Sarcophagus of the Spouses
Unknown · c. 520-510 BC
A couple recline together on a banqueting couch, propped on cushions shaped like wineskins, and they have been smiling at each other for two and a half thousand years. The man, bare chested with a cloak wrapped around his hips, rests his right arm around the shoulders of his wife. She wears a soft cap, a tunic, a necklace and pointed shoes with curled toes, and her hands once held objects that are now lost. His skin is painted red and hers white, the conventional way of telling men from women in ancient Mediterranean art, and traces of the colours survive on the flesh, the eyes, the black hair and the orange drapery.
Everything here is fired clay, moulded and modelled in two separate pieces and then painted over a light slip. The Etruscans of Caere were masters of large terracotta sculpture at a time when the Greeks reserved such scale for marble and bronze. Look at the archaic details: the almond shaped eyes, the braided locks falling over the shoulders, the fixed smile borrowed from Greek sculpture of the same decades. The gestures are what matter. The man's missing left hand probably poured perfume or held a cup, and the couple's open palms suggest they are offering or sharing something at an eternal banquet. The back is only roughly finished, since nobody was meant to see it.
The piece was found in the Banditaccia necropolis at Cerveteri, the ancient Caere, during excavations of eighteen forty five and forty six, and it entered the Louvre in eighteen sixty one with the enormous purchase of the Campana collection. The museum record lists it as a lid, possibly of a sarcophagus or of a large urn, and dates it to about five hundred and twenty to five hundred and ten before Christ. A close twin is in the Villa Giulia in Rome. Both show a feature of Etruscan society that shocked Greek and Roman writers: wives reclined and dined beside their husbands as equals, which is exactly what this smiling pair are doing.
Did You Know? The couple have been smiling at each other for some two and a half thousand years, and the wife reclines beside her husband as an equal, a habit that scandalised Greek and Roman writers.
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