- Françoise Gaultier –
grave goods there continue to furnish fi ne pieces. Recovery is, however, quite clear in
southern Etruria from the fourth century bc. Everywhere the old aristocracies make a new
display of wealth and foster the creation of new types, whether original or infl uenced in
the last decades of the century by Macedonian and Tarentine fashions.
Symbols of victory as in Greece, the Etruscan wreaths/crowns,^50 stamped in the form
of bay leaves, olive, ivy, oak, vine or myrtle, usually arranged in groups attached to
a support, have a specifi c typology. Their extreme fragility surely reserves them for a
ceremonial or funerary usage. Mixed with arms or jewelry, with banquet vessels in male
or female burials, they evoke both the social status of the deceased during his earthly life
and his victory over death. Associated with arms, the crown evokes both the military
triumphs of the dead warrior and his status as a hero and his identifi cation with divinity
in the Afterlife. Associated with the image of the banquet it also refers to Dionysian
cult, which unites the themes of symposium and triumph, or some mystery religion
such as Orphism, which refl ects his vision of bliss in the hereafter through the image
of an eternal banquet and ordained to adorn the body of the deceased with a crown for
his participation in the banquet of the blessed.^51 The manufacture of these crowns is
attributed in large part to the workshops of Vulci, and for the rest of them, to Chiusi,
Populonia and Volterra, and in a more hypothetical fashion to the factories of Perugia
and Spina.^52 It is usually assumed that these are the same workshops that produced the
diadems, mainly those of Vulci, from which come examples of very high quality, or bullae,
two-piece discoidal amulets with stamped decoration from Greek mythology (Fig. 50.8),
that appear in the fi rst half of the fourth century bc alongside plain bullae, undecorated
or with decoration limited to the zone of the suspension bail.
The most common type of earrings in the fourth century bc are the a grappolo earrings.^53
This female attire is often reproduced in antefi xes, votive terracottas and tomb paintings.
The simplest type, also regarded as the oldest (Fig. 50.9), is composed of an upper
horseshoe-shaped element, decorated with simple lines of stamped (“dapped”) dimples,
Figure 50.8 Bulla: contest between Thetis and Peleus (?) between two female fi gures.
First half of the fourth century bc. Paris, Musée du Louvre, Bj 745 © RMN (Musée du Louvre)
Gérard Blot/Christian Jean.