The Etruscan World (Routledge Worlds)

• chapter 59: Science as art –

Figure 59.6 Swaddled infant, from Veii. Antikensammlung, Inv. T III-38 (formerly Sammlung

Stieda), Giessen. Photo Matthias Recke.

MATERIAL AND PRODUCTION

The bulk of the Etrusco-Italic anatomical votives consists of fi red clay, thus terracotta.
Rarely, there are representations in bronze, and then they are especially concentrated in
the northern Etruscan region. The terracotta votives are usually moldmade, less often
turned on a potter’s wheel or hand-modeled. A combination of the various techniques is
common. Thus moldmade objects can be reworked by hand or completed with appliqués,
and hand- or wheel-made fi gures may be completed with parts drawn from a mold. Most
of the extant anatomical votives however are obtained without extensive reworking or
retouching. Since the production of such votives is a serial mass-production technique,
there is usually little room for expression of artistic merit. In fact the molds were often
used for a very long period of production, until they were heavily worn and details were
only faintly visible. Differences in size between examples of identical types show that new
molds were drawn from extant impressions, so that their products are then signifi cantly
smaller than the originals, due to the natural shrinkage of the clay in fi ring.^10 Individual
molds and details thus become blurred over succeeding mold-generations. This means
that an art-historical, stylistic dating technique can only be reliably applied to the
original version of a mold. And this applies in principle only for the representations of
heads (see Figs. 59.1–2), since the anatomical votives in the narrow sense do not conform
to a stylistic dating.^11
The fact that anatomical votives were moldmade in large numbers means that they
were stock productions and have no real claim to individuality. That might be different
in the case of large, expensive votives like the life-size statues and torsos with visible
internal organs, because here at least the body was usually individually fi nished by hand
(Fig. 59.7, see Fig. 59.13). The extant examples show, however, that even in these cases
the heads were taken from the repertoire of stock head-types already to hand.^12