No. 5. Two beautiful trays or toilet tables belonging to the Etruscan ladies. Looking at these one seems to understand the elaborate wigs on the heads of those ladies who smile upon the tops of their sarcophagi. Several objects in Case D. explain them further.
No. 4. A lovely line of graceful vases, good illustrations of the imitative power of the Etruscans. Not only the forms, but even the shining texture of the Grecian bronze, is here copied in bucchero.
No. 8. These vases are the work of those people who preceded the Etruscans in Umbria. The forms are simple, the patterns purely geometrical.
Case D
Nos. 2, 3. Some quite common earthenware urns for the ashes of the poor who could neither afford tombs nor inscriptions. On one or two of these a name is scratched in rough black paint, probably with the finger, and as a last token to the dead from someone who had loved him.
No. 7. Some earthenware bottles corresponding to the beautiful glass ones in Case A: those in earthenware were used for the tombs of the poor.
Room III.
Sarcophagi.
This room has a selection of the most interesting Sarcophagi in the museum. The corridors outside, and the staircase also, are filled with other specimens of more or less interest.
There is always a certain monotony in a collection of Etruscan tombs or sarcophagi, and the ordinary person wearies easily of the recumbent figures which lie so stolidly in effigy upon the lids of their own burial urns, with an expression of comfortable contentment on their somewhat unexciting and uneventful countenances. They seem, one and all of them, like persons who have fallen asleep on peaceful days with easy consciences,—persons whose hope of heaven is as slight as their fear of hell. They are, most of them, middle-aged, the pathos of old age, the hope and the passion of youth, is lacking in their faces. Their charm is to be sought in their extreme repose.