Abstract

Among the archaeological finds from the Etruscan artisans’ sanctuary at Cetamura del Chianti is a pair of bronze figurines, one partial and one complete, depicting a creature with the head and torso of a human female ending in a pair of fish-tails. These figurines served to decorate the handle attachments of a bronze wine-bucket, Situla L, which was found in a well at the site, with an estimated date in first half of the third century BCE. The figure depicted on these attachments has been identified as a Skylla figure. In Greek art from the fifth century BCE onward, Skylla is depicted as a half-maiden, half-sea-monster with dogs protruding from her waist and genital area. However, as this figure displays no canine iconography, and as Cetamura is a distinctly Etruscan site, it seems more suitable to categorize her among the several varieties of sea monsters and merpeople found in Etruscan art before and during the third century BCE. Among these Etruscan images, the term Skylla usually refers to an iconographic category of female hybrid creatures rather than to a specific mythological figure. This paper will examine the figure from Cetamura in comparison with a number of Etruscan and Italian artifacts which are similar in iconography, location, chronology, and function. This will ultimately demonstrate that, of the surrounding artistic and cultural influences, she most closely represents an Etruscan artistic tradition of sea-monsters, whose shapes, poses, and iconographic varieties persisted from the Archaic Period well into the Roman encroachments of the third century BCE and beyond.

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