(by Alessandra Baldini) Having conquered Berlin and after stopping from December to March in Aquileia, the bronze San Casciano dei Bagni prepares to fly to the USA. The Etruscans: From the Heart of Ancient Italy, a major exhibition of some 200 works from 30 international museums, will open May 2, 2026 at the Legion of Honor in San Francisco, then move to the San Antonio Museum of Art in Texas.
Many of the ‘powerful items’ will be included in the exhibition curated by the Museum of Fine Arts’ head of antiquities, Renée Dreyfus. Among the most important loans are grave goods from the Regolini-Galassi tomb in Cerveteri, one of the richest tombs in the Etruscan world, arriving from the Etruscan Gregorian Museum, amidst a section dedicated to the role of women, traditionally superior to other societies of the ancient Mediterranean. For the first time in the US, the Zagreb Linen Book will also be on display, the oldest known Etruscan text: a calendar from the 3rd century BC with rituals and sacrifices associated with different days of the year.
“The Etruscans left us a legacy of extraordinary gold and bronze works, creating objects of unparalleled beauty,” said Thomas P. Campbell, director of the San Francisco Museum of Fine Arts. In the US, the last exhibition on the Etruscans began in 2009, when the Meadows Museum in Dallas presented New Light on the Etruscans at the Poggio Colla excavations in Mugello. Dreyfus aimed to bring to the fore cultures that were “little known or even unknown to the general public” in the United States. Also on display are finds with inscriptions, a vase with the Etruscan alphabet, and an urn lid with a reclining man holding a heart, a ritual tool of divination.
The highlight will come from San Casciano: the ambassador of the most sensational archaeological discovery of recent years, bronzes from an ancient thermal sanctuary have only traveled abroad once, for an exhibition at the Staatliche in Berlin that has just ended. “Having a single work from San Casciano is a tremendous accomplishment for the museum,” Dreyfus said. Among the most anticipated and spectacular works, there will also be a libation cup by Palestrina decorated with 250,000 gold grains, on loan from the Victoria and Albert Museum in London, but the curators, working with etruscologist Richard Daniel De Puma, professor emeritus at the University of Iowa, have also selected works from the museum’s vaults. “We want to introduce little-known objects to the experts themselves,” he explains.
The San Francisco Museum of Fine Arts – which brought together de Young and the Legion of Honor – since its founding has housed a large collection of ancient art from Egypt, the Near East, Greece, the Aegean, Etruria and Rome. Only ten of the approximately 200 pieces on display come from the museum’s collection.
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