VOLCANIC LANDSCAPE WITH CRATERS

Extract

Most ancient Greek vases in modern collections were found in Etruscan tombs. To state this is not a revelation: however, it is a fact of provenance often overlooked or marginalized in discussion about Greek vases. Some years ago, by way of contributing to a Festschrift assembled in honour of my postgraduate mentor, Robert Cook, I attempted an explanation as to why so many Greek-made pots had been hoarded by the Etruscans: an explanation steered predominantly by the final funerary context of those vessels. Since then, a number of further studies relating to this phenomenon have been made, most notably by Christoph Reusser; and our archaeological understanding of how Greek vases were used by the Etruscans has become markedly more refined. Traditionally, the separation of Etruria into ‘cities’ and ‘cemeteries’ has favoured the generous material evidence of the cemeteries. Investigations of the elusive cities – including the major centres of Tarquinia and Cerveteri – now offer some opportunity to review the ways in which certain artefacts frequently found buried among the ‘community of the dead’ were also in active circulation amid the society of the living. The assemblage of a corpus of Etruscan inscriptions on Greek vases attests to one highly significant local and particular value accrued by these objects. And further to all this (or because of it), there has also been a palpable softening of the tendency, on the part of Classical art historians, to depict Etruria as a place where affluent barbarians took ‘whatever they were offered’ by trans-Mediterranean traders.