The largest U.S. showcase of ancient Italy's fascinating Etruscan culture debuts at Legion of Honor.

A childhood visit to the Metropolitan Museum sparked a lasting fascination with Etruscan art and tomb paintings. Later discoveries about a statue being a fake did not reduce interest, and copying wall paintings became a personal way to engage with the culture. A major exhibition, The Etruscans: From the Heart of Ancient Italy, brings together about 150 works borrowed from 28 institutions, including major museums and the Vatican. The show emphasizes advances in engineering and architecture alongside artistic achievements. The curator created the museum’s antiquities department in 1977 and has since organized more than 20 exhibitions, including major Tutankhamun-related shows that drew large crowds and inspired popular culture.

"Growing up in New York, Dreyfus remembers going to the Metropolitan Museum as a child and looking up at an eight-foot-tall statue of an Etruscan warrior. How could you not be impressed? she says. Years later, they found out it was a fake, but I was already hooked. I remember copying wall paintings from the Etruscan tombs and giving them to my parents to put on the refrigerator. I've always been intrigued by them, but the more I learned, the more I realized how important they are and they should not be overlooked."

"Now, after doing the hard work of borrowing about 150 pieces from 28 institutions including the Vatican, the Hearst Museum of Anthropology at UC Berkeley, the British Museum, and the Metropolitan Museum, Dreyfus has created the most comprehensive exhibition on the culture yet in the United States. The Etruscans: From the Heart of Ancient Italy is about the huge advances in engineering and architecture made by the still somewhat mysterious people, along with their artistic achievements."

"When she started at the museum in 1977, there was no antiquities department; she created it. Since then, she has curated more than 20 exhibitions, starting with Theophilos Hope D'Estrella: The Magic Lantern Man, about a deaf photographer, in 1978. The next year she curated the de Young's blockbuster show, Treasures of Tutankhamun, which 1.3 million Egypt-crazed visitors attended in just four months."

"The exhibition inspired wild and crazy guy Steve Martin's hit song King Tut (Now, if I'd known / They'd line up just to see him / I'd taken all my money / And bought me a museum), which he performed on Saturday Night Live. Thirty years later, in 2009, she organized Tutankhamun and the Golden Age of the Pharaohs at the same museum."

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