The Etruscans appear to have paid particular attention to the decoration of the head. Following a custom in vogue throughout Greece, men as well as women adorned themselves with fillets; while women also wore highly ornate hair-pins, with heads shaped like balls, acorns, and pomegranates, decorated in granulation. Many of these pins must have served to fix the diadems and fillets for which the Etruscans appear to have had an especial liking. The latter are composed for the most part of the foliage of myrtle, ivy, and oak, in accordance with the symbolical ideas attached to these leaves. The greater number are of plate of gold, so thin and fragile that they can only have been employed as sepulchral ornaments—like the wreath of ivy leaves and berries of thin gold still encircling the bronze helmet from Vulci in the Room of Greek and Roman Life in the British Museum, and a similar wreath of bracteate gold around a conical bronze helmet in the Salle des Bijoux Antiques of the Louvre.
Earrings of the finest period bear a striking similarity to Greek ornaments of the same date. The first type is penannular in shape, one end terminating in the head of a bull or lion, and the other in a point which pierces the ear. To this ring is next attached a pendant. In the third type the hook which pierces the ear is hidden by a rosette or disc from which hang tassel-shaped appendages, and in the middle between them small animals enamelled white, such as the geese, swans, and cocks in the British Museum, and the peacocks and doves in the Campana Collection in the Louvre. Earrings of another class are saddle-shaped, formed like an imperfect cylinder, one end of which is closed by an open-work rose cap, which completely enclosed the lobe of the wearer's ear. The latest Etruscan earrings, of pendant form, are mostly of great size and in the shape of convex bosses.
In examining the very primitive necklaces and other ornaments that have been discovered in various tombs in Italy, especially in Etruria and Latium, the extraordinary abundance of amber at once attracts attention. The amber of this ancient jewellery of Italy has accessories, sometimes of gold, and more frequently of silver, or else of an alloy of gold and silver termed electrum. A noteworthy early necklace of these materials found at Præneste, and now in the British Museum, is composed of amber cylinders, and pendent vases alternately of amber and electrum ([Pl. VI, 2]).
Though the majority of Etruscan necklaces aim at largeness of display, some are as delicate and refined as the best Greek ornaments. From a round plaited chain in the British Museum hangs a single ornament—-the mask of a faun whose hair, eyebrows, and wavy beard are worked with fine granulation; another pendant is a negro's head on which the granules are disposed with exquisite skill to represent the short woolly hair ([Pl. VI, 5]). Finer even than either of these—and a remarkable example of the combination of the two processes of filigree and granulation—is a neck pendant in the form of a mask of Dionysos (Bacchus) in the Campana Collection in the Louvre. On this the curls of hair over the forehead are represented by filigree spirals, while the beard is worked entirely in the granulated method.
A large number of necklaces have evidently been produced simply for sepulchral purposes, for they are composed, like the majority of crowns, of the thinnest bracteate gold in the shape of rosettes and studs strung together.
The chief characteristic of Etruscan necklaces is their ornamentation with pendent bullæ. The bulla, from the Latin word meaning a bubble, was usually made of two concave plates of gold fastened together so as to form a globe—lentoid or vase-shaped—within which an amulet was contained. In Etruscan art both men and women are represented wearing necklaces and even bracelets formed of bullæ. Occasionally, instead of a bulla, is some such object as the tooth or claw of an animal or a small primitive flint arrow-head, which served as an amulet.
PLATE VII
etruscan jewellery
(brooches, diadem, bracelet, rings)