Archeology

Judging by the variety of garments depicted in fine detail in Etruscan art, we are dealing with a people subject to multiple cultural influences, also as regards fashion. So much so that, if an “Etruscan style” existed, it would be impossible to imagine it outside the context of trade relations and frequent exchanges between Mediterranean and Near Eastern peoples. This is the case with the variations on the chiton, a garment of Greek origin, but also with hairstyles like the long plait worn down the back, of Oriental derivation, or the tutulus imported from Greece, but interpreted according to typical local forms. Larissa Bonfante seeks to identify the most indigenous features of Etruscan fashion by conducting a multifaceted analysis of its development from the 8th to the 5th century BCE. She does this with the aid of a rich iconography that follows the evolution of individual garments, footwear, ornaments and hairstyles, about which written sources yield little information. It is through artists that we know about the Etruscans’ fondness for luxury that led them to adorn themselves with jewelry and accessories; their custom of wearing tailor-made clothes as opposed to the loose, flowing garments worn by the Greeks, and their reluctance to embrace the nudity favoured by the latter.  But also their fondness for a wide range of hats in contrast to the Greek custom of going bareheaded, and the female custom of wearing clothing that elsewhere was reserved for men, such as the semicircular tebenna, the short mantle that could even be worn back to front, and footwear with laces. This custom reflected the freedom enjoyed by women in Etruscan public life and society, compared to those in other coeval civilizations. For Bonfante, clothing becomes an important historical document for dating finds and attributing a gender, a social rank, and even a name to the figures depicted. Although Etruscan fashion reflected the assimilation of Greek and Near Eastern models that were then transmitted to the Roman world, this still left room for the development of a specifically Etruscan style.

Gian Francesco Gamurrini’s Autobiografia – written at the age of 86 – traces key moments in an entire life dedicated to archaeology and to protecting the cultural  heritage of the Arezzo area from plundering by speculators and art dealers, especially after the suppression of ecclesiastical bodies. This was a threat to be avoided at all costs, since the French occupation had resulted in the dispersal of part of the art treasures on the international market. Giamarrini’s work as a librarian was carried out with the same civic passion as his archaeological activities and his defence of cultural heritage as conducive  to the growth of a national consciousness. These pages describing his travels in Italy to document its epigraphic evidence, are on a par with Goethe’s Italian Journey, not so much for the description of landscapes and monuments, as for the wondrous attention  – typical of 18th-19th century peripatetic literature – to the people he encountered, which brings them alive and allows us a glimpse of life at the time. The volume is enriched by the essays of Sara Faralli, Gulio Firpo, Andrea Gaucci, Giulio Paolucci.

Italian edition onlyCount Francesco Mancinelli Scotti, descendent of an Umbrian noble family fallen on hard times, was gripped at roughly age forty by an “insane passion” for archaeology and digs, leading him to devote his next forty years to “devastating” northern Lazio. A man of momentous impulses, such as his enlistment with Garibaldi’s forces at age twenty, Francesco Mancinelli Scotti went on to become a tireless, and quite successful, excavator, collector and merchant of antiquities, selling what he found in digs to American collections and museums, often based on altered information on the pieces’ origins. This side of Mancinelli Scotti’s approach is of particular interest, given that he was active in the same years in which the government established an initial framework for regulating digs, preventing the indiscriminate export of archaeological materials abroad and keeping the antiquities on the market from being dispersed. The dual goal of this volume, therefore, is to portray Francesco Mancinelli Scotti, and the impact of his frenetic exploration, while also promoting further reflection on how best to safeguard our cultural heritage.

The travel dairies of esteemed figures who took the Grand Tour, such as the explorer and Etruscan scholar George Dennis, the watercolour artist Samuel James Ainsley, and Elizabeth Hamilton Gray, a pioneering nineteenth-century female scholar of Etruria, still contribute to the study of Etruscan civilisation and the sites that were its cradle. But before these illustrious individuals came Wilhelm Dorow, a diplomat at the court of Frederick William III of Prussia, an historian, a man of letters and an orientalist, but first and foremost an archaeologist and collector of antiquities. In fact, he was one of the first to visit the cities of ancient Etruria with a scholarly focus, documenting the artistic and archaeological treasures of the hinterlands of Siena and Arezzo, between Cortona, Chiusi and Arezzo.Dorow’s notebook, published almost twenty years in advance of George Dennis’s celebrated The Cities and Cemeteries of Etruria, is a key source for the history of Etruscan studies and the collection of antiquities. This Italian edition, translated from the French version of 1829, comes complete with the sixteen original prints. Dedicated to Bertel Thorvaldsen, with whom Dorow corresponded over the years, and who had words of praise for his collection, the notebook documents a trip that Dorow began from Florence in the summer of 1827.Accompanied by Squire Francesco Inghirami - author of, among other works, the imposing illustrated volume Monumenti Etruschi - and by the artist Giuseppe Lucherini, whose task it was to portray the ancient artefacts, Dorow’s in-depth knowledge of the Italian context sets his account apart from those of his English contemporaries, thanks to sharp, precise insights that, even today, are of great use to archaeologists. His descriptions of visits to the places where the most important Etruscan artefacts are found, and to the leading private collections of Etruscan antiquities, are rendered all the more thorough by Lucherini’s painstakingly detailed drawings. What emerges is an overview of Etruria in the 19th century, highlighting Dorow’s invaluable contribution to reconstructing the history of the collections and their destinies, and all this in the decisive years when mere curiosity for Etruscan antiquities was evolving into serious scholarship.

Italian edition onlyThe conference “Immaginare l’Unità d’Italia. Gli Etruschi a Milano tra collezionismo e tutela” was organized by the Superintendency of Archaeological, Artistic and Environmental Heritage for the Metropolitan City of Milan, the Municipal Council of Milan (Civico Museo Archeologico), the University of Milan (Department of Cultural and Environmental Heritage) and the Fondazione Luigi Rovati in connection with the exhibition Il Viaggio della Chimera. Gli Etruschi a Milano tra archeologia e collezionismo. The proceedings of the conference, the second stage of an in-depth research project on the Etruscans, address subjects regarding the history and specificity of Etruscan archaeological collecting as a phenomenon connected from the mid-19th to the early 20th century with nationalistic aspirations that saw the history of this people as the first experience of territorial unification under a common identity. The authors focus primarily on the major collectors who contributed to the development of archaeology in Italy, especially in connection with the city of Milan, interweaving the histories of the collections and of the institutions – universities, museums and institutes of research – that have taken up their physical and spiritual legacy of preservation and study. Attention then shifts to the close connection between collecting and preservation, addressing the evolution of activities and measures for the protection of antiquities all the way from the period prior to Italian unification up to the present national legislation with reference also to particular cases in the modern era.

Known by the ancient Romans as Caere, Cerveteri was one of the most important Etruscan cities. With its port of Pyrgi and a necropolis renowned for the magnificence and evocative quality of its tombs, it was added to the list of UNESCO World Heritage Sites in 2004. A stage of the 19th-century Grand Tour mentioned in countless travellers’ accounts, it was the object of minute drawings and written descriptions by authors like George Dennis and Elizabeth Hamilton Gray as well as numerous historical and archaeologic studies in the 19th and 20th century. The names established in the academic sphere do not, however, include the priest Sabino De Nisco. Educated in Naples, probably under the guidance of the Latin scholar and philologist Enrico Cocchia, this self-proclaimed “doctor of letters” is the author of acute and precious contributions to our knowledge of Caere and Pyrgi that are not mentioned, however, despite their quality, in the post-1950s scholarly literature on Cerveteri. This volume presents two short studies on the origins of the city and the divinity of the temple of Pyrgi published in Naples by De Nisco in 1909. Clearly evident in both are the author’s first-hand archaeological knowledge of the site and absolute mastery of the literary sources combined with the solidity and authority of his reasoning, acute critical intelligence and keen sense of historical research in attributing the city’s origins to the Terramare culture rather than the Pelasgians and identifying the divinity of the temple of Pyrgi as the exquisitely Greek figure of Leukothea. This new edition seeks to set the writings of De Nisco, after a century of oblivion, in their rightful place alongside the principal works of historical and archaeologic research on Cerveteri.

Italian edition onlyThis book presents the proceedings of two international conferences on the Etruscan heritage and collecting in Europe from the 16th to the 19th century held in the splendid setting of the Palazzone di Cortona (1–2 November 2014 and 29–31 January 2016). Organized by the Scuola Normale Superiore di Pisa and the Municipal Council of Cortona, these events marked the culmination of the research project “The Etruscan Academy of Cortona: Collecting and the Republic of Letters in 18th-Century Europe”, supervised by Maurizio Ghelardi and directed by Ilaria Bianchi. Great scholarly importance attaches to the conferences, which addressed subjects connected with museology and collecting that have become a focus of antiquarian interest in recent years. The Etruscan world and collecting are also at the centre of the work of the Fondazione Luigi Rovati, whose Etruscan museum in Milan endeavours to play an active part in the study and valorization of the archaeological heritage, not least by developing solid relations with academic institutions inside and outside Italy. This approach could hardly fail to include Cortona and the Accademia Etrusca, with which collaboration has been established in support of research and scholarly debate. The Fondazione Luigi Rovati readily espoused the project of publishing the contributions of the scholars present at the conferences as a preliminary step towards in-depth examination of the processes whereby the collections of the major Italian and European museums were built up.

The exhibition “Il viaggio della Chimera. Gli Etruschi a Milano tra archeologia e collezionismo” (12 December 2018-12 May 2019), at the Civico Museo Archeologico in Milan, conceived and organized by the Fondazione Luigi Rovati and the Civico Museo Archeologico in collaboration with the Superintendence of Archaeology, Fine Arts and Landscape of Milan, highlights the connections between Milan and the Etruscan world, which started to emerge in the mid-18th century with the creation of the oldest part of the Milanese archaeological collections and was cemented in the post-war years when the city hosted a major exhibition of Etruscan art and civilization, curated by Massimo Pallottini at the Palazzo Royale in 1955. This watershed moment marked the start of a fruitful period for Etruscology in Milan from the surveys by the Fondazione C.M. Lerici at the Politecnico to the campaigns carried out by the University of Milan in Tarquinia and in Etruria at Forcello di Bagnolo San Vito.  Exploration of the connections between Milan and the Etruscans continues to bear fruit as borne out by the recent excavations carried out in Populonia by the Università Cattolica and the forthcoming opening of the Etruscan Museum at 52, Corso Venezia. The exhibition is arranged over five sections with more than 200 items from leading archaeological museums in Italy, including the Civico Museo Archeologico in Milan and the Fondazione Luigi Rovati itself, offering a preview of some of the items that will form the collection in the new Etruscan museum. The catalogue is also divided into five sections. The section on collecting and collectors draws on the Etruscan collections of the Museo Civico Archeologico, the Fondazione Rovati and the Milanese historic core collection comprising the findings of Pelagio Palagi, Amilcare Ancona and Jules Sambon. The focus then shifts to the 1955 exhibition at the Palazzo Reale on Etruscan art and civilization and so to the excavations supported by the Fondazione C.M. Lerici at the Politecnico di Milano and the Milanese universities in Etruria, Campania and Etruria Padana, where many inscriptions have been found providing evidence of an Etruscan presence north of the Po. Three themes are examined in more depth: canopic urns and the representation of the human figure; the orientalizing fantastic bestiary; and myth. They offer a transversal interpretation of the exhibits and introduce the section with detailed descriptions of the objects on show. 

Over the centuries, Italy’s historic-artistic heritage has been pilfered of numerous works in a wide variety of genres, giving rise to a flourishing, often illegal market in ancient art. Fortunately, portions of this inheritance have occasionally been brought home through official channels, restoring missing pieces of an immense legacy. This volume focuses on seven Etruscan fresco fragments that today are part of the Lucio and Giovanna Rovati collection, analysing and positioning them within the vast artistic production of Etruria.Silvia Menichelli, a curator, archaeologist and researcher, provides background information on the place of these fragments within Etruscan society and art, and especially painting, the technique that, more than any other, has given us an idea of the history of the Etruscan people. Analysing documents, drawings and watercolour reproductions of ancient works, plus excavation reports, Dr. Menichelli draws parallels to known tomb paintings, determining the historical context of the seven frescos (late-archaic age, datable to approximately 500 BC) and interpreting their iconography, while also pointing to their possible place of origin.The volume includes a preface by Prof. Stephan Steingräber.