by Lian Slayford-Wei

Created on: April 05, 2010

The Etruscan Love of Athenian Pottery

Excavations in Italy have shown over 30,000 pieces of Athenian pottery surviving from Etruscan tombs, the vast amount dating from the fifth and sixth centuries BCE. When looking at these high numbers, we have to ask ourselves why the Etruscans were so attracted to Athenian pottery.

Careful studies have shown that some Athenian pottery was specifically intended for the Etruscan market. Scholars have unearthed an Athenian workshop dating to the late sixth century BCE. Here they created pottery which was fashioned after the native Etruscan bucchero pottery, and made different forms of pottery for the different markets in Etruria. For the Etruscans of Cerveteri they created a specific shape of amphora (the ‘Nikosthenic amphora’); for Vulci, two different forms of ladles (‘kyathos’) and for Chiusi and Orvieto, a shape of pyxis.

Not only were the shapes specifically fashioned for the Etruscan market, but some imagery too. 87% of the so-called ‘Tyrrhenian’ amphoras were almost certainly created in Athens, with their distinctive imagery of violence and sex. The so-called ‘Perizoma group’ (a late sixth century workshop in Athens) were known for their creating images of athletes in loin-cloths. These were more in the fashion of the Tomba delle Olimpiadi at Tarquninia (c. 530 BCE) rather than in the form of traditional Greek athletes. Again, unlike Greek pottery imagery, the Perizoma images show elite women participating and reclining drinkers on the ground. They also depict a series of scenes of armed dancers at funerals. These suggest then that these images were specifically produced for the Etruscan market.

Despite the arguments made by other scholars that the Athenian pottery was made for other markets, there was a definite Etruscan demand for Athenian pottery. We can clearly see this both in pottery and in other Etruscan media which show scenes of Greek life and mythology. This leads to the question whether the strong Athenian pottery manufacturing business was a product of Etruscan demand rather than the Athenian culture determining the demand themselves. This is not quite so straightforward when taking a closer look at the patterns of demand.

There were both demands for Athenian pottery for home consumption and for Etruscan exportation. For example, the Athenians would place the white-ground lekythoi in graves during the fifth century BCE. There are few instances of these found

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