Marketing Motherhood: Etruscan Case Studies

Lecture by Prof. Alexandra A. Carpino

Representations of mothers are everywhere in Etruscan art, testifying to the importance of the family and its visualization in funerary, religious, and domestic contexts. On one important class of household artifacts – engraved bronze mirrors – narratives featuring divine and mythical mothers enter the corpus in the fifth century BCE and remain present well into the early third century. Notably, the stories that most appealed to the mirrors’ principal users, women, were those highlighting the close bond between a mother and her son/s. Closely tied to this maternal ideal, especially in the fourth century BCE, are the phenomenon of undress, with a particular emphasis on the mother’s breasts and torso, and a visual rhetoric that appears, at least to modern eyes, to veer towards the erotic. What engravers were marketing, however, wasn’t anything untoward, discomforting, or explicitly sexual about mother-son relationships in Etruria – rather, their imagery presented potential customers with various exempla whose bodies and behaviors materialized the elite’s expectations for their womenfolk. Equally novel is the messaging manifested by a different maternal paradigm that engravers first include in the corpus in the fifth century, one that highlights mothers who are punished by their sons for behaving badly. All in all, whether uplifting or cautionary, the pictorial emphasis on mothers in Etruscan mirror iconography magnified the links between actions and gender norms in the domestic sphere.  

Free and open to the public. Registration is not required. Doors open at 5:30pm CT and seats are assigned on a first-come-first-served basis, until capacity is reached.

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