The Etruscan Seated Banquet: Villanovan Ritual and Etruscan Iconography

Abstract

The banquet was one of the most popular and consistent funerary motifs in ancient Etruria. The earliest banquet scenes depict people sitting, whereas later representations show banqueters reclining on couches. By examining these primordial seated banquet scenes, we see the representation of an already cogent iconography. The deceased is either depicted at a meal or ancestor figures are shown welcoming the newly deceased to the banquet. The characterization of the deceased at a meal is a funerary theme that also finds expression in the earlier tomb groups of the Villanovan period. It is argued here that new foreign artistic models of enthroned figures are adopted and manipulated in the Orientalizing period because they could be used to express a preexisting funerary theme of the deceased at a meal.