Etruscan Black Ware: Hut-urn and Bucchero
(British Museum).
At Chiusi an extraordinary development is manifested, which gradually obtained a monopoly. The city was far from the sea and Hellenic influences, and retained Oriental traditions. After the end of the sixth century all the varieties of bucchero were fused into one type, which lasted down to the end of the fourth century.[[2303]] The shapes include amphorae, trefoil-mouthed oinochoae, various forms of cups, bowls with raised handles and ladles (kyathi), table-utensils, basins imitating metal forms, braziers, and vases in the form of birds or fishes. They are ornamented with reliefs from top to bottom, the subjects being much the same as in the last group. The tops or covers are often in the form of female or cows’ heads, or surmounted by birds (cf. Plate [LVII]. fig. 5). The figures and ornaments are stamped in from moulds and fixed by some adhesive medium, incised designs being inserted to fill up the spaces. These reliefs are never found earlier than the period of Attic importations.
The subjects are derived as before from Greek, Egyptian, and Assyrian sources, the Oriental types being so much combined that they must evidently have come through the Phoenicians. Among the Greek subjects we find Theseus and the Minotaur, Perseus and the Gorgons, Pegasos and the Chimaera, warriors, etc. The animals and the four-winged figures are Assyrian in type, while Egypt supplies such types as Ptah, Anubis, and other animal-headed deities, and the female heads on the so-called Canopic jars.
There are here no signs of inventive genius. The technique is purely native, but all is founded on foreign models.[[2304]] The shapes are those of Ionia and the coast of Asia or of Athens. On the other hand, the development of the technique from the Villanuova pottery is certainly apparent. The Greeks, indeed, tried to imitate it at times, and bucchero ware is found at Rhodes and Naukratis. We may fairly lay down that Etruscan invention is limited to the perfecting of the technique and the combination of the borrowed elements and art-forms. Many of the flat reliefs seem to be copied from ivories, and the rounded reliefs are certainly from bronze repoussé work; in some cases we find traces of gilding, silvering, and colour, which have been intended to reproduce the appearance of metal. Again, in many respects the bucchero vases are merely the counterparts of works in bronze, as in the case of the braziers and the bowl with Caryatid supports given in Plate [LVII]. fig. 2.[[2305]] In short, they reproduce for us what is wanting in our knowledge of early Greek metal ware.[[2306]]
There seem to be some references to this early black ware in the Roman poets, for Juvenal[[2307]] mentions it as being in use in the time of Numa: “Who dared then,” he says, “to ridicule the ladle (simpuvium) and black saucer of Numa?” Persius[[2308]] styles it Tuscum fictile, and Martial[[2309]] imagines Porsena to have been quite content with his dinner-service of Etruscan earthenware.
A peculiarly Etruscan type of vase which deserves some separate attention is that known as the Canopic jar, resembling the so-called κάνωποι in which the Egyptians placed the bowels of their mummies.[[2310]] These Etruscan canopi are rude representations of the human figure, the heads, which are often attired in Egyptian fashion, forming the covers. The eyes are sometimes inlaid, and the female heads have large movable earrings and other adornments. In the tombs it was customary to place these vases on round chairs of wood, bronze, or terracotta. An example may be seen in the Etruscan Room of the British Museum, where the chair is plated with bronze, covered with archaic designs in repoussé relief,[[2311]] and another is shown in Fig. [181]. Similar chairs were discovered in the Tomba delle Sedie at Cervetri; but the Canopic jars are almost confined to Chiusi. The type finds a parallel in the so-called “owl-vases” from the second city at Hissarlik (Vol. I. p. [258]), in which the same combination of the vase-form with the human figure is to be observed. The lower portion of the jar was intended to receive the ashes of the dead, like the ossuaria, this method of placing the mortal remains of a person within a representation of himself being peculiarly Egyptian.
Signor Milani[[2312]] has traced the origin of the Canopic jars to the funeral masks placed over the faces of the dead, which are sometimes found in the earliest Etruscan tombs. This practice may have been derived from Mycenae, where Schliemann found gold masks in the shaft-tombs of the Agora; but in Etruria the examples are all in bronze, except a few of terracotta.[[2313]] A gradual transition can be observed from the mask, at first placed on the corpse and then attached to the urn containing its ashes, to the head fashioned in the round and assimilated with the cover; while in later times a further transition may be observed from the vase with human head to the complete human figure. Finally, its place was taken by the reclining effigies on the covers of the sarcophagi (p. [320]). The earliest jars are found in the pozzo tombs of the eighth century, the evolution of the head modelled in the round being accomplished by the seventh century, and the archaic types last down to about 550 B.C., when the severe perfected style comes in, to be succeeded by the free style of the fifth century, after which time the Canopic jars cease to be manufactured.
