The Etruscan mythological sarcophagi produced during the second half of the fourth century BC are evidence that Greek myths were used at the grave in this particular type of monument long before their Roman and Neo-Attic counterparts. In this talk, I examine the corpus of Etruscan mythological sarcophagi that have come to us, their place in the scholarship and the current problems of interpretation regarding some of their unique iconographic choices.
Valeria Riedemann is originally from Chile, where she initiated her studies in Philosophy, Aesthetics, and History of Art at Universidad de Chile. In 2009, she obtained a scholarship (Becas Chile) to pursue further graduate studies in the United Kingdom where she earned an MA in Comparative Art and Archaeology from University College London (2010), followed by a DPhil in Classical Archaeology at the University of Oxford (2016). Her doctoral dissertation -supervised by R.R.R. Smith- studied the uses of Greek myths in Apulian and Etruscan funerary monuments. During her academic career, Valeria has been a member of the British School at Athens (2010), and a Wiener-Anspach Fellow Researcher at the Centre de Recherches en Archéologie et Patrimoine (CReA-Patrimoine) at Université Libre de Bruxelles (2014). She has excavated in Italy and Turkey and is the author of various research papers, articles, and book reviews related to Greek, Apulian, and Etruscan art. Valeria is currently a Visiting Scholar at the University of Washington (Department of Classics) and, since 2017, an Adjunct Instructor in Art History, Anthropology, and Visual Communication at the NCAD.