The Neo-Orientalizing Beasts of Late Archaic Caere (20 min)

Presenters

Daniele Federico Maras, Ministry of Culture, Rome, Italy

Abstract

The terracotta roof decoration of Temple B in Pyrgi is evidence of a short-lived neo-Orientalizing phase in the elite’s imagery at Caere in the last decade of the sixth century B.C.E., at the time of Thefarie Velianas. In this context, Near-Eastern figural schemes such as the “bird-headed deity” and the “flaming hero” were reinterpreted as astral symbols, and the figures of the master and mistress of animals were transformed into Hera and Heracles driving chariots, symbolized by pairs of rearing horses depicted at their sides. It is not surprising, therefore, that several series of painted terracotta plaques decorating sacred buildings of Caere depicted wild beasts in sequences that remind us of the Corinthian and Etrusco-Corinthian vessels of the seventh century B.C.E.

Significantly, the ideology and imagery of wild animals and fantastic beasts is shared by a part of the painted tombs at Tarquinia, with coincidences that include not only the choice of subjects but also some peculiar iconographic elements. For instance, the uncanny aspect of the bulls of the namesake tomb at Tarquinia find perfect comparanda in the bulls depicted on some terracotta plaques at Caere.

The insistence on wild animals is not just a mark of an old-fashioned figural style, but is a remainder of the ancient ideology of hunting and power over nature that the Etruscan elites inherited from the past. Deers, lions, panthers, big dogs, and so on appear both in sacred and funerary contexts, respectively at Caere and Tarquinia, suggesting that the ideology of the heroic hunting belonged in the cultural background of Etruscan aristocrats, as a revival of the ideals of the “age of princes,” even in the different sociopolitical context of the late Archaic period, in parallel with renewed international connections with Carthage and the increasing trade network of Attic pottery.