- chapter 48: Foreign artists in Etruria –
and its social, aristocratic implications), or that represent scenes of myth which usually
have a symbolic value and recall particular political and/or social situations: these vases
are analogues to the Greek patterns for the shape, function, and decoration.
- The impact on an aesthetic and cultural level exercised by active foreign masters in
Etruria is more pronounced than that simply exerted by objects coming from the
same region as the artists. The presence of people implies the direct and immediate
transmission of techniques, customs, ideas. The process of acculturation is broader
and deeper, fl owing from contact between the two worlds, and generates a whole
series of positive results, when there are real persons as protagonists. The comparison
between Etruria and Magna Graecia or Sicily is instructive: here, through the Greek
colonial movement, there is a sort of peripheral Hellenism, where customs and mores
of the motherland are preserved, while in Etruria acculturation develops on a local
base that still is never obliterated and always emerges in a clear manner.
- Etruria is the destination for – in addition to master-artists – merchants (one thinks of
Demaratos or Sostratos), for commercial agents, especially in the port-sanctuaries, for
artisans and slaves, all of whom contributed – in different ways – to the acculturation
of Etruria. It is natural, as already noted, that the master artist, as a highly trained man,
would have an impact on those who interacted with him. A different situation was
produced by the artists who worked in the homeland, manufacturing objects for export
to a foreign country – and for consumers from a different culture than their own. Also
different is the case of the master who works on commission in his own country for
foreign customers, usually through the intermediary of a commercial broker.
- Ultimately, there surfaces the question of whether the foreign masters operating
in Etruria produced works that belonged to the art of their homeland, or to the
corpus of Etruscan art. Certainly, as we have had occasion to note above, the style,
iconography, and techniques of their products belong to the homeland, but the
master, while he worked in Etruria, inevitably adapted to the local context, to the
taste and requirements of his clientele, for whom an iconography might be altered
to give it a new meaning. Eloquent examples are found in the works of the middle
decades of the seventh century bc Phoenician master mentioned above, active at
Caere. From his workshop came the gilded silver kotyle from the Tomba del Duce of
Vetulonia (Fig. 48.7): the shape of the vase is of Corinthian origin; the technique of
incision on precious sheet-metal, the distribution of the decoration in parallel, low
friezes that cover the entire surface of the vase, and the fi gural repertoire of animals
and hybrid creatures are all Phoenician in origin.
Figure 48.7 Silver kotyle from Tomba del Duce, Vetulonia. Florence Museo Archeologico inv. 73582,
after drawing from I. Falchi, Vetulonia e la sua necropoli antichissima (Florence, 1891), reproduced in
G. Camporeale, La Tomba del Duce (Florence: Olschki, 1967) p. 99 no. 68, pl. B no. 3.
