Poignée de ciste

Handle of cist

Three figurines forming a group represent a warrior being transported. His rigid body is horizontal but is rendered frontally, so that it is possible to contemplate his powerful musculature, not concealed by any clothing. His legs are extended. His left arm rests on the corresponding thigh, while the other, instead of hanging free, is pulled back around the head in a gesture of surrender, in this case signifying death throes or death, two states consistent with the closed eyes.

Nothing remains of his weapons, except the sword visible in the fist of the bearer at left. It is clear that the warrior, though without any visible wounds, has fallen to the enemy’s blows. Now, before our eyes, he is being evacuated from the battlefield to be given funeral honors. The action is marked with solemnity.

The two bearers are of different sexes. The man, at left, has a plain hairstyle and wears only a simple cloth around the hips, whereas his female companion, at right, is dressed in a finely pleated sleeved tunic. Over it she has slipped a mantle, forming a sort of apron in front. Her hair, notched on the forehead and curling over the ears, is topped by a ribbed diadem. She is also wearing a heavy necklace, and her outfit is completed by ankle boots. As for the faces of the two figures, they display rather severe features: very marked arches of the eyebrows; large and globular eyes; straight noses; and thick-lipped mouths.

This group in bronze stands on a rectangular base plate made of the same metal and rounded at the corners. The central hole indicates that it was originally attached to another object.

By analogy with other groups of the same kind that are still in place, it is known that the object in question was a cist (box), made of a thin sheet of metal welded together. It was equipped with a lid, and the sculptural group constituted its handle. This lid, made of bronze like the rest, must have been slightly convex, hence the curved shape of the base for the figurines.

Such cists, round or oval and mounted on three feet, were used to hold toilet articles. The masterpiece of the genre is the Ficoroni cist, discovered in Praeneste (Palestrina) in 1738. Signed by one Novios Plautios, it bears on its sides a magnificent engraved scene based on a Greek myth, the Argonauts’ expedition to Colchis, and more precisely, the episode of the punishment of Amykos.

A few other cist handles that depict the same funerary theme are also known. The bearers are either men (New York, Metropolitan Museum of Art, Inv. 13.227.7) or women (Paris, Bibliothèque nationale de France, Inv. A-V H 3368). But there is no other example of a mixed couple, as in the exemplar in the Barbier-Mueller collection. Winged jinn, both male (Metropolitan Museum, Inv. 22.84.9 a, b) and female (Florence, Museo Archeologico Etrusco, Inv. 682), can also be found in place of the human beings. Who are these winged jinn? No one knows, for lack of other Etruscan representations—on painted vases or bronze engraved mirrors—where these figures would be identified by an inscription.

In the Greek world, the figures dedicated to the dead warrior are of the male sex and winged, one personifying Sleep (Hypnos), the other Death (Thanatos). They can be seen at work, for example, on the famous New York krater (Metropolitan Museum, Inv. 1972.11.10), which represents the death of Sarpedon outside Troy. That Attic work, dating to about 515, is said to have been found in Cerveteri. In another episode of the epic, the death of Memnon, Hypnos is replaced by the hero’s mother, Eos the Dawn. Modestly dressed, she has wings on her back, which will allow her to carry her son off into the air. Greek illustrations of that myth were known to the Etruscans, who themselves provided a beautiful version of it on an intaglio in chalcedony, housed at the Metropolitan Museum of Art (Inv. 42.11.28), which dates to the first half of the fifth century B.C. The Etruscans therefore had models for their funerary groups at their disposal and adapted them to fit their own religious concepts. On the subject of models, the figure of Nike, or Victory, widespread among the Greeks, can also be cited as an equally plausible source of inspiration. What date to assign to this work, which is also extraordinary for its aesthetic quality? The composition is so grandiose that it is easy to forget its actual size, only about 13 centimeters (5 inches) in height. The young, bare-chested bearer is reminiscent of Polycletes’ statuary type, but the prominent forward hip is from a later time, probably the second quarter of the fourth century, when Etruria was experiencing a general revival, political and commercial as well as cultural.

Published in: Sales cat. Paris 1905, p. 22, no. 137, pl. 9; Reinach, vol. 4 (1910), p. 322, no. 1; exh. cat. New York 1970, p. 12, fig. 18; Dörig 1975, no. 265 (J. Chamay); Zimmermann 1991, p. 113, fig. 38, pp. 134, 135 (plate); Barbier 2000, p. 122.