Skip to main content
The Etruscan (L'etrusco)
Artist
Michelangelo Pistoletto
(Italian, born 1933)
Date1976
MediumBronze and mirror
DimensionsOverall: 120 × 84 × 47 in. (304.8 × 213.36 × 119.38 cm)
Credit LineCollection of the Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth, Museum purchase, The Friends of Art Endowment Fund
Object number2001.11
Status
Not on viewCopyright© Michelangelo Pistoletto. Courtesy of the artist, Luhring Augustine, New York, Galleria Christian Stein, Milan, and Simon Lee Gallery, London / Hong Kong
Category
Label TextFor Michelangelo Pistoletto, mirrors represent a doorway into ideas of space and time. The artist’s interest in mirrors and their conceptual possibilities began in the mid-1950s, when he was painting self-portraits from his reflection. One day he realized that a mirror could bring the living world into a painting, so there was no need for a painted background. Pistoletto decided that his art should not constitute an isolated, privileged experience but should instead reflect the larger world.
The Etruscan (L’etrusco), 1976, is a freestanding, life-size bronze sculpture of a man whose raised arm reaches toward the surface of a large wall-mounted mirror that reflects not only the statue but also the spectator and much of the surrounding space. In both title and materials, the work recalls the Etruscan culture’s bronze mirror-making expertise. The work incorporates layers of time: Pistoletto recast The Orator, a representation of Etrusco-Roman senator Aule Metele from about 100 BCE, nearly two millennia after its creation and two centuries after its rediscovery near Perugia. The sculpture’s history and, by virtue of the mirror, the spectator’s, simultaneously diverge and connect.
Pistoletto invites us to become an integral part of the image we are contemplating. Through this reflection, it is the artist’s hope that we will attempt to locate ourselves in an expansive continuum of space and time.
The Etruscan (L’etrusco), 1976, is a freestanding, life-size bronze sculpture of a man whose raised arm reaches toward the surface of a large wall-mounted mirror that reflects not only the statue but also the spectator and much of the surrounding space. In both title and materials, the work recalls the Etruscan culture’s bronze mirror-making expertise. The work incorporates layers of time: Pistoletto recast The Orator, a representation of Etrusco-Roman senator Aule Metele from about 100 BCE, nearly two millennia after its creation and two centuries after its rediscovery near Perugia. The sculpture’s history and, by virtue of the mirror, the spectator’s, simultaneously diverge and connect.
Pistoletto invites us to become an integral part of the image we are contemplating. Through this reflection, it is the artist’s hope that we will attempt to locate ourselves in an expansive continuum of space and time.