Cinerary Urn Lid with a Reclining Man
Unknown · Lid second half of the 3rd century BC; chest c. 125-75 BC
A man reclines on a couch as if at a banquet, propped on a cushion, wearing a headband and a cloak draped across his lower body, his torso bare. In his hand he holds a phiale, a shallow libation bowl with a raised boss in the centre. He is the deceased, and this terracotta lid once closed a box that held his ashes. Traces of red paint survive in his hair and of white slip on his face. Parts of the modelling were left unfinished, since these lids were produced quickly in local workshops.
The lid was made at Chiusi in the second half of the third century before Christ, while the chest it now rests on is later, from the late second or early first century, a pairing made in modern times. Chiusi produced thousands of these small urns in the Hellenistic period, each showing the dead person reclining for eternity at the funerary feast, the bowl ready for a last offering to the gods. The pieces came to the Louvre with the purchase of eighteen sixty one. Notice the hard concretions still clinging to the clay, left by centuries underground in a tomb.
Did You Know? The lid and the box it sits on were made perhaps a century and a half apart and were only paired later.
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