Reply To: Women in Art

[Aubri Stogsdill]

There does seem to be a dramatic shift in the position that women played in Etruscan society that we certainly haven’t seen up until this point. In Egyptian art, women were generally depicted as smaller than their husbands, slightly behind them, or beneath them. Until Etruscan art, I don’t recall there being much affection displayed or celebrated between husbands and wives. While there was often an emphasis on the after life in most of the cultures we have studied, those cultures didn’t feel the need to express their desire to be close with their spouses in the after life. But, we see at Cerveteri Sarcophagus and the Sarcophagus of Larth Tetnies and Thanchvil Tarnai, representations of husbands and wives laying close and lovingly embracing each other. These images show a sort of balance and mutual respect between the man and the woman as well as a clear desire to remain in the afterlife together. The husbands do not seem to Lord over their wives. There is a strong sense of love and cheering in these depictions, which certainly doesn’t seem to have been the norm leading up to this point! This is a great shift for women, and I am sure the change in the status of women played a very massively positive role in the functioning of the rest of society.