“Patriarchy has tried to erase imagery of the feminine since time immemorial. Destroy the image and you can control the narrative.”
— Syreeta McFadden, The Guardian U.S., April 13, 2015
Almost life-sized, the “Venus of Cannicella” looks out at us from behind her protective transparent cylinder in an archeological museum in the town of Orvieto, Umbria, Italy. Dated to around 500 BC, and found in 1884 in a neighboring Etruscan necropolis, she’s an anomaly in several ways. For instance, unlike virtually all other surviving statues found in ancient Etrusca, she’s made of marble — in this case, from the Greek island of Paros. And she’s probably a representation of the Etruscan goddess Vei, equivalent to Demeter, Greek goddess of fertility. What’s a statue representing new life doing in a cemetery? Answer: Anthropologists believe the Etruscans viewed death as an extension of life.
But the oddest detail is that she has a vulva. Odd, because the ancient Greeks, and later the Romans, de-sexed women when representing them in statues and frescos. Naked men had penises; naked women were Barbie-smooth. Why? You don’t have to be an arch feminist to appreciate that, in the words of English professor Syreeta McFadden, quoted above, “somewhere along the line, the vulva became synonymous with the obscene. As ancient Greek society … developed, feminine power and, by extension, the vulva, was denigrated.”
Turns out that the “Venus of Cannicella” is a rare surviving Greek statue (that somehow ended up in an Etruscan graveyard) from a time before the full patriarchal shift had happened in Athens. Show me a Greek Classical Age writer and I’ll show you a misogynist bro. As it happens, Etruscan women enjoyed much more freedom than their Greek and Roman counterparts. They could, for instance, own property, learn to read and write, and go out unaccompanied in public. Greek historian Theopompus, writing in the 4th century BC, sniffed that Tyrrhenian (Etruscan) women “often exercise even with men, sometimes also with one another, because it is not shameful for women to show themselves naked …. They also like to drink a lot and are very good-looking.”
The name “Etruscan” probably derives from the hypothesized Proto-Indo-European root “turs,” meaning “tower.” The Tusci, or Etruscans, typically built their towns on high buttes with vertical walls (like Orvieto). As you’re reading this, making sense of squiggles on paper or a screen, give a nod of thanks to those long-ago people who gave us our alphabet. The ancient Greek alphabet (ultimately derived from Phoenician (“The Invention of the Alphabet,” Nov. 12 and 19, 2009) came to present-day Italy in a variant known as Euboean. In what is now Umbria and Tuscany, Euboean morphed into Etruscan, which the nascent Roman civilization adopted in the 7th century BC, thus the Latin alphabet. That is, essentially, our alphabet.
We’re long on hypotheses, short on hard facts about the Etruscans, history being written by the victors. As the Roman Republic grew into a superpower, the original 12 Etruscan strongholds fell one by one. Volsinii, present-day Orvieto, surrendered in 280 BC after a two-year siege. Today, little remains of the town’s Etruscan legacy other than two cemeteries. It’s ironic that the “Venus of Cannicella,” Orvieto’s most striking archeological find, isn’t Etruscan, but Greek, created at a time when her true-to-life beauty could be shown.
Barry Evans (he/him, barryevans9@yahoo.com) likes the idea of being paid to write about vulvas (vulvae?).
This article appears in Corkscrew Trees and a Crooked Trail.