New Paintings
from “The Etruscan Dream”
by William Eckhardt Kohler
THE ETRUSCAN DREAM
After visiting the necropolis at Cerveteri, in Italy, this past summer 2022,
I asked myself, what if what the Etruscans believed was true; that their souls would live in perpetuity in those quiet avenues?
How would that manifest in the lands and living things in and around their tomb cities, in the artifacts they left behind and as spirits in those places?
I’ve always loved the liveliness of the art of the Etruscans and been inspired by the emotional range of their art, which can be beautiful or ugly in turns, and by the way their art reflects a celebration of life even in death.
Their art speaks to a love of life, their writing concerns itself almost entirely with the spiritual life and directions for ceremony, and their images and statuary of loving couples reclining on their couches speak to a life affirming egalitarianism of their sexual relations.
These paintings imaginatively explore these questions beginning with drawings I made while traversing the extraordinarily deep collections of Etruscan art in museums such as The Vatican and The Villa Giulia, and from the Cerveteri necropolis north of Rome to create The Etruscan Dream .
