer's dive displays excellent technique and the product of a lot of practice. The head, which is lifted high and unprotected by the arms, is the sole unrealistic aspect, although Greek art places importance on displaying the face. The author also discusses how important sex is in the picture: “The scene has a homoerotic component. And the small member isn’t infantilization: the Greeks preferred a small [penis] – to represent a big one was seen to be in bad taste.”
He continues by praising the scene's beauty, saying, “There is a wonderful harmony in the painting, with trees that seem to extend their bare branches towards the jumper. The sea is represented in a very delicate way”. The platform from which the diver jumps “is a mystery… I don’t have a definitive opinion on what that structure is. It looks like some kind of stone tower, but we haven’t found anything similar in archeology.”
Although it hasn't been established that the young people leaped off of cliffs into the lake, Hölscher believes it makes sense to believe that they existed and will eventually be found.
Hölscher speculates that the swimmer from Paestum must have been “a member of the city’s elite – culturally Greek. It could be someone who died young. The Greeks made the most beautiful tombs and funerary monuments for those who died young… it was something that moved them a lot.”
