Journey to the Underworld

The bulbous shape of this hybrid vessel was developed in Etruria and was later adopted by the Greeks. Its basic form is taken from the olla, a rotund handled vase known from grave deposits as early as the seventh century BC. A tall flaring foot and small horizontal handles complete this vase shape, called a stamnos. The Berlin example is decorated with a tongue pattern on the shoulder and a kymation around the rim. Palmettes beside the handles divide the body into two pictorial fields.
One side depicts the deceased travelling to the Underworld. A pair of mules walks to the right, drawing a two-wheeled cart with the deceased wrapped in a cloth on top of it. Oddly enough, the dead man has propped himself up on his left arm and faces in the direction of travel. His beard and forehead wrinkles signal that he is old; his wide-open eyes may indicate excitement or fear at the prospect of the destination ahead. Ovoid shapes reserved in the colour of the clay hover over the deceased and the horses – perhaps greaves and shields whose internal details were not added, or have since been lost. Armour has been found in Etruscan graves, and sometimes features in the wall decoration in tomb chambers.
On the other side of the vase, a youth in a hooded mantle rides a horse. As he gallops to the left, he turns around to blow a trumpet held in his right hand. A woman follows him with a taenia and small box balanced in her left hand; with her right she touches the horse’s tail. Charun strides ahead of the procession, recognizable from his animal ears, hooked nose, and large hammer over his shoulder. He too turns to look back.
In Etruscan funerary ritual, the deceased was laid out at home before being escorted to the grave in a ceremonial procession (ekphora), accompanied by family and friends. They carried various personal effects and signs of rank, which they then consigned to the grave.
This vase appears to show not a real procession to the necropolis but an imaginary journey to the Underworld – hence the deceased’s unusual half-upright pose. Neither does the scene depict the pompa funebris. In this Roman ritual, actors wore masks of the deceased’s ancestors. The tradition goes back to Etruscan funerary rites, in which one participant in the procession might wear the mask of Charun. But neither the youth on the horse nor the opposite directions of movement seems to align with that tradition.
Etruscan art of the sixth century BC depicts funerary rituals as cheerful, even lively events (cf. cat. no. 107). The images center on the banquet, dances, and athletic competitions held in honour of the deceased. The light-hearted atmosphere, however, which also appears in wall paintings in Archaic Etruscan graves, changes over time: it comes to be replaced by mythological scenes of unexpected and sometimes harrowing deaths, like that of Dirke. In another representation of the Underworld, this time on a clay ash urn in Berlin, the deceased is surrounded by furies, a wolf demon, Hades, and Charun. With wild hair, a heavy hammer, and a ghoulish face, Charun has little to do with the friendly ferryman Charon in Greek art; here he inspires fear and dread. Such fright in the face of death can be seen on the Berlin stamnos, where the deceased raises himself up and stares fixedly ahead.
A nearly identical stamnos resides in the Hermitage in St. Petersburg. Both scenes on that vase, however, are oriented toward the left, creating a single direction of movement. Its painted decoration is also of higher quality than that on the Berlin vase, which recalls the Owl Pillar Group in its simple, almost careless painting. Despite this similarity, the stamnos was likely made in a Faliscan workshop.