Word: etruscan
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...story. The Rome of 8th century B.C., as described by Duggan, sounds very much like a common European caricature of the 20th century U.S. Rome is slow to war. and quick to extend aid to an enemy once he has been beaten. Its conglomerate citizens-Latin farmers, Sabine hillmen, Etruscan renegades, Greek exiles-are swiftly shaped into a conforming whole; they dress and act alike and are fond of boasting of their superiority over their decadent and vicious neighbors. An Etruscan says, "It's true that you Romans are generous and merciful. But you go about your deeds...
...Royal College of Art in London and discovered the primitive sculpture in the British Museum. "I was in a daze of excitement. I would literally float home on the top of an open-deck bus at the end of each visit." He was affected by all-Egyptian, Sumerian. Etruscan, archaic Greek, Norman, Romanesque, and especially by the art of ancient Mexico. One of his first reclining women (1929) is an unabashed descendant of the ancient Mayan Chac-Mool, which Moore saw only as an illustration in a German magazine at the British Museum...
When Rome was little more than a cluster of hill villages and the Forum a swampy marketplace, the proud and pleasure-loving Etruscans ruled Italy from the Tiber to the Po. In the end, the Roman legions crushed the loose confederation of Etruscan city-states and razed their walls. Etruria's bizarre hobgoblin world of superstition, ritual and magic provided the folk mythology from which poets from Virgil to Dante evoked their images of Hades and Hell; its art was buried in underground tombs to await latter-day grave robbers...
Even today, Romans prefer to dwell on the grandeur of classic Rome rather than recall the Etruscan kings, who, as Livy reminded them, could once make the Roman Senate tremble. But tucked away in a corner of Rome's Villa Borghese park is one of the world's richest collections of Etruscan art, which each year is drawing increasing numbers of visitors. Housed in the massive Villa Giulia, built in 1555 as a papal summer resort, the collection today numbers bronzes, terra-cotta sculptures and artifacts in the tens of thousands, displays its choicest treasures in two floors...
...Villa Giulia's unquestioned Etruscan masterpieces is the Sarcophagus of the Spouses (above-), found in the ancient Etruscan city of Caere (now the small town of Cerveteri, some 25 miles outside Rome) and recently reassembled. Molded from terra cotta in the 6th century B.C., it is a key to the culture of the Etruscans, who, haunted in life by a host of demons and ogres, prepared optimistically for a life after death that would be an unending feast. Their vision of paradise is vividly shown on the walls of the underground tombs-a world in which dancers, lute players...