Aristocrazia, potere e musica nell’Arte delle Situle

In Situla Ars, a small corpus differs from the standard production of these artefacts in the representation of music within the figurative narrative. The small number of findings and the lack of a specific multidisciplinary study have led to an absence of interpretation of the musical data characterising it. This contribution attempts to address the theme of the representation of music and musical instruments, combining the archaeological data and interpretation with a possible musicological interpretative reading. The aim is to establish the prerequisites for a forthcoming joint and integrated figurative analysis of this form of high artistic craftsmanship. The interpretation of musical instruments grants a further semantic level of meaning for a broader understanding of the figurative narrative and contributes to restoring the dynamics of cultural mobility that characterise the territory that this art produced and in which it developed and spread. Given the same archetypal themes depicted ‒ e.g. rites of passage to adulthood or alliances ‒ the type of instruments represented helps to show the possible influence of mixing/hybridisation, as the cultural and musical traces of Etruscan, Greek and Celtic matrixes imply, as well as the elements of Thracian and Phrygian tradition, in the case of the peripheral phenomenon of the point-boss technique.