The Etruscans placed the ashes of the dead in jars with smaller vases and ornaments and buried them in pits; or for the wealthy, tomb-chambers were built and arranged to resemble rooms in the houses of the living, the cinerary urns being set in niches, or the bodies being laid out on biers. Their urns in the earlier periods were frequently made in a very rude imitation of a human being with portrait head, and were often placed in terracotta chairs. Two examples are in Case N in the Second Room ([fig. 153]). Curious trays of dishes, probably used for offerings to the dead and known as “focolari,” are not uncommonly found in tombs. Examples are in Cases R and Q in the Second Room ([fig. 151]). In later times rectangular stone boxes, sculptured or painted, with a reclining figure of the deceased on the cover, were used. There are several of these urns in the Seventh Room, in Cases N and P and on Pedestals E and U ([figs. 154-155]).

FIG. 156. ROMAN GRAVE MONUMENT

The Romans burned their dead, with some exceptions. A few of the ancient families, notably the Cornelii, kept to the older fashion of burial, and it was customary even when a body was cremated to take one small portion of bone, called the “os resectum” from the ashes and bury it. The very poor, slaves, and outcasts were buried in graves made to hold a number of bodies, often with little care or respect. Roman funeral customs, so far as we know them, were very similar to those of Greece. Glass urns were in common use in the western part of the Roman world from the first to the third century A.D. One still contains fragments of bone and ashes. Under the Empire the custom of burial became frequent among the well-to-do, as is evidenced by the large and costly stone sarcophagi of the period. There are two Roman sarcophagi, Nos. 36 and 46 in the Sculpture Gallery, and a large one from Tarsus in the Vestibule. The relief on the south wall of the Sculpture Gallery representing the death of Meleager (No. 38A) once decorated a sarcophagus. These sculptured scenes are rarely connected with death, but are usually mythical or fanciful. A grave monument on the west wall of the Eighth Room, representing a young man and his wife, is interesting in that this form of portrait relief within a box-like frame is thought to have been derived from the wax death-masks, “imagines,” enclosed in boxes, which adorned the hall of the Roman noble ([fig. 156]). In the Sculpture Gallery is a stone cippus or monument (No. 43), erected to a mother and her two sons, and decorated with portraits in relief.

INDEX

OF THIS BOOK
ONE THOUSAND COPIES
WERE PRINTED
JANUARY, MCMXXIV
ONE THOUSAND ADDITIONAL COPIES
WITH CORRECTIONS WERE PRINTED
JUNE, MCMXXIV