Twenty years ago, M. Menichetti wrote a groundbreaking book on the Praenestine ciste, Quoius forma virtutei parisuma fuit … Ciste prenestine e cultura di Roma medio-repubblicana (1995). Now d.A. has written a work of equal scope and grandeur. This is one of the most significant attempts to understand the production of decorated funerary urns form Etruria, rather than simply to produce catalogues or typologies (although he does that too).
D.A. begins with his methodology; he argues in his introduction that we should look to Roman versions of Greek theatre for a parallel to the adoption of Greek myth on Etruscan sarcophagi, because there too we can see forms which are not completely driven by the propaganda of a national identity. D.A. works hard to dissociate production from a simplistic view of identity, and stresses dynamic change, relational aspects within and beyond communities and what he calls degrees of intensity, which I take to mean univocality. What d.A. is doing is creating a world of nuanced interpretation, in which the Greek myths are part of the grammar, but the language is complex, fluid and a form of communication not declaration.
This work continues in the first chapter where d.A. painstakingly seeks to avoid falling into pitfalls of overly simple interpretation. He argues against the search for artistic prototypes, and talks of horizons of possibility, which allow for changes to the stories at a local level. This avoids the tendency to identify strange Greek variants in every wayward detail on a sarcophagus. He wants to allow the mythological element to be significant, formally and ideologically, but he also wants to arrive at social context. Anyone familiar with those studies of Etruscan urns, which are focused on individual mythological interpretations or are rigidly typological will see that d.A. is urging a rather original line.
That said, chronology and typology matter, and the next chapter offers moderate revisions to G. Colonna's 1993 account, and also a useful summary of Chiusine history, such as we can deduce it from the rather tattered sources. D.A. is refreshingly honest about how few fixed points there are for his corpus. Once his basic matrix has been created and the overall historical context inked in, the interpretation of the scenes can begin.
D.A. divides the iconography into scenes of battle, brotherly conflict and friendship, youth at risk and the family. Chiusine iconography has a very strong military flavour, and this does differentiate it from Volterra for instance. It is interesting that there is also a rather unusual set of representations of Celts (recognisable by their torques). The obvious interpretation might force the idea of a direct connection between the deceased and war, but d.A. looks for a much more subtle reading of risk and uncertainty – a sense of conflict but not necessarily historically determined or specific. He also argues that the victor is not necessarily the largest figure or the only focus, which is interesting given that for much of the period treated the Chiusines were subordinate to the Romans.
The focus on the family and on risk is also helpful in explaining the kind of cultural milieu that might have produced the sorts of iconography which the workshops reproduced with minor variations across a couple of hundred years. As a strategy for whatever the burial group was (and Chiusi like other cities seems to have suffered some unrest in its political and social history, in this case perhaps around 200 b.c., leading to a new social group, perhaps from a lower or more mercantile status, imitating elite practice), the concern with the precariousness of life and social bonds may have been less than simply a direct representation of specific grief, and more than a banal metaphor for death and mourning. D.A. opens up the way to seeing a broader range of social and political concerns around the themes of violence, immaturity, closeness and betrayal. If we are right to see social change, it is interesting that the previous iconographic patters were still used. The one exception, the rare depictions of a man with a plough, raised as if as a weapon, are difficult to interpret; d.A. tentatively wonders if there is a reference to agriculture, whilst rightly noting E. Benelli's demolition of the notion of a fixed class of penestai.
This is precisely analogous to the sorts of readings that Menichetti offered for contemporary Praenestine society and it is a subtle and beautifully argued thesis. If one were to be critical, there is a slight sense that d.A. is so careful not to launch into the sorts of univocal readings he criticises in others, that he is perhaps not explicit about whether he thinks this is our best hermeneutic approach, or if such ambiguity existed also at the time of production and consumption. Now even if an Etruscan (at least occasionally) could have made a direct link between the nature of the death of the deceased and the mythological representation, d.A. could counter that we would need to excavate under that certainty to find deeper sociological needs, but there are perhaps a couple of inexplicit steps in d.A.’s argument.
I am also not absolutely convinced by the drama parallel, at least as sketched in, although I think it is a genuinely interesting comparison. I think d.A. might be able to do something with the concept of translation. The sarcophagi act as a form of cultural mediation, and it is interesting that this should be sufficiently significant to be pervasive on what were at least initially elite expressions of identity. Demonstrations of cultural superiority are going to be part of the story but not perhaps the whole; there is perhaps a grasping for deeper meaning than ordinary expression can encompass in the face of something challenging to the social order at least of the family and, by association, the community. D.A.’s insistence on getting away from a bland local identity game is very useful, and still leaves the central importance of context for any understanding of the work of the sarcophagus in the social arena.
This account has not so far emphasised enough the degree of detailed analysis on which d.A. rests his case. Every chapter is carefully illustrated with Chiusine examples, but also relevant other material such as the Esquiline tomb paintings or the François tomb frieze. Over 400 sarcophagi are exhaustively described in the catalogue, with full bibliography. They are then mostly presented in the clear and sharp black-and-white photographs (and a few colour ones). Cross-referencing is easy, and there is a forty-page general bibliography and a decent index, all of which means that this adds up to a distinctive and very important work of reference. The price is high, but unlike another Italian publisher where prices are often three times as high and the quality of product much lower, this is at least an explicable reflection of a well-produced volume and a credit to its series.
As d.A. himself says, one next step is comparison. Volterra is the obvious site and ripe for a major reconsideration along similar sorts of lines, and with due attention to its different social and economic trajectory. Another prospect is to spread the analysis across Chiusine culture; there are many questions raised here about religion, ritual and politics and how they fitted into the imaginary of Chiusine society, as well as the connections between sarcophagus production and other distinctive artisanal activity. Indeed, d.A. has raised an important question with his reference to theatrical culture, and even if the evidence will scarcely permit us to answer it for the Etruscan context, the understanding of the total cultural field is worth exploring. D.A. has given us both some of the necessary information and an important methodological toolkit.
