CHAPTER FIFTY FIVE

PORTRAITURE

Alexandra A. Carpino

INTRODUCTION

L

ike 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 fi gures 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 fi rst to make “the transition from generic to specifi c representations”^2 but
also that their “sculptors of the seventh century bce produced the fi rst 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
Although we can never know the extent to which recognizable representations of
specifi c individuals were captured by the Etruscans’ artists,^5 an interest in physiognomy
and personality “expressed in terms of irregularity and uniqueness”^6 is readily apparent
in their surviving imagery. This interest, moreover, led to a distinctive approach to the
human fi gure: rather than focusing on the body as a whole, Etruscan artists concentrated
on the heads and chests of their subjects, emphasizing their physical differences as well
as aspects of their age, state of health and “social persona.”^7 Thus, their likenesses became
highly personalized, and a genre of art not previously articulated in the Classical world
was born, spearheaded by local customs and traditions.

PORTRAITS IN FUNERARY CONTEXTS

The Etruscans’ cult of the ancestors, with its emphasis on what Brendel calls “memorial
portraits,”^8 provided the impetus for the production of images of the deceased which