- chapter 50: Etruscan jewelry –
carefully drawn by means of granulation. Sometimes too fragile to have actually been
worn, these jewels must have had an essentially ceremonial and/or funerary function. One
may recall in this context the famous disc-fi bula of the Regolini Galassi Tomb, which
repeats a form common in the Villanovan era, but its size – it measures more than 30 cm
in length – renders it practically unfi t for use (Fig. 6.20). We can also recall the fi bula
from a tomb in the necropolis of Tolle near Castelluccio di Pienza in the region of Chiusi,
today in the Louvre (Fig. 6.34). Exceptional, it bears an inscription, doubly meaningful
because writing is the preserve of the aristocracy and its mastery itself a sign of prestige.
This inscription: “I am the fi bula of Arath Velavesna, Mamurke Tursikina gave me” refers
to a practice well attested in archaic societies, the exchange of gifts between people of
high rank, used to seal a marriage alliance or to conclude a contract, a practice illustrated,
for example, in Book 23 of the Iliad, where a silver krater made by the Sidonians, given
to Thoas by the Phoenicians, then by the son of Jason to Patroklos to ransom Lycaon the
son of Priam, passes thus from hand to hand.
The accumulation of jewelry and the abundance of banquet vessels in gold and silver
that characterize female sets of jewels and the furnishings of the great “princely” tombs of
Etruria and Latium are not the expression of a simple taste for refi nement and pomp, they
must be understood as a symbolic representation and as an exhibition of the opulence and
power of the great families.
In the Archaic period the cities assert their authority: more widely distributed, wealth
is no longer hoarded (treasured), but invested in the activities and the structures of the
city, in the building of temples and the decoration of sanctuaries. Often still a great
refi nement, jewelry is now more discrete, but around the middle of the sixth century
bc, the rise of a new aristocratic class and the installation of Ionian populations fl eeing
the Persian menace then being exerted on the Greek cities of Asia Minor, gives rise to
a revival of jewelry. Often reproduced on the walls of the painted tombs of Tarquinia,
or in antefi xes or funerary monuments in terracotta, jewelry is also relatively common
in female burials of the second half of the sixth century bc. New types of jewelry are
emerging, some are local creations, many may be attributed to the artisans newly arrived
from Ionia: it is to their workshops established in southern Etruria that one attributes,
around 530 bc, the fi rst engraved gems in Etruria (see Chapter 51),^35 often mounted in
rings^36 and sometimes in pendants, and the introduction of disc-earrings and cartouche-
type fi nger-rings, or even the use of glass and hard stones.
Earrings are among the most common jewelry of the Archaic period. The barrel-
shaped earrings (in Italian a bauletto, “carpet-bag-shaped”) (Fig. 50.5) are widely diffused
between the mid-sixth century^37 and the early fi fth century bc through all of Etruria as
well as the Faliscan territory, and attested as far as Spain^38 and one can imagine several
production centers for this original creation of the Etruscan workshops. The earrings of
this type, consisting of a rectangular gold leaf folded on itself in a half-circle, overlapped
the earlobe, to which they were attached by a transverse gold wire. The front part of these
loops, which are decorated in granulation, fi ligree and stamping, can be decorated with
geometric and fl oral motifs, but also with fi gures of animals and more rarely with female
heads.^39 Their backs, less visible, are decorated simply with geometric patterns such as
parallel lines or a star. In the latest and most complex examples, a semicircular element
or a palmette masks the fastening system, and the sides are completely or partially closed.
The disc-shaped earrings (Fig. 50.6),^40 of East-Greek origin, are decorated with a
central motif and concentric friezes composed of geometric and fl oral motifs, bosses and