- Vincent Jolivet –
The ceramic forms show a profound break with the previous period: from the third
century, the black-gloss ceramic, long known, appears everywhere, and forms of “Campanian
ware,” adapt to a wider audience; for a long time produced in a multitude of small factories,
they were dominated, from the early second century, by a group of workshops related to
Campanian B, of which Etruria becomes a major production center. This strong trend
undergoes a new acceleration with nearly industrial products that appear in Arezzo, imitating
famous Eastern red vases, around the mid-fi rst century (the tyrrhena sigilla, for Horace, Epodes
2.2.180); the workshop, with its different subsidiaries, supplied most of the fi ne table-ware
of the classical world for nearly a century. All of these products available at low prices in a
range of quite varied forms are widely disseminated and poorly differentiated in their decor.
Clay and stone (and, just after the founding of Luni, marble from the Apuan Alps) were also
involved: for funerary goods, and for the manufacture of sarcophagi or urns, which are mostly
products of widely repetitive series. Yet, their different degrees of refi nement and fi nish show
that they were produced for different levels of the population, as their context of discovery
can sometimes indicate: in Tarquinia (stone sarcophagi), Tuscania (terracotta sarcophagi),
Volterra (urns of alabaster and tufa) or Chiusi (multicolored terracotta urns) (Fig. 8.19).
These different classes of objects, deeply foreign to Roman art, as were the burial customs to
which they bear witness, attest the vitality and originality of genuine Etruscan production
(Fig. 8.20), although it often betrays a strong infl uence from Greece, with or without the
mediation of Rome. Metal objects, especially bronzes, cease to appear in large numbers in
tombs and instead of banquet dishes objects connected with the toilette appear: mirrors (Fig.
8.21) and strigils, still products of Etruria and of southern Etruria particularly, but whose
workshops are increasingly challenged by those of Praeneste, which dominates the parallel
production of cistae (Fig. 8.22). But the Etruscan cities retained a prestige production, as
evidenced by different outright masterpieces of the Hellenistic period in Etruria such as the
Chimaera of Arezzo or the Oratore (Fig. 8.23; see Chapter 57), and their artisans contributed,
with Rome, to the development of portraiture (see Chapter 55).
Figure 8.19 The travertino urns of Strozzacaponi, found in recent excavations of a large Hellenistic
cemetery, still offer a very rich polychromy which offsets reliefs that are very stereotyped but often relate to
Greek myths: here, the Seven against Thebae (tomb of the Funerary Bed, urn 6; Cenciaioli 2010, p. 29).