Lecture: Examining the Elusive Etruscans with Renée Dreyfus

Renée Dreyfus is coming to The San Antonio Museum of Art on Saturday, October 31, for a talk titled Examining the Elusive Etruscans. It runs from 7 PM to 8 PM, and it's free with admission to the museum.

The talk is part of the exhibition The Etruscans: From the Heart of Ancient Italy, which brings together recent archaeological finds, current scholarship, and new advances in understanding the Etruscan language. If you're not familiar with them, the Etruscans were a pre-Roman civilization in central Italy, active from roughly 900 to 100 BC. They built autonomous city-states across what are now Tuscany, Lazio, and Umbria, and they left an outsized mark on Western architecture, engineering, urban planning, and art. The "elusive" part of the title comes from the fact that their own written records have largely not survived, so much of what we know comes from the things they left behind rather than what they wrote down.

Dreyfus is the George and Judy Marcus Distinguished Curator and Curator in Charge of Ancient Art at the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco. She co-founded the Ancient Art Council in 1997 with the help of the Elios Society and has since organized more than twenty exhibitions, including Treasures of Tutankhamun in 1979 and Tutankhamun and the Golden Age of the Pharaohs in 2009. She's spent a lot of her career working with ancient art, so she's a natural fit for a talk that connects archaeological finds with the broader history of a civilization that's often overshadowed by the Rome that followed it.

The lecture is at The San Antonio Museum of Art (SAMA), 200 W Jones Ave, on Saturday, October 31, from 7 PM to 8 PM. It's free with admission, so you'll just need your museum ticket to get in.