Archaeologists Unearthed an Ancient Face Where It Wasn't Supposed to Be
· Yahoo NewsHere’s what you’ll learn when you read this story:
- Recent excavations in the ancient Etruscan city of Vulci revealed the head of a marble statue that appears to have Greek influence.
- The head belongs to a kore, statues made in the images of young women which stood in and around the temples of Greece at the time.
- Thought to have been associated with a temple in Vulci, this artifact is a rare glimpse at larger Etruscan objects inspired by cultural exchange with the Greeks of Attica.
At an archaeological site in what used to be the ancient Etruscan city of Vulci, the disembodied head of a young woman began to emerge from the ground, her empty eyes staring through millennia of history. Her marble face had not seen daylight in 2,500 years.
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Before the rise of the Roman Empire, the Etruscan civilization flourished in the western region of central Italy once known as Etruria. Vulci was situated northwest of Rome in what is now the province of Viterbo. As directors of the Vulci Cityscape project, archaeologists Mariachiara Franceschini of the Albert Ludwig University of Freiburg and Pau Pasieka of Johannes Gutenberg University Mainz were excavating the ruins of this once prosperous ancient metropolis. It was there that they came upon the marble head of a statue mirroring the Greek korai found near the Parthenon in the Athenian Acropolis. It was a rare glimpse into a larger sculpture that shows the extent of Greek influence on Etruscan art and culture.
The face of the nameless woman most likely gazed out from a monumental temple that was discovered in 2020 near Tempio Grande. She had once had a decorative and possibly ritual purpose. With an eerily lifelike smile, she wears a diadem over a crown of hair that has been meticulously carved down to every strand, and while the paint that once brought her to life has long since eroded, she was preserved so well that traces of original paint can still be seen on the marble. While it used to be thought that most of the cultural exchange between Etruria and the Attica region of Greece (also famous for its honey) was evidenced in the form of painted pottery, the head of this kore shows that Hellenic influence reached beyond clay vessels.
Whoever commissioned this statue must have been one of the Etruscan elite. Marble was an expensive material usually reserved for the religious or funerary art of the upper classes, and the quality of the craftsmanship can still be seen thousands of years later. This level of detail extends to the texture of the kore’s hair—its flowing waves are reminiscent of similar Hellenic statues. She is one of the few pieces in this style found outside of Greece. Most previous Etruscan excavations have focused on tombs and necropolis complexes without much investigation of everyday urban life. Unlike the broken columns of ancient Greek and Roman cities that are still standing, no buildings survive in that area. Only their foundations remain.
This kore is now being restored at Rome’s Instituto Centrale per il Restauro. Though it is not certain whether she was made for the temple she is now being associated with, that temple rose between the end of the sixth and the beginning of the fifth century B.C.E. It was also built the same time as another temple that was excavated during the 1950s and dated based on artifacts that were unearthed around its foundations. Crumbling sections of wall made of volcanic rock gave more insight into how the architecture of Vulci evolved over a thousand years of serving as the heart of Etruscan society.
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“We discovered remains from the city’s origins that had previously been overlooked in Vulci and are now better able to understand the dynamics of settlement and the road system, besides identifying different functional areas in the city,” Pasieka said in a press release about the discovery of the temple.
Another impressive Etruscan object with Hellenized features is a massive bronze lamp whose symbolism was a mystery for decades. Its images of forest nymphs and satyrs were finally determined to be revelers of Dionysus, the Greek deity of wine, fertility, ecstasy, mysticism and theatre, who appears as a horned god in ornamental figures that surround them.
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