Sarcophagus of the Spouses

In the 540s BC the Persians took the Greek cities on the Aegean coast of what is now Turkey, and many people of one of them, Phocaea, sailed west. Some went to Marseille, a colony Phocaeans had founded decades earlier. Others, craftsmen among them, found work with the Etruscans, and the museum links this meeting of cultures to the first painted tombs at Tarquinia and to this couple from Cerveteri, made around 530 to 520 BC.

Despite its famous name it is a cinerary urn, made to hold the remains of the dead. A man and a woman recline together on a banqueting couch, his arm around her shoulders. Her hands once held something now lost, perhaps perfume, and his perhaps a cup or a garland. Greeks found it unacceptable for a respectable woman to recline at a banquet, while Etruscan women took part as equals. She wears the pointed Etruscan cap called a tutulus and shoes with upturned toes. The urn was found in 1881 in the Banditaccia cemetery in about 400 fragments, and only one certain replica is known, in the Louvre.