ABSTRACT

Like their contemporaries in ancient Greece, Etruscan artists focused a great deal of attention on renderings of the human body, bodies which portrayed, in the majority, actual men and women rather than deities or figures of heroic origin. Beginning in the seventh century bce, representations of anonymous and named Etruscans were crafted in a variety of materials (terracotta, bronze, stone) and styles (abstract, stylized, idealized, realistic), and placed in either funerary or religious contexts.1 The circumstances surrounding the creation of these images – commissions to portray either the deceased or the donor – stimulated Etruscan artists to move, at a very early date, in the direction of portraiture, albeit within the context of contemporary artistic conventions and traditions. In his comprehensive treatment of Etruscan art, Otto Brendel argued that the Etruscans were not only the first to make “the transition from generic to specific representations”2 but also that their “sculptors of the seventh century bce produced the first portraits of western art, … [motivated by] the demand for memorial images.”3 He also proposed that “a turn from ‘typical’ to ‘real’ portraits…happened in Etruria about or shortly after 350 bce.”4