The National Etruscan Museum of Villa Giulia is participating in the exhibition *Rituels grecs: une expérience sensible* (November 24, 2017–March 25, 2018) with a significant loan, curated by Evelyne Ugaglia, Chief Curator of Heritage and Director of the Musée Saint Raymond in Toulouse, based on a scientific project by Adeline Grand-Clément (Jean Jaurès University of Toulouse), coordinator of the Synaesthesia research program. Due to the originality of the scientific project and the exhibition design, as well as the significance of the works on loan from foreign museums, the exhibition has been recognized as “of national interest” by the French Ministry of Culture.
How did the ancient Greeks experience religion and interact with the gods? The visual, olfactory, and auditory environment of daily life was very different from the sensory universe specific to the ritual sphere, and the ancient Greeks, in order to communicate with the gods and better perceive their presence, sought to create special conditions that would engage and stimulate all the senses simultaneously. Thanks to special museum displays—which also drew on the findings of experimental archaeology to reproduce ingredients, fragrant ointments, and textiles—the overall atmosphere of the four distinct rituals on which the exhibition focuses is reconstructed in an original, captivating, and immersive way: weddings, sacrifices, symposia, and funerals. Visitors thus become active participants in their own visit, immersing their minds and senses in the universe of Greek ritual—rich in color and teeming with sounds and scents.
The work on loan from the National Etruscan Museum of Villa Giulia occupies a central place in the section dedicated to sacrifice: it is the so-called Ricci Hydria (530–520 B.C.), originating from a tomb in the Banditaccia necropolis of Cerveteri and attributed to a painter from northern Ionia (present-day northern Turkey) known as the Louvre Painter E 739, who settled in Etruria shortly after the mid-6th century B.C. and in whom one might recognize one of the Phocaean artisans present in Cerveteri after the Battle of Alalia (in the Sardinian Sea), which in 540 B.C. pitted the Phocaeans against the Etruscans—allied with the Carthaginians—for control of the Tyrrhenian Sea.
This is a truly unique piece, both for the erudite choice of mythological subjects depicted on the body of the vase (in addition to the more common depiction of Hercules’ entry into Olympus, the duel between Memnon and Achilles over Antilochus’s weapons during the Trojan War, while Zeus weighs their fates on a scale), and for the frieze winding around the shoulder, which depicts with extreme care the “sacrificial kitchen”—that is, the entire sequence of operations that took place immediately after the slaughter of the animal offered to the deity: the meat is cut and cooked, skewered and roasted and boiled, while the officiating priest—or perhaps Dionysus himself—accompanied by a player of the double aulós (a sort of oboe), holds out the kantharos (the wine cup typical of the god) and, with one hand, touches a cluster of grapes from the garland of vines and ivy that forms the vegetal setting framing the sacrifice.