View Article: Etruscan Places: Lawrence's Fascinations and My Own Reflections

	Etruscan Places: Lawrence's Fascinations and My Own Reflections
	written by kayanna / 10.24.2005

Etruscan Places

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Part 1:

Lawrence seems to be groping for life beyond death. He describes the paintings in the tombs as full of life several times and often uses analogies for life in the symbols used by the Etruscans. In one passage, he describes the sea and dolphin as two symbols of procreation – the womb and the phallus. He speaks of the fish as symbols of life itself within the womb. Even his words are chosen to convey energy and life – “like the phallus carrying the fiery spark of procreation down into the wet darkness of the womb.”

Lawrence is searching for a fiery spark of procreation after death, and this search provides the insight to his future – his fascination with life, especially as depicted after death.

Part 2:

Etruscan Sarcophagus

beasts with a deer in their jaws

The dominant image in Lawrence’s writing is life – as a single image, perhaps as the egg in the tombs that Lawrence mentions and describes, by which one is reborn in death. This is the image I feel Lawrence clearly took away with him. He sought a comfort about death and found it in the carefree way the Etruscans viewed death as a new life.

The image I took away with me is the unabashed way Etruscans dealt with the feeding of energy from one being to another, as of wolves or cats preying on deer – that this powerful act is natural and even artistic. This imagery is cast on the sides of sarcophagi, on the top corners of tombs, and is a theme on a strip of color in the tomb imitating a hunting pavilion. It is surprising to me that amongst many tombs with friezes depicting gaiety and song, there are be some that focus on the hunt – human and animal. The fact that some Etruscans felt these were important enough concepts to have them forever on their sarcophagi and in their tombs leads me to believe that the Etruscans were fascinated with this part of the natural world around them.

I see this fascination as a comment on hierarchy, perhaps dominance. In the conflict between deer and cat, the cat will win and will earn his meal. As I am wrestling with issues of who I will become and what my place will be in the world, my focus on these images displays my concern with whether it is necessary to seek power over others to achieve what I want in the future. Is it necessary to have power to be influential in the way that I want to? Is this act the same as the cat and the deer? Is it inevitable? The depictions on the Etruscan tombs and sarcophagi lead to sympathy with the deer but also empathy with the cat. The fascination I had with this act of dominance of one being over another shows my concern with the act of sustenance at the expense of others.

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