Iconography and Gender in Etruscan Art: The Evidence of the Onomastic Mirrors

Alexandra Carpino

Department of Humanities, Art, and Religion

Northern Arizona University

Box 6031

Flagstaff, AZ 66011

Alexandra.Carpino@nau.edu

Bronze mirrors form one of the largest corpora of extant Etruscan luxury art, and, as such, they play an important role in our understanding of Etruscan culture and taste. Narrative scenes decorate the reverses of around sixteen hundred of these mirrors, providing scholars with evidence of social customs, political ideologies and/or religious beliefs. The mirrors' iconographies further indicate an overwhelming interest on the part of the Etruscan patrons in Greek mythology and literature, although the latter was often manipulated or altered in order to convey ideas relevant to the Etruscans' lives, and to the mirrors' varied functions (as symbols of status, votive offerings, and/or grave goods). Our understanding of the mirrors' iconographies is further enhanced by epigraphic evidence: around three hundred mirrors contain inscriptions that either identify the mythological or historical characters represented in the narratives, and the names of owners, recipients, and donors. The latter onomastic mirrors indicate that both men and women owned and/or used mirrors in Etruria, a fact which counters one of the most common assumptions about the ownership of Etruscan mirrors found in the scholarly literature, namely, that they were the exclusive property of women.

The onomastic mirrors also provide scholars with an opportunity to understand better the relationship between gender and representation in Etruscan art. Another common assumption in the scholarly literature concerning mirrors correlates images of violence, boxing and wrestling with a male audience and/or patrons, and images of adornment, lovers, baths, and family groups with female clientele. The iconographies of the onomastic mirrors, however, reveal a wide variety of subject matter, from images originating in Greek sources to scenes with specifically local characters and themes. In this paper, I question the above assumption by focusing on the iconographic and epigraphic evidence provided by the onomastic mirrors; through this process, the Etruscans' ideas about gendered representations, as well as about artistic choices and modifications, will become clearer.