- chapter 63: Modern approaches to Etruscan culture –
England. It spread to wall and crockery decoration. In 1769, Josiah Wedgwood created
a new factory of decorative vases in Burslem in Staffordshire, it was called the Etruria
works, and shortly before 1768, he developed a fi ne-grained black stoneware he described
as “Etruscan.” Under the name of Artes Etruriae renascuntur, series of “Etruscan” vases
were made, their decoration inspired by the Hamilton collection, but most of them were
imitations of Greek art, not Etruscan art. The Adam brothers created an “Etruscan room”
(1775–1777) for Osterley Park, an Elizabethan mansion on the outskirts of London.
In France, Jean-Jacques Lagrenée made tumblers with Etruscan handles and saucers
of Marie-Antoinette’s service, for the dairy of Versailles. Academies and learned societies
multiplied, such as the Etruscan Academy of Cortona, founded in 1726 by a Cortona
patrician, O. Baldelli, who owned a collection open to all scholars and who thus favored
the development of Etruscan studies. Every year, it elected its president who was conferred
the Etruscan title of lucumon; twice a month, the academicians, called “the very scholarly
and famous associates,” met during the “Cortona nights” and read “academic essays,”
published between 1738 and 1795, covering all the Etruscology subjects studied at the
time: origins, language, alphabet, relations with Hebrews, Lydians and Egyptians. In
1750, it opened one of the fi rst public collections. The Tuscan Academy of Science and
Letters “La Colombaria” was created in 1735 in Florence by A. F. Gori, a scholar in the
tradition of Florentine antiquarians, who published Museum Etruscum in Florence in three
volumes, from 1737 to 1743, when he published inscriptions found in Etruria. Indeed,
Gori collected Greek, Latin, Etruscan inscriptions, tracings and drawings. They were
used in particular to support his theories on the place of Etruscans. They were published
in the three volumes of Inscriptiones antiquae in Etruriae urbibus existantes, and in Difesa
dell’alfabeto degli antichi toscani.
After this, collections and research developed outside the territory of ancient Etruria. In
Verona, the Marquis S. Maffei gathered the important collections of Museum Maffeianum,
and published them in his Museum Veronense in 1749. For many of those collectors, for
whom Greek easily became Etruscan and Roman became Greek, the enthusiasm of
discovery was a universal excuse, which lasted until the publication in 1789 by the Jesuit
abbot, Luigi Lanzi, deputy keeper of the gallery of antiquities of Florence, of a book
that revolutionized Etruscology. In Saggio di lingua etrusca e di altre antiche d’Italia Lanzi
correctly interpreted almost the whole alphabet, and put the precise role and relation of
Etruscans with Roman civilization and especially Greek civilization back in its context.
He understood that a good many vases described as Etruscan were in fact Greek, a
revolutionary idea at the time, and that they were made to order by Greeks. He made an
inventory of 500 Etruscan inscriptions.
IDEAL OF AN ETRUSCAN SCIENCE IN THE
NINETEENTH CENTURYThrough the rigor of his reasoning and through the widening of historical perspectives,
Lanzi’s work launched “scientifi c” Etruscology. It developed slowly in the nineteenth
century. The attempt at a critical examination of sources was thus carried on by G. Micali
in 1810 in L’Italia avanti il dominio dei Romani, in which he tried to bring out the specifi c
contribution of the peoples Roman civilization had originally taken over, but the book
was considered as an anti-Bonapartist pamphlet and, in the course of the century, because
of its anti-Roman bias it became one of the bibles of the Risorgimento and was met with