Lid from a sarcophagus (coffin)

The deceased woman depicted on this sarcophagus lid reclines on a bed or couch with a gabled footboard and rests her left arm on a pillow. She wears a chiton, belted under her breasts, beneath a himation, or mantle, and has a diadem in her hair. Despite her awkward proportions, her expectant, upward gaze conveys a sense of pathos. The woman’s pose may have been intended to suggest that she is reclining at a banquet, a common theme in Etruscan funerary sculpture and tomb painting. This sarcophagus lid is particularly remarkable because the Etruscans, famed as metalworkers, made relatively little sculpture in stone. It is part of a group of sarcophagi made from a soft, gray volcanic stone, known by the Italian name nenfro, in several cities of southern Etruria in the 4th and 3rd centuries B.C. The surface of the stone was originally painted, and traces of red and white pigment survive on the woman’s skin, hair, and clothing, and on the footboard.