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Article: Etruscans, losing their edge.
- Article from:
- American Scholar
- Article date:
- March 22, 2004
- Author:
CopyrightCOPYRIGHT 2004 Phi Beta Kappa Society. This material is published under license from the publisher through the Gale Group, Farmington Hills, Michigan. All inquiries regarding rights should be directed to the Gale Group. (Hide copyright information)
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Of Etruscan civilization, we have mostly bronze funerary statuettes. Florida photographer Carol Munder hunts them up. She finds them neglected in Mediterranean villages' glass cases. We do not know, and never did, what manner of folk made them, or why. Munder's prints seem to wake them. The figures find themselves in a fix. Their gaudy world is gone. Mute, they prayed or pray to gagged gods of whom we know nothing.
These paralyzed bronze statuettes, some of them, predate the earliest Greek sculptures. Etruscans made them--always human forms--as grave goods that perpetually spoke unknown messages to unknown gods. Or perhaps in them selves they reminded unnamed ...