“
T
he Etruscans, as everyone knows, were the people who occupied the middle of Italy in early Roman
days, and whom the Romans, in their usual neighborly fashion, wiped out entirely.” So opens D. H.
Lawrence’s witty and sensitive Etruscan Places (1929), one of the earliest modern essays to value Etruscan
art highly and treat it as much more than a debased form of the art of the contemporaneous city-states
of Greece and southern Italy. (“Most people despise everything B.C. that isn’t Greek, for the good reason
that it ought to be Greek if it isn’t,” Lawrence quipped.) Today it is no longer necessary to argue the im-
portance and originality of Etruscan art. Deeply influenced by, yet different from, Greek art, Etruscan
sculpture, painting, and architecture not only provided the models for early Roman art and architecture
but also had an impact on the art of the Greek colonies in Italy.
The heartland of the Etruscans was the territory between the Arno and Tiber rivers of central Italy
(MAP9-1). The lush green hills still bear their name—Tuscany, the land of the people the Romans called
Tusci, the region centered on Florence, birthplace of Renaissance art. So do the blue waters that splash
against the western coastline of the Italian peninsula, for the Greeks referred to the Etruscans as Tyrrhe-
nians and gave that name to the sea off Tuscany. The origin of the Tusci—the enduring “mystery of the
Etruscans”—is not clear at all, however. Their language, although written in a Greek-derived script and ex-
tant in inscriptions that are still in large part obscure, is unrelated to the Indo-European linguistic fam-
ily. Ancient authors, as fascinated by the puzzle as modern scholars are, generally felt that the Etruscans
emigrated from the east. Herodotus, the fifth-century BCEGreek historian, specifically declared they came
from Lydia in Asia Minor and that King Tyrsenos was their leader—hence their Greek name. But Dionysius
of Halicarnassus, writing at the end of the first century BCE, maintained the Tusci were native Italians.
And some modern researchers have theorized the Etruscans came into Italy from the north.
All these theories are current today, and no doubt some truth exists in each one. The Etruscan people
of historical times were very likely the result of a gradual fusion of native and immigrant populations.
This mixing of peoples occurred in the early first millennium BCE. At that time the Etruscans emerged as
a people with a culture related to but distinct from those of other Italic peoples and from the civilizations
of Greece and the Orient.
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