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Turan's Own Adonis

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Turan's Own Adonis

Alongside her appearance in the Judgement of Paris and her general role as the Etruscan counterpart of Aphrodite, Turan has a specific mythic consort of her own drawn from the same story cycle that gave Greek Aphrodite her beloved Adonis: Atunis, the Etruscan rendering of the same figure, a beautiful young mortal loved by the goddess and shown together with her on a number of engraved mirrors in scenes of embrace and courtship that closely parallel, without simply copying, the visual conventions Greek and later Roman art used for Aphrodite and Adonis. The pairing of Turan and Atunis demonstrates that the Etruscans received not merely the general iconographic type of a winged, beautiful love goddess but the specific attendant mythology surrounding her, including a doomed mortal lover, and reworked it into their own visual and narrative tradition on the engraved bronze mirrors that served, in Etruscan households, something like the function later Greek vase painting served for transmitting mythological scenes into everyday domestic objects.

Etruscan versions of the Turan and Atunis story do not survive as connected written narrative the way the Greek Adonis myth does in later mythographers, and what can be reconstructed comes entirely from reading the visual conventions of the mirror scenes themselves, comparing recurring poses, attendant figures and inscriptions naming the pair, rather than from any surviving Etruscan text describing the myth in words. This makes Turan and Atunis a useful reminder that a considerable portion of what is known about Etruscan mythology exists only in this visual, captioned form, requiring art historians to reconstruct narrative content that a Greek audience would simply have read in a poem.

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