Painted Wall Panel with an Athletic Trainer

A fragmentary architectural panel is formed from a thick slab of terracotta, the clay ground of which is covered with a cream-colored slip. The panel illustrates a draped youth with curly brown hair and sideburns. His flesh is indicated in red pigment, and his frontal white eye has a black pupil, outlined lids, and eyebrow. Looking back to the left as he proceeds to the right, his chest is depicted frontally. Both arms are bent at the elbows and held in front of his chest. In his left hand he holds a knotty staff across his body. The youth wears a tan tunic with crinkled folds in added red running vertically from the shoulder to the chest, and a diagonal dark brown mantle. The hem of the mantle from the left shoulder down both open sides has red and white bands that form a zigzag pattern where they join; the bottom hem has a simple white zigzag and small white circles along the edge. Above the figured scene is an unusual ornamental frieze, consisting of a red bad, row of black dots; a double row of dot-edged red and black palmettes alternating with outlined black ivy-leaves, and connected by slanted black s-curved tendrils; below, a row of black dots, a red band, and a black band. The panel is fragmentary but has a finished right and left edge; sections of the lower sides and bottom are missing, including the youth’s lower legs and feet, and parts of his upper arms.

From his movement and backward glance, the finely dressed youth appears to take part in a narrative scene with one or more following figures, perhaps in a procession. That it was one of a series of panels is suggested by the truncated palmettes on both sides of the upper subsidiary frieze. The unusual form of the staff, with its crooked forked top, may signal that it represents an emblem of a special office. The forked staff representing an insignia or scepter is held by divinities or rulers on architectural frieze plaques found at Murlo and Acquarossa, and may be represented by fragments of wood in a tomb at Verrucchio. Similar forked staffs are held by athletic trainers and officials, who are frequently depicted on Greek vases; in Etruscan iconography, individuals holding a short staff with a curved top or a straight stick sometimes observe athletic competitors. This panel may depict an athletic competition, a composition that occurs in several Etruscan tombs. Funeral games honoring the dead were an integral part of Etruscan funerary ritual.

Etruscan public buildings and tombs were frequently ornamented with paintings, which were usually applied directly to the walls of the structure or chamber. In some instances, however, painted terracotta panels were made separately and mounted to form an extended narrative frieze. Such panels occur most frequently in sanctuaries and cemeteries in the city of Caere.