Why five phases, and why Greek names?
The Etruscans left no histories, so their timeline is built from tombs, objects and the accounts of Greek and Roman writers. Archaeologists borrowed the labels of Greek art history because the two worlds were in constant contact and their objects can be dated against each other. The dates below follow the Metropolitan Museum’s timeline; other books move the boundaries by a few decades, which is normal for periods defined by changes of style.
Villanovan: villages on the plateaus (from about 900 BCE)
The culture of the people of Etruria grew out of an Iron Age culture called Villanovan. Its traces are mostly cemeteries. At Veii, a group of Villanovan villages occupied the plateau in the ninth and eighth centuries BCE, with their graves on the rocky ground around it; at Tarquinia the oldest remains are ninth-century well tombs, and at Cerveteri the Banditaccia necropolis begins in the same century. At Veii, at least, the city grew out of a cluster of villages.
Orientalizing: gold from the east (about 750-575 BCE)
Trade made Etruria rich. Its copper and iron fed an exchange with the Greek and Phoenician world that brought in ivory, amber, ostrich eggs and the taste for eastern motifs that gives the phase its name. The Etruscans began to write, in the seventh century BCE, with an alphabet borrowed from the Greeks. The black pottery called bucchero reached its finest form, thin and polished like metal.
The Regolini-Galassi Tomb at Cerveteri shows what this wealth looked like. Found intact in 1836 and dated to about 675-650 BCE, it lay under an earth mound about 48 metres across. A woman of royal rank was buried in the lower chamber with a gold pectoral, a large fibula, bracelets and a necklace, silver and bronze vessels, and a Phoenician-Cypriot cup; in the antechamber stood a funeral bed, shields and three carts. A man’s ashes lay in a side cell.
Archaic: the Etruscans at their height (about 575-490 BCE)
In the sixth century BCE Etruscan power stretched from the Po valley to Campania. In the north the Etruscans made Bologna, which they called Felsina, their regional capital and founded a new town at Marzabotto; in the south Capua became their main city. At sea they allied with Carthage: around 535 BCE an Etruscan and Carthaginian fleet fought the Greeks off Alalia, in Corsica, and the Greeks gave up the island.
This is also when, according to Roman tradition, an Etruscan family sat on the throne of Rome. The Tarquins are said to have ruled from 616 BCE until the expulsion of the last king in 509 BCE, and Rome’s first kings left the city its great drain and the temple on the Capitol. Art matched the power: painted tombs at Tarquinia, the terracotta Apollo of Veii (about 510-500 BCE), and the gold tablets of Pyrgi, in which a ruler of Cerveteri dedicates a sanctuary in Etruscan and in Phoenician.
The first setbacks came in the same decades. In 524 BCE the Etruscans failed to take the Greek city of Cumae, and after 509 the road between Etruria and its towns in Campania, which ran through Latium, was cut.
Classical: Rome closes in (about 490-300 BCE)
The Etruscan bronze workshops were still at their best, as in the Archaic phase, but politically the cities lost ground. Rome took Veii, its nearest Etruscan rival, in 396 BCE after a long siege. Tarquinia fought Rome in 394, 388 and 358-351 BCE and was finally overcome in 311. In the north, Marzabotto was abandoned around the middle of the fourth century BCE, when Celtic peoples moved into the Po valley.
Hellenistic: becoming Roman (about 300 BCE to the first century BCE)
The last phase is one of autonomy lost and art that carried on. Families still filled their tombs with carved sarcophagi and cinerary urns, often carved in high relief, and these are some of the best Etruscan works of the period. Religion kept its prestige: the bronze model of a sheep’s liver found near Piacenza, inscribed with the names of gods and made for the diviners who read the livers of sacrificed animals, dates to the second or first century BCE. Politically, Etruria was Roman. Tarquinia received a Roman colony in 181 BCE, Etruscan culture merged into Roman culture by the end of the second century, and in 90 BCE, during the Social War, Roman citizenship was extended to the Italian communities.
Where to see the phases
The Museo Gregoriano Etrusco in the Vatican Museums shows the Orientalizing gold of the Regolini-Galassi Tomb in Room II; the Museo Nazionale Etrusco di Villa Giulia in Rome covers the Archaic phase, with the Apollo of Veii and the Pyrgi tablets. The Liver of Piacenza is in the civic museums of Palazzo Farnese in Piacenza, and the Metropolitan Museum in New York has a good run of bucchero.
Sources
- The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Heilbrunn Timeline: C. and S. Hemingway, “Etruscan Art” (2004); record 21.88.146.
- Vatican Museums, Museo Gregoriano Etrusco, Room II: “Regolini-Galassi Tomb”.
- Museo Nazionale Etrusco di Villa Giulia: records of the Apollo of Veii and the Pyrgi tablets.
- Encyclopaedia Britannica, “Etruscan”, “Veii”, “Tarquinia”, “Bucchero ware”, “Social War”.
- Città metropolitana di Bologna, museum guide: Museo Nazionale Etrusco Pompeo Aria and the Etruscan city of Kainua (Marzabotto).
- Musei Civici di Palazzo Farnese, Piacenza, and VisitPiacenza: “The Etruscan Liver”.
