Sarcophagus of the Spouses
Unknown, Caeretan workshop · c. 520-510 BC
A man and a woman recline together on a banqueting couch, propped on cushions, their upper bodies raised and turned towards the viewer. Their legs, treated almost as an afterthought, melt into the couch. Both smile the tight archaic smile of late sixth-century art, both have almond eyes and long braided hair, and their hands are held in curved, hollow gestures that once cradled small objects, perhaps an egg, a perfume flask or a cup. The couple are not a sarcophagus lid in the Greek or Roman sense but the container of cremated remains, shown eating and drinking for eternity.
The object is terracotta, built in four large sections that were modelled and moulded separately, fired in a kiln big enough to take them and then fitted together, an extraordinary technical feat at that date. Traces of black, brown and red paint survive on the hair, the lips and the cushions. Notice how the woman is given equal prominence to the man, sharing the couch rather than sitting at its foot: Greek writers were scandalised by the freedom Etruscan women enjoyed at banquets, and this piece is the visual evidence.
It comes from the Banditaccia necropolis at Cerveteri, ancient Caere, and was excavated in the 1840s in hundreds of fragments. The Marchese Giampietro Campana assembled it for his vast private museum in Rome; when he was convicted of embezzlement his collection was sold, and Napoleon III bought a large part of it for France in 1861. The sarcophagus has been dismantled and restored more than once since, most recently with the removal of heavy nineteenth-century plaster that had disguised the original joins.
Did You Know? A near twin of this piece, almost certainly from the same Cerveteri workshop, is in the Villa Giulia in Rome, so the two most famous Etruscan sculptures in the world are siblings separated by a nineteenth-century sale.
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