- Alexandra A. Carpino –
Figure 55.9 Over-life-sized bronze statue of Aule Meteli, found near Lake Trasimene, second–fi rst
century bce. Museo Archeologico, Florence (Photo: Courtesy of Jessica Gardin).NOTES
1 As Warden (2011: 1) has observed, the “display, at least as it has been preserved, [of Etruscan
sculpture] was closely connected to religious observance, to funerary ritual, and to votive
religion and thus has been found almost exclusively in either mortuary or sanctuary contexts.”
2 Brendel 1995: 103.
3 Ibid: 87.
4 Ibid: 396.
5 Small 2008: 57. See also Brendel (ibid.: 104) who writes: “...in the absence of written
documentation not only does any defi nition of an early Etruscan work as a portrait rest on
assumption, but also the degree of physiognomical similitude and the concept itself, of what
exactly was expected of a portrait, remain hypothetical factors.” He also notes that that “even
the most photographic portrait cannot give a complete record of a person” (ibid.). Finally, as
Small (2003: 129) has pointed out, a similar problem exists for Roman portraits: “Roman
portraits from the late Roman Republican period and after seem to capture physical likeness
remarkably well. The portraits look like real people, but in the absence of any knowledge of
what those people looked like, we cannot tell how accurate the portraits are.”
6 Brendel 1995: 105.
7 Stewart 2003: 53. What Prag (2002: 62) calls “total portraits, where all the parts of the body
have been rendered to depict one particular individual,” did not exist in either Etruria or even
later in Roman art. Stewart (ibid: 47) observes: “The enormous range of Roman portrait heads
in stone was also tailored to a relatively small range of body-types. There is usually nothing
about the body or pose that specifi es the identity of the portrait subject in anything other
than generic terms: it is the head which is, so to speak, tailor-made...”
8 Brendel 1995: 109: “the need for memorial portraits...was rooted in the Etruscan way of
life...It was put to [their] artists to account for the differences between persons, in visible
forms, as something essential to the human experience.”