Art by Etruscan Artist

The Etruscans, who controlled much of central Italy before Rome absorbed their territory, left behind a distinctive body of art whose individual makers are almost entirely unrecorded by name. Their best-known surviving works include painted tomb chambers at Tarquinia decorated with scenes of feasting, dancing, and the afterlife, the life-size terracotta Sarcophagus of the Spouses showing a married couple reclining together at a banquet, and bronze work like the Chimera of Arezzo. Much of what's known about Etruscan art comes specifically from tombs, since the Etruscans buried their dead with elaborate, carefully decorated spaces meant to be lived in, in some sense, for eternity.