- chapter 59: Science as art –
vice versa. Equating the donor with the person depicted is indeed probable in most cases,
but not provable exclusively.
Despite the popular view in the scholarship that the anatomical votives, just like all
the complete fi gures and heads, are deputies representing the worshippers, as pars pro toto,
the real question is: what are the meaning and purpose of such dedications? On account
of the lack of dedicatory inscriptions, this is not at all clear.
The various interpretive approaches that have been found to date for the genre of
Etruscan and Italic votive body-part models are also conditioned by the historic state of
the research. Thus, the fi rst scientists who studied the genre sought to recognize in it the
representation of symptoms of illness.^34 Uterus-votives might be seen as representations
of some incident involving the uterus (prolapse) (Fig. 59.9), hands holding votive
offerings as depictions of a tumor,^35 half-heads a sign of unilateral headache (migraine)
(see Fig. 59.2), heart-votives as boils, abscesses or even as “pathologically altered glans
of the male member.”^36 This specifi cally pathological interpretation is today, as a rule,
no longer proposed. The only assumption that continues to be held is that penis-votives
with closed, tightly pointed foreskin (Fig. 59.10) should be explained as images of the
Figure 59.9 Uterus from Veii. Antikensammlung, Inv. T III-7 (formerly Sammlung Stieda), Giessen.
Photo Matthias Recke.Figure 59.10 Penis. Göttingen, Archäologisches Institut, Inv. TC 135. Copyright Archäologisches
Institut der Universität Göttingen, Photo Stephan Eckardt.