- Marie-Laurence Haack –
Interest for Etruscan culture faded away but it came back with a vengeance in the
seventeenth century thanks to the infl uence of the Medici. Between 1616 and 1619,
upon the request of Cosimo I, the Scottish humanist T. Dempster, professor of law at
the University of Pisa, wrote a monograph in seven books on the Etruscans, De Etruria
regali (see Chapter 62). Eventually, the book was published in two volumes in Florence,
between 1720 and 1726, and then dedicated to Cosimo III and his successor, Gian
Gastone de Medici, at the time when the dynasty, in steep decline, was attempting to
strengthen its hand by insisting on its so-called Etruscan origins. The manuscript caught
the attention of Sir T. Coke, an English nobleman, who brought it back from his grand
tour in Italy; it was then sent back to Florence and, thanks to Coke’s money, published by
F. Buonarroti, a Florentine and a descendant of Michelangelo who took charge of the 93
plates illustrating Etruscan monuments known at the time. The published book turned
out to be scholarly after all, thanks to Dempster, who divided it into sections on the
customs, the history, the inventions and the cities that have vanished. Dempster did the
real work of a philologist, while not questioning the validity of ancient literary sources,
since he took up again the idea of Etruscan indigenous identity aired by Dionysius of
Halicarnassus and underlined the difference between Etruscan and the other languages
of the ancient world. He did not believe in the idea of an Aramaic origin for Etruscan, an
idea supported by Annio da Viterbo and by Giambullari.
COLLECTIONISM IN THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURYWe then go from a simple description to a systematic and reasoned inventory of
antiquities that reminds us of the work of B. de Montfaucon, L’Antiquité expliquée et
représentée en fi gures (1719–1724), which made up a real encyclopedic book and in which,
the language problem was treated as distinct from the script problem for the fi rst time.
The publication of Dempster’s work gave impetus to a whole movement of collecting
and Etruscomania fueled by new excavations, new collections and as a result, theoretical
treatises on every aspect of Etruscan history, art and civilization. New collections were
assembled, a thriving antiquities market developed, notables wanted their curio cabinet
and real private museums were created.
In Volterra, Mario Guarnacci (1701–1785) gathered a collection chiefl y made up of
urns discovered in the city and the surroundings. The abbot published three volumes of
Origini italiche, from 1767 to 1772, a highly scholarly work on the mythical and historical
origins of the fi rst peoples who lived in the Italian Peninsula. In this work, Guarnacci
asserted the primacy of Etruscans who were supposed to have represented the fi rst hotbed
of civilization in Italy. He wanted to show that arts and sciences were not imported from
Greece to Italy but exported from Italy to Greece. He reproached the Romans for being
ungrateful to the Etruscans even though they owed them their laws, their arts, their
monuments and their rites. In the same manner in the second half of the eighteenth^
century, in France, the Count of Caylus gathered a huge collection, which was published
in seven volumes: Recueil d’antiquités égyptiennes, étrusques, grecques, romaines et gauloises; it
was published in Paris between 1752 and 1767, and Sir W. Hamilton, British ambassador
at the court of Naples, took advantage of his stay in Italy to assemble two big collections
of Greek vases found in Campania that were described as Etruscan in their publication by
P. F. d’Hancarville, Antiquités étrusques, grecques, et romaines tirées du cabinet de M. Hamilton
à Naples, 1766–1767. So, under Hamilton’s infl uence, an “Etruscan taste” was born in