Why most of it comes from tombs
Etruscan art served three worlds, the tomb, the city and the sanctuary, but the tombs kept the most. The Etruscans imagined the afterlife as an extension of life, so they furnished the tomb like a home, with jewellery, games, tableware and even food, and the earth protected all of it. They even had a word, suthina, “for the tomb”, which they wrote on objects to turn a mirror or a cup into a gift for the dead. Since the Etruscans left us no literature, these objects are also our main source on how they lived.
Clay that could become a god
Terracotta (Italian for “baked earth”) is clay fired in a kiln, the same material as a flowerpot. The Etruscans made it their noble material. In the sixth century BCE Veii was the greatest centre of terracotta sculpture in Etruria, and its workshops made life-size statues to stand on the ridges of temple roofs. The Apollo of Veii, almost two metres tall, was one of a group set on the roof of the temple at Portonaccio: from below you would have seen the god striding along the sky line, painted in bright colours.
Clay was also the material of the dead. The Sarcophagus of the Spouses, from a tomb at Cerveteri, shows a husband and wife reclining on a dining couch in an embrace, about to drink wine together. They smile the so-called archaic smile, and their eyes, now empty, were once painted black and white.
Bronze, the Etruscan speciality
Etruria was rich in copper and iron, and the Etruscans became master bronzesmiths who sold their work all over the Mediterranean. They hammered it into reliefs, cast it into statues and engraved it. The Monteleone chariot in New York, found in 1902 in a tomb under a mound, is the best preserved chariot from Italy before the Romans; it was a parade vehicle for a person of rank, never meant for battle, and its panels are decorated in repoussé, that is, beaten from behind so the figures stand out on the front. The Chimera of Arezzo, a fifth-century BCE bronze monster about 80 cm high, is now in Florence.
The most personal bronzes are mirrors. Their polished face reflected the owner, and the back was engraved with scenes from myth, each figure labelled with its name. Those labels are how we know the Etruscan gods: some names are Greek ones adapted, like Aplu for Apollo or Ercle for Herakles, but Zeus was Tinia and Aphrodite was Turan.
Black pottery and Greek vases
The Etruscan pottery you will recognise first is bucchero, shiny black ware whose shapes copy metal vessels. Its colour is not paint: the pots were fired in a kiln starved of oxygen, which turns the iron in the clay from red to black. Next to it, Etruscan tombs held something else in large numbers: painted Greek vases, which the Etruscans prized and collected.
Rooms painted for the dead
Where the Etruscans could, they painted the walls of the tomb itself. Tarquinia has about 200 painted tombs, the oldest from the seventh century BCE. The figures are painted flat, in two dimensions, and the scenes are lively: in the Tomb of the Augurs, painted in the late sixth century BCE, there are wrestlers, dancers, musicians and a banquet, and those subjects stayed standard for a long time. Later the mood darkened, and the underworld is shown as more threatening.
Greek models, Etruscan taste
Is Etruscan art just Greek art made in Italy? No. The Etruscans were in contact with the Greeks from very early on, took over myths and shapes, and Greek potters influenced their painted wares. But the way they adapted Greek images is complex, and the results often look different from their models. In the last centuries, carved sarcophagi and cinerary urns, with realistic portraits of the dead, became an especially rich body of work, and that taste for real faces passed on to Roman portraiture.
Where to see Etruscan art
The Museo Nazionale Etrusco di Villa Giulia in Rome has the Apollo of Veii and the Sarcophagus of the Spouses; the Chimera of Arezzo is in the Museo Archeologico Nazionale in Florence. In New York, gallery 170 of the Metropolitan Museum shows the Monteleone chariot with the rest of its tomb furnishings, and the Museo Gregoriano Etrusco in the Vatican has the gold of the Regolini-Galassi Tomb.
Sources
- The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Heilbrunn Timeline: C. and S. Hemingway, “Etruscan Art” (2004); T. Huntsman, “Etruscan Language and Inscriptions” (2013); records 03.23.1 and 09.221.16.
- Museo Nazionale Etrusco di Villa Giulia: records of the Apollo of Veii and the Sarcophagus of the Spouses.
- Encyclopaedia Britannica, “Etruscan art”, “Etruscan religion”, “Bucchero ware”, “Veii”, “Tomb of the Augurs”.
- UNESCO World Heritage Centre, “Etruscan Necropolises of Cerveteri and Tarquinia” (1158).
