The Freedom of the Etruscans: Etruria Between Hellenization and Orientalization

Introduction

One of the main research questions in Etruscology since the origins of the discipline in the late eighteenth century has concerned the nature and consequences of cultural contact, particularly with the Greek world. Over the course of the twentieth century, acculturation has been the predominant paradigm for explaining cultural change as a consequence of contact whether with the East Mediterranean (Orientalizing), the Greek world (Hellenization) or Rome (Romanization). While the former and latter have been the object of wider debates amongst scholars of cognate disciplines from the latter part of the century,¹ Hellenization has proven to be challenging to unravel outside English-speaking scholarship² despite earlier calls for a critical understanding of the concept itself.³ Classical archaeology’s intellectual genealogy steeped into the paradigm of classicism, on the one hand, and the post-colonial turn promoting the rejection of acculturation paradigms in the broader archaeology of the Mediterranean,⁴ on the other, have produced a widening chasm, between Etruscology and Mediterranean archaeology. This is despite the fundamental advances made, in late twentieth-century Italian Classical archaeology, in understanding the cultural contact between Tyrrhenian Central Italy and the Greek world, in studies of the social context of artistic production and consumption⁵ and in those concerned with iconography and myth inspired by French anthropological approaches to Classical antiquity.⁶ Whether jettisoned⁷ or acknowledged, the Hellenization of Etruria therefore remains an object of debate.

In this paper I reassess the intellectual genealogy of this debate and the ideas developed around it between the late eighteenth and the middle of the nineteenth century in order to reflect upon the origins of a paradigm that still casts a shadow over Etruscology today, and that risks isolating the discipline from wider discussions in the archaeology of the Mediterranean. In reconsidering some key studies in the disciplinary history of this period, I wish to argue that, along with the prominence of classicism from the late eighteenth century and the philhellenism of German nineteenth-century scholarship, with its critical impact upon studies of Etruscan antiquity and art, what also contributed to the emergence of a Hellenocentric view of Etruscan art and material culture was the evolution of thought on the relationship between Etruscan art and political systems. Importantly, the thinking about this relationship was not simply an antiquarian concern, but it evolved through differing conceptualisations of what constituted valid empirical evidence and historical analytical methods. What follows therefore is a nuanced examination of the thinking about that relationship; the ultimate aim is to demonstrate its critical role in shaping ideas about the Etruscans and Etruscology as a discipline, and to suggest that scholarly discussions about Etruscan autochthony in relation to nineteenth-century nationalism have overshadowed this role.

Although discussed by Johann Joachim Winckelmann in his Geschichte der Kunst der Alterthums in regard to the imitation of Greek art by Etruscan artists, the question of Etruscan political systems was not developed in-depth by Winckelmann’s contemporary and Jesuit antiquarian Luigi Lanzi, author of a study of Etruscan and Italic languages and arts, the Saggio di lingua etrusca e di altre antiche d’Italia: per servire alla storia de’ popoli, delle lingue e delle belle arti, in three volumes (first published in 1789). Lanzi refrained from considering the relationship between Etruscan art and Etruscan political systems partly because of his dismissal of the use of abstract conjectures in the history of art, and partly because of his distinct interpretative approach to style that sought to explain change in relation to time. Lanzi had developed this approach following his involvement in the reorganization of the museum at the Uffizi in Florence.

Lanzi has been rightly acknowledged as the founder of Etruscology for introducing an analytical method that moved away from antiquarianism and successfully built a historical narrative for Etruscan art akin to that developed by Winckelmann for Greek art.⁸ His Saggio, furthermore, represents a major watershed for the decipherment of the Etruscan alphabet: rejecting both previous comparisons with Oriental languages and Hebrew and the etymological method of previous antiquarians, Lanzi applied a strictly philological and epigraphic method to Etruscan inscriptions and compared them closely to Greek and Latin inscriptions, noting the similarity between the Greek and Etruscan alphabets. He also considered other Italic pre-Roman languages, and proposed that all these languages, including Etruscan, derived from a common root, namely Greek, and that Latin was the end point of the Etruscan language.⁹

Fifty or so years later, Karl Otfried Müller, author of a ‘total history’ on the Etruscans, Die Etrusker, was silent on the relationship between art and politics. Müller’s was the first compendium on the subject and became the most influential nineteenth-century Etruscology handbook, just as Müller’s handbook on ancient art was highly acclaimed; both publications were exemplary of the Altertumswissenschaft scholarship that was to mould nineteenth-century Classical archaeology in Italy. Influenced by Barthold Georg Niebuhr in his reading of the sources on the political (aristocratic) constitution of the Etruscan ‘nation’, Müller, in contrast to Winckelmann, saw the imitative quality of Etruscan art as negative. The nexus between art and the political, which Winckelmann had theorized, would only be resumed once Orientalist perspectives on artistic styles were in turn translated into styles of political authority.

From Winckelmann to Lanzi

Ever since Lanzi, scholars have noted Etruscan art’s subordinate position vis-à-vis Greek art in Winckelmann’s work, and the imitative quality of the latter in respect to the originality of the former;¹⁰ this has led recent scholarship to locate the origins of Hellenocentric perspectives upon Etruscan art in Winckelmann. Winckelmann first hinted at his view of Etruscan art in his catalogue of the gem collection of Prussian baron Philipp von Stosch, published in Florence in 1760 as Description des pierres gravées du feu baron de Stosch. Etruscan gem art appeared to him as particularly ancient and therefore unable to reach the sublime beauty of Greek art; and yet, in the catalogue, he considered one of these gems, the Stosch gem, which would illustrate the frontispiece of the first edition of the Geschichte (1764), as being equivalent to what Homer was amongst the poets.¹¹ Equally, the Tydeus gem, also part of the catalogue, was, to his eyes, the pinnacle of the achievements of Etruscan art.¹² In this publication, one can already see Winckelmann’s thoughts on changing artistic styles, from the rise of an art to its decline, which he then systematically applied in his Geschichte.¹³ The third chapter of the Geschichte, devoted to the ‘art of the Etruscans and their neighbours’, was based upon Winckelmann’s analysis of Etruscan antiquities that he knew first hand and upon published illustrations, from Gori’s Museum Etruscum (1737–1743) to Buonarroti’s images for De Etruria regali (1723); it represents the earliest systematic attempt to classify Etruscan antiquities and produce a synthesis of ancient art of which Etruscan art was part.

As is well known, Winckelmann’s classification followed an evolutionary paradigm and stylistic criteria that closely followed those applied to Greek art. He divided Etruscan art into three styles: an initial first style, a second ‘mannered’ style, in which he placed some gems from the Stosch collection, and a third style, in which he saw the decline of Etruscan art and the process by which Etruscan art imitated Greek art following the establishment of Greek colonies in Italy.¹⁴ The most salient aspect of Winckelmann’s Etruscan chapter is his juxtaposition between these styles and the ‘temperament’ of the Etruscans, melancholic, violent and full of passion, on the on hand, and the freedom of the Etruscan republics on the other. This echoes his link between Greek art and Greek freedom in the second part of the Geschichte.¹⁵ According to his reading of Livy and Dionysius of Halicarnassus,

among the Etruscans, royal dignity implied not an arbitrary ruler but rather a leader and a commander, of which there were twelve, in accordance with the number of provinces of this people, and these twelve were communally elected by the twelve councils. These twelve chiefs recognized one ruler in particular, who, like them, was raised to the highest office only by vote. The Etruscans so jealously guarded their freedom and were such great enemies of royal authority that they found the latter detestable and unbearable even in those peoples merely allied with them.¹⁶

Political freedom was key, in his eyes, to the flourishing of Etruscan art as it was to the flourishing of Greek art. While Etruscan art, precisely because of that Etruscan character, did not reach the same level of beauty as Greek art, Winckelmann nevertheless placed emphasis, in the first edition of his Geschichte, upon the role of freedom in leading the desire of Etruscan artists to emulate the art of others:

This freedom, which is the nursemaid of the arts, and the Etruscans extensive trade by land and water, which preoccupied them and nourished them, must have awakened in them the desire to emulate the artists of other peoples, especially as in every free state, the artist has more true honor to hope for and achieve.¹⁷

The revised Etruscan chapter in the posthumous 1776 Viennese edition of the Geschichte, which was highly criticized by German scholars for the number of mistakes contained in it, is presumably based on additions that are contained in the two treaties Anmerkungen über die Geschichte der Kunst des Alterthums and Monumenti Antichi Inediti, both published in 1767, although the original manuscript was lost and probably destroyed.¹⁸ These additions included new material, a richer historical context that treats the two Pelasgian invasions of Italy, underlining the Pelasgian, that is Greek, origins of Etruscan art, the problem of the lack of written sources and the integration of Greek myth into Etruscan culture.¹⁹ The themes of free, industrious Etruscans and of freedom stimulating the arts remain, but are implicit in Winckelmann’s revised explanation of the Etruscan democratic elective governments, bearers of peace and tranquillity; most importantly, the statement that freedom inspired emulation is no longer there.²⁰ What is instead underlined, in the description and explanation of the three styles, is the political dominance of the Etruscans all over Italy coinciding with the emergence of the first style, the flourishing of the arts in the second style hand in hand with the perfecting of the arts amongst the Greeks and the establishment of Greek colonies in Southern Italy which restricted Etruscan territory as the third style emerged.²¹

Winckelmann’s emphasis on the causes for these styles and the character of Etruscan art is inherent in his conceptualisation of a ‘system’ for explaining artistic development through universal causes.²² As Harloe has argued,²³ this concern for universal history derives from Winckelmann’s reading and adaptation of the works of philosophic historians of the French and English Enlightenment. This reading included Montesquieu’s L’Esprit de Lois, which directed Winckelmann’s emphasis to the physical and moral or political factors, such as climate, geography, customs and government, affecting the character of different types of ancient art.²⁴ But no single source should be overemphasized: Harloe has noted Winckelmann’s eclecticism in drawing for his analytical method from a range of sources, from Enlightenment historians to early modern literature on artistic development and contemporary works on the connoisseurship of antiquities, including Comte de Caylus’s Recueil d’antiquités égyptiennes, étrusques, grecques, romaines which he read while writing the Etruscan chapter.²⁵

For Winckelmann, the political was inextricably linked to art; indeed, art provided the means through which one could throw light upon political forms and conditions. While the Etruscan chapter remained on the fringes of the Geschichte, which was essentially concerned with the evolution of Greek and Roman art, it nevertheless sought to provide a specific political setting for the evolution of Etruscan art that did not place the latter in an entirely subordinate position vis-à-vis Greek art. On the contrary, the affirmation, in the first edition, that Etruscan desire to emulate derived from Etruscan freedom and, in the second edition, that Etruscan elective democratic governments provided the context for art’s beginnings, explicitly endorsed Etruscan art’s prominence at the beginning of the history of art and the political. And while Winckelmann’s admission about the scarcity of sources on Etruscan art, which had been noted by contemporary antiquarians including Caylus, reveals his own scepticism towards the prospect of constructing a narrative of its development,²⁶ it is notable that in the first edition he declared the role of climate and government in the flourishing of Etruscan art as ‘certain’, and the role of temperament in the stalling of that flourishing as ‘a possibility’;²⁷ the same level of certainty towards the government of the Etruscans and uncertainty towards their temperament remains in the second edition.²⁸

Winckelmann’s inference about the temperament as an explanation of the reasons why the development of Etruscan art stalled exemplifies the role of conjectural reasoning that is central to the entire Geschichte, but is even more necessary in the case of the well-known paucity of sources for Etruria.²⁹ As Harloe noted,³⁰ while the centrality of such reasoning resonates with Rousseau’s use of conjecture in Discours sur l’origine et les fondements de l’inégalité parmi les hommes, which must have been known to Winckelmann, the Preface and the end of the Geschichte highlight love and desire as essential qualities of the historian of antiquity who has to reconstruct it through incomplete evidence; this intriguingly echoes the Etruscan artists’ desire to emulate the Greeks in the youth of their own artistic development.

Following the second Viennese edition, subsequent translations were made of Winckelmann’s Geschichte into other languages. Two Italian translations were made soon after the second edition was published, the first by the Augustinian abbot Carlo Amoretti in Milan in 1779, and the second by abbot Carlo Fea in Rome in 1783–1784. They were not, however, simple translations: they were critical translations, to which Amoretti and Fea added their own footnotes that contained bibliographic and material additions as well as comments, and which re-organized Winckelmann’s original text.³¹ Fea, moreover, as he makes clear in the preface to the readers, discarded Amoretti’s translation as a version full of errors, and decided to work on the German and French editions, correcting and adding to the text.³²

In his Preface, Fea emphasizes that Winckelmann’s sistema, based on general and absolute rules, dismissed the ‘infinite exceptions’ to the rules to the point of bearing false arguments: he therefore decides to correct the Viennese edition of the Geschichte.³³ The collaboration between Fea and Winckelmann’s close friend and declared follower Johann Friedrich Reiffenstein, whose role Fea emphasizes in his translation, gave particular prestige to this second Italian translation, as probably did the fact that Fea and his collaborators were part of the cosmopolitan circle of antiquarians residing in Rome, the centre of antiquity and the arts and residence of Winckelmann.³⁴ In reality, Fea’s translation did not overcome the errors that Amoretti’s translation had and like Amoretti’s, it failed to convey some key concepts of Winckelmann’s thought that reveal his platonic or neo-platonic aesthetic and philosophical approach to art, such as the concept of the sublime,³⁵ so strongly prevailing was the Enlightenment empiricism in Italy by the late eighteenth century.³⁶

The reception that Winckelmann’s Geschichte received in Italy in the late eighteenth century is apparent from the fact that both translations included, at the beginning, the panegyric that Göttingen philologist Christian Gottlob Heyne wrote for Winckelmann.³⁷ Despite its praise of Winckelmann, Heyne’s panegyric was also a strong attack on his abstract and systematic method, and on the possibility of explaining artistic development according to external phenomena, whether political or geographical. On the contrary, Heyne argued, only the analysis of historical events and causes could provide an explanation; the collection and ordering of the antiquities and of the literary sources alone could lead the scholar to a strict and historically driven analysis of art, just like a natural scientist would do with one’s own objects of analysis.³⁸

The comparison of the analytical method of the scholar of antiquity with that of the natural sciences echoes Luigi Lanzi’s choice of analytical method in his Saggio di Lingua Etrusca, where he stated that ‘Il paragone è all’antiquario ciò che al fisico l’esperimento’:³⁹ comparison is to the antiquarian what the experiment is to the natural scientist. This statement may not have been fortuitous: Lanzi was aware of the publication that the Göttingen scholar had devoted to Etruscan art, published between 1772 and 1774 in the Novi Commentarii Societatis Regiae Scientiarum Gottingensis, and cited it favourably in his Saggio.⁴⁰ Heyne, conversely, liked Lanzi’s Saggio and wrote to Lanzi personally to express his positive opinion, as we know from Lanzi’s letters to fellow Jesuit Girolamo Tiraboschi.⁴¹ While sometime ago Cristofani asserted that to Heyne we owed the first library-based attempt to historicize Etruscan art, and to Lanzi the second attempt, based on the close study of objects,⁴² the recently renewed scholarly interest in Lanzi’s oeuvre has placed him within the broader realm of historiographical and philosophical developments of his time, and captured the sophistication of his thought and the linkages between his diverse erudite and antiquarian works,⁴³ which radically and rightly distances him from Heyne. Lanzi’s emphasis on experiment and comparison encapsulates his empirical and comparative approach to the study of Etruscan and other ancient Italic languages and of Etruscan art. His comparativism is indebted to the Methodus Historica of sixteenth-century French jurist Jean Bodin,⁴⁴ which Lanzi expressly cited in the Saggio, and which allowed him to conceive of history as a cyclical process, and hence to compare different eras in time and space.⁴⁵ His empiricism, on the other hand, is peculiar: while indebted to Bacon’s inductive method, which Lanzi also cited in his defence of the Saggio in response to Lodovico Coltellini, a member of the Accademia di Cortona, published in a posthumous edition,⁴⁶ the use of specific analogies throughout his oeuvre distances him from a strictly inductive method.⁴⁷

Lanzi’s intellectual world and the multi-faceted historicophilosophical perspectives that shaped his oeuvre from the Saggio itself to the Storia pittorica della Italia, a vast history of Italian painting from the Middle Ages to Lanzi’s times, have been notably drawn out by Rossi.⁴⁸ The Storia pittorica first published in 1792 as Storia pittorica della Italia inferiore, and fully published in six volumes in 1809, takes an approach that combines very different historiographical traditions, from Classical historiography and Bodin’s late-sixteenth-century historical method to a Jesuit-style Baconian encyclopedism⁴⁹ and eighteenth-century Enlightenment thought.⁵⁰ Rossi has moreover suggested that Lanzi’s emphasis on cycles and repetitions throughout history, found both in the Saggio and in the Storia pittorica, echoes the concept of ricorsi in Giambattista Vico’s Principj di Scienza Nuova, one of the three elements that articulates Vico’s own historical comparativism, and a particularly useful concept for periods, like Etruscan antiquity, poor in sources.⁵¹ At the same time, the coexistence of cycle and permanence in Lanzi’s view of history, which brings him to consider Etruscan art in relation to the arts of early modern Tuscany, owes much to Winckelmann, without whom Lanzi could have never have developed his thought;⁵² similarly, the debt to Winckelmann is clear in Lanzi’s views on the relationship between Etruscan and Greek art,⁵³ and in Winckelmann’s tripartite classification of different epochs of artistic development, which Lanzi adopted in one of his earlier essays, the Notizie preliminari circa la scoltura degli antichi e vari suoi stili, published in English in Rome in 1785 and subsequently in Italian as part of the second volume of his Saggio in 1789; he maintained this classification in the Saggio albeit with strikingly different conclusions.⁵⁴

Three key aspects made Lanzi’s interpretations innovative: first, he approached Etruscan art from the point of view of linguistic development through a close study of Etruscan and other Italic inscriptions, that is to say, data which to him looked more certain than others, and which would be accompanied by other data: ‘Il filo che mi è paruto meno incerto è quel de’ caratteri, che però io desidero accompagnato da altri indizi’.⁵⁵ In fact, inscriptions, which, Lanzi claimed, Caylus had neglected from his first ever systematization of the earliest antiquities, were, to him, the means through which to date the art: ‘La paleografia etrusca riceve luce dalle figure che l’accompagnano; e vicendevolmente la rende loro, e all’epoche del disegno. […] la paleografia etrusca m’insegna in qualche modo l’epoche de’ suoi stili’.⁵⁶ This method was indebted to that which antiquarian Scipione Maffei before him had developed in his Lapidarium of Verona and Torino, both published in 1749.⁵⁷ In this way, and having a much more in-depth knowledge of the artefacts than Winckelmann, Lanzi established a much more sound relative chronology of Etruscan art than Winckelmann had been able to, and one which stayed valid until the impact of the Vienna School of Art upon Etruscology and Italian Classical archaeology well into the nineteenth century.⁵⁸ Thanks to this chronology, he was able, on the basis of vase painting and gems, to refute Winckelmann’s view that Etruscan art was earlier than Greek art at its beginnings;⁵⁹ like Winckelmann, he discerned the impact of Greek art upon the second Etruscan style, but he affirmed convincingly that the Etruscans never imitated the Greeks slavishly,⁶⁰ and that they developed their own ‘school’. Last but not least, thanks to his chronology, Lanzi was able to discern through his analysis of Volterran funerary urns that the so-called third Etruscan style coincided with the optimal imitation of Greek art.⁶¹

The concept of scuola (school), the second key aspect of Lanzi’s novel interpretative approach to art, whether ancient or modern, is already present in the Saggio, but fully developed only in the Storia Pittorica.⁶² Although Lanzi placed importance upon the source material and the style in relation to the object, legacies of the antiquarian and of Winckelmann’s methods, respectively, the comparison with other pieces of evidence and, above all, with similar objects, in the manner of a rudimentary typology, was of the utmost importance to his understanding of these objects. Here too, Maffei’s method consisting of drawing serial comparisons amongst inscriptions in order to identify them provided the background to Lanzi’s typology of objects; so did a broader Italian scholarly tradition, the so-called Scuola Mabillona, to which Maffei belonged, that sought to systematize historical visual and written material and founded a new methodology for historical research.⁶³ In his Notizie preliminari, Lanzi explicitly stated his method and his aim: ‘vorrebbesi in certo modo che ogni pezzo disposto sistematicamente secondo le scuole e secondo i tempi, in quella guisa che … si e’ ordinata la imperial quadreria a Vienna’.⁶⁴ Hence, the object was to be understood not simply in relation to the story of a people and in relation to its style and its time, but also according to a ‘school’ which he defines as follows:

Dico pertanto che una cosa è stil etrusco; e una diversa cosa son le opere degli artefici etruschi. Simil distinzione usiamo nella pittura moderna. Franco è veneto; ma il suo disegno è fiorentino: Feti è romano; ma il suo stile è lombardo. Lo stil etrusco è quello che regnò in questa scuola dalla sua fondazione fino a un certo tempo; e che i Latini propriamente chiamano tuscanicus. Non dicean’essi homines, nè agri tuscanici; ma bensì opera e signa tuscanica: così questo vocabolo non tanto significò presso loro una nazione, o una provincia; quanto una scuola o uno stile.⁶⁵

Lanzi was therefore interested in the context and time of production of an object, conceived within a series of objects, all of which, he thought, had to be systematically organized according to the school rather than the single monument or masterpiece à la Winckelmann. In this, he did not differ much from the eighteenth-century’s disposition to seek regularities and types,⁶⁶ but the concept of scuola was effectively the means through which Lanzi could refute the view of Etruscan artists’ servile imitation of the Greeks; like the concepts of ‘series’ and ‘order’, it also allowed for synthesis and for an accurate grasp of temporality. This grasp, as scholars have recognized for some time,⁶⁷ Lanzi could not have achieved without his involvement in the reorganization of the Real Galleria at the Uffizi.

Lanzi, who resided at the Collegio Romano in Rome in the 1760s and was part of Rome’s antiquarian cosmopolitan community, was called upon by the Grand Duke of Tuscany, Peter Leopold, in 1775 to collaborate with Giuseppe Pelli Bencivenni, the then director of the Uffizi, in the reorganization of the museum. The plan for this reorganization, proposed by Lanzi and Pelli Bencivenni to Peter Leopold in 1780, was realized in 1782, a few years before Lanzi’s earliest writing on Etruria was published, and more than a decade before the publication of his Storia Pittorica. The reorganization was aimed at doing away with the encyclopedic format of the display, and creating a new display for a wider public that would single out the best art and antiquities and would be composed of new objects and paintings acquired for the purpose of filling the gaps of the collection.⁶⁸ The ultimate aim, desired by the Grand Duke, was to provide a didactic experience for the public, and as such, the project was a political–ideological one, much in line with other late eighteenth-century and nineteenth-century museums.⁶⁹ An Etruscan section, the Loggetta Etrusca, as Pelli first called it, or Museo Etrusco, as Lanzi called it, was created after much re-thinking and following the purchase of several Etruscan artefacts from the Bucelli collection of Montepulciano.⁷⁰ Other antiquities were arranged throughout the museum: for example, the Galleria delle statue was altered to house the increasing number of Greek and Roman sculpture that came into the collection; other objects and paintings were placed in twenty smaller rooms or gabinetti.⁷¹ Art historians have underlined the variety of interpretative frameworks underlying the reorganization of the displays, and apparent in Lanzi’s museum guide published in 1782.⁷² For example, the busts of the Medici family are introduced in the guide through a distinctly historical interpretation, while the cameos and the gems are described following an erudite antiquarian approach.⁷³ The gabinetti were organized and introduced in the guide according to their own genre: for example, a geographical arrangement was used for the Museo Etrusco, a mythological arrangement for the gabinetto of the ancient bronzes, a geographical and chronological order for the medaglie/medals and an art-historical order for the modern bronzes and the paintings overall.⁷⁴ What is most remarkable, however, is the unique placement of Etruscan antiquities throughout the gabinetti and the corridors. The Museo Etrusco, located in a small room, which Lanzi insisted on calling ‘his’ in his guide,⁷⁵ contained funerary objects, namely urns, ollae/globular undecorated vessels and inscriptions, arranged by provenance and accompanied by captions. All the other Etruscan antiquities were arranged in other rooms together with other ancient and modern material that encouraged the visitor to compare the Etruscan with this other material in order the see the ‘schools’ and artistic change through time. Hence Etruscan little bronzes were arranged in the gabinetto of the Ancient Bronzes (dei Bronzi Antichi), while the Arringatore, the Minerva and the Chimera, Etruscan pieces that had belonged to the Medici collection since the sixteenth century, were placed near one another in the Gallery of the Statues (corridoio/Galleria delle Statue) together with other ancient and modern, namely Renaissance, sculpture.⁷⁶ In his museum guide, Lanzi invited the visitor, upon entering the museum, to amble through the long corridors displaying busts and paintings, all the way to the Museo Etrusco and to begin from there, in order to gain a general view of the arts: the very beginnings of art were therefore placed in Etruria, where the geographical differentiation of sepulchral art distinguished the alabaster urns from Volterra from the terracotta ones from Chiusi.⁷⁷

Lanzi’s interpretative framework, however, bears no resemblance to the eighteenth-century published collections and histories of art and antiquities, which, as shown by Caylus’s Recueil d’Antiquité, functioned as a published gallery or a paper museum, corresponding to the development of museum displays.⁷⁸ In contrast to these, Lanzi’s publications were not illustrated or poorly so, and often referred the reader to existing illustrations of other publications. Scholars have explained this either as evidence of Lanzi’s intention to encourage readers to confront the art object themselves at the museum, with the Storia Pittorica as travel book in hand⁷⁹ or, alternatively, of his intention to place his own text above any possible reproduction of the art object which, by definition, cannot be completely truthful.⁸⁰ More prosaically, Lanzi’s emphasis on schools and series may have motivated his decision not to illustrate: no single monument, whether epigraphic or artistic, took precedence over others. To illustrate them all would have been impossible; this, in fact, indicates the limits of the eighteenth-century illustrated publication.⁸¹ Whichever the case, his remark in the museum guide that he ordered the ancient figured vessels following d’Hancarville’s classification criteria reveals his quite profound distance from the eighteenth-century illustrated collections and histories of antiquities.⁸² For d’ Hancarville, Caylus, Winckelmann and others, the images constituted the history of art;⁸³ to Lanzi, images were auxiliary to the autoptic examination of the objects displayed in the museum, and that autoptic examination was the indispensable accompaniment to the text.

The third key aspect of Lanzi’s intellectual innovation may provide a partial explanation of his singular approach to image reproduction: to him, changes in language were analogous to changes in art and, as he showed in the Storia Pittorica, in literature, too. Lanzi’s approach, as outlined above, allowed him to employ analogy and comparison as structuring principles of analysis, to the extent that his entire oeuvre could explain language, art and literature and links between them through a series of parallels, and thus provide the possibility of a universal history.⁸⁴ While such a potential is fully realized in the Storia pittorica, the Saggio is inevitably constrained by the poverty of the sources. In relying on the Baconian inductive method, Lanzi nevertheless emphasized here the almost five hundred inscriptions he had collected and the efforts made at transcribing inscriptions correctly despite their sometimes poor state of preservation, which he highlighted in his defence against Coltellini.⁸⁵ Hence, the priority given to epigraphy over art as a ‘certain’ datum, as mentioned above.

In these ways Lanzi, archaeologist ante-litteram, truly revolutionized what would become Etruscology. Yet his work is rarely cited in Müller’s Die Etrusker (1828), a succeeding major publication on the Etruscans by one of the founding fathers of the Altertumswissenschaft. This may be for a number of reasons, most prominently Müller’s philological approach that gave precedence to texts over artefacts and brought him to distance himself from Lanzi’s view over the relationship between culture and language.⁸⁶ However, the Saggio’s lack of illustrative material, in an essay that aimed at an epigraphy- and artefact-based interpretation of Etruscan art, must have also determined Lanzi’s place (or lack thereof) in Müller’s work. Lanzi’s own perspective upon style, which was of a school, may have contributed; Müller’s own preference for reference to a people’s spirit was closer to the reference to a people or ‘nation’ in Winckelmann. As Lanzi declared in the Notizie Preliminari,

…io distinguerò popolo da popolo nelle arti, come nel saggio di lingua etrusca gli distinguo negl’idiomi. Nel resto io non sarò riprensibile se ogn’italico lavoro antico chiamerò indifferentemente toscanico; avendo già osservato, che tal vocabolo è nome non di nazione, ma di stile.⁸⁷

Lanzi, in fact, rejected the inextricable nexus that Winckelmann had postulated between art and the political precisely because that nexus presupposed style to be of a ‘nation’. He thus distinguished the time of Etruscan power from the time of their ‘good taste’:

Distinguo negli Etruschi il tempo della lor gran potenza dal tempo del loro buon gusto […]. Nella prima epoca gli considero piuttosto uomini di stato che letterati; piuttosto fabbricatori che statuarj. Nella seconda scema è vero la lor potenza; ma cresce il sapere, e le arti migliorano. Se una volta ne insegnarono alcuna a’ Greci, sempre più felici in perfezionare arti che in inventarle; ora coll’ajuto de’ Greci ne migliorano molte; e in queste arriverebbono forse a vincere i loro maestri, se tornassero alla condizione di prima. La statua di Metello, ch’è nella R. Galleria, gli fa vedere già emoli del migliore stile greco, anche quando erano soggetti a’Romani: che avriano fatto liberi e padroni di tanta terra e di tanto mare? Ma la fortuna era volta altrove. Quindi se in Grecia e in Roma, ove potenza e gusto lungamente andaron del pari, a dispetto de’saccheggi e della barbarie, si trovan sempre bellissimi monumenti; in Etruria ove mai non si collegarono gran potenza e gran gusto, si trovano sì rare volte.⁸⁸

Although he recognized the possibility that political power could coexist with ‘good taste’ as stated above, the distinction between art and the political becomes even more evident in his Storia pittorica where changes in gusto in the history of painting are seen as analogous to, but not caused by, political changes in civil history.⁸⁹

The rejection of Winckelmann’s nexus was furthermore crucially predicated upon the careful distinction, derived from Lanzi’a analytical method, of different types of evidence – certain, little certain and uncertain – and therefore between different degrees of strength for conjecture.⁹⁰ While conjecture was the necessary tool of the antiquarian of Etruscan antiquities, Winckelmann, in Lanzi’s view, had exceeded what was reasonable to conjecture in foregrounding external factors which, to Lanzi, would be more suitable to embellish a ‘system’ rather than establish it.⁹¹ In his criticism of Winckelmann, however, Lanzi failed to capture the Geschichte’s emphasis on the role of the Etruscan democratic governments with elective heads, the Lucumoni, for fostering the cultivation of the arts; Lanzi instead stressed the ‘tranquillity’ that, to Winckelmann, was guaranteed by such governments and caused the flourishing of the arts:⁹²

Nè già quell’uomo [Winckelmann], per altro grande, si fa carico della storia […]: nè si fa carico de’monumenti certi [italics original] di que’ medesimi tempi; ch’è il corpo delle medaglie de’ due popoli […]; molto meno si fa carico degli altri monumenti: queste osservazioni davano congetture troppo forti contro il suo sistema. Che fa dunque? Paragona lo stato turbolento di Grecia alla quiete, alla opulenza, al buon governo di Etruria, e da ciò argomenta che fra gli Etruschi meglio le arti fiorisssero che fra’ Greci. Con tal raziocinio si potrebbe negare che nel secolo XIV si avanzassero in Firenze le belle arti fra le fazioni de’ Guelfi […]: eppure la storia prova che così avvenne.⁹³

Lanzi’s prey here is clearly Winckelmann’s erroneous chronology of Etruscan ‘monuments’ and their identification; it is nevertheless notable that, by comparing antiquity to fourteenth-century turbulent Florence, he shifted attention to peace as Winckelmann’s key error of judgement rather than to the buon governo that was the cause of that peace and therefore the original cause of the flourishing of the arts.

One reason for this may derive from Lanzi’s appreciation, explicitly expressed in several passages of the Saggio,⁹⁴ for the essays of Giovanni Maria Lampredi, a young jurist at the University of Pisa and member of the Accademia di Cortona. Heavily inspired by Montesquieu, particularly in his second essay where he applied the French philosophe’s historical method to Etruria, Lampredi wrote on the philosophy of the Etruscans (Saggio sopra la filosofia degli antichi Etruschi, 1756) and on their political systems, moral values and customs (Del governo civile degli antichi Toscani e delle cause della loro decadenza, 1760), using ancient written sources and comparing ancient and modern federal republican states.⁹⁵ In the first essay, Lampredi emphasized the moderation of Etruscan republican governments in ensuring peace and stability, a view originating, in fact, from a mistaken and superficial reading of Montesquieu’s writing on the laws and the states’ defensive policies.⁹⁶ The second essay, specifically devoted to the history of the Etruscan states, explored the dynamism of these states and their eventual decline under Rome. Although these essays had no impact on contemporary and subsequent antiquarian scholarship, and indeed were scorned by Müller,⁹⁷ the themes that Lampredi drew out of his historical analysis may, I want to suggest, have affected Lanzi’s own perspective upon Winckelmann’s ‘system’.

Niebuhr and Müller

Winckelmann’s nexus between art and the political was eventually jettisoned by Müller himself who used Winckelmann’s concepts of freedom and simplicity to characterize the Greeks and their spirit or temperament rather than their art, as Winckelmann had done. To Müller that spirit had much more profound influence than political systems or climate,⁹⁸ which he saw as ‘external’ facts to an ancient culture.⁹⁹ It is perhaps for this reason that in his handbook on ancient art (Handbuch der Archäologie der Kunst, 1st ed., 1830), a compendium on the subject at a time of momentous archaeological discoveries across the Mediterranean, he followed a very different sequence from that of Winckelmann’s Geschichte, placing the Greeks at the very beginning.¹⁰⁰ A couple of years earlier, Müller had published a two-volume essay, Die Etrusker (1828), for which he won a prize in Berlin.¹⁰¹ The essay was a compendium on the latest knowledge held at his time, and critically combined all the sources available for the Etruscans. It was a total Etruscan history, but one in which the ancient texts were the primary evidence: as such it exemplified nineteenth-century Altertumswissenschaft and the historicist approach to antiquity that put at the forefront the need to achieve a total historical understanding of an ancient people through the study of all the possible sources available.¹⁰² As Momigliano noted,¹⁰³ the reason behind Müller’s decision to undertake such a challenging task must be sought in the interest in the early eras of Greek and Roman antiquity in German scholarship of the time,¹⁰⁴ that was stimulated by the Archaic Greek archaeological discoveries such as those from the Temple of Aphaia at Aegina in 1811.¹⁰⁵ This interest is strikingly manifested in the 1811 publication, after a series of successful lectures in Berlin, of the first volume of the History of Rome by Niebuhr, first professor of history at the University of Berlin, whom Müller admired.¹⁰⁶

Niebuhr’s History had the specific aim of reconstructing the agrarian legal history of Rome, an aim that must be seen against the politicohistorical background of his times, in the aftermath of la Terreur of the French Revolution, and marked by profound political and social changes. Niebuhr was a direct observer of these changes as diplomat and collaborator to Freiherr von Stein, the reformist Prussian Chancellor who pushed for reforms on landownership, local governments and serfdom in the aftermath of the Prussian defeat by Napoleon.¹⁰⁷

With his History, re-edited in 1827, Niebuhr, although ultimately he never resolved the enduring debate around the nature of Rome’s ager publicus, showed that the lesson one could learn from Archaic Rome was that the success of a state like Rome lay in the sociopolitical space given to free non-aristocratic landowners by the reforms of Servius Tullius: these reforms ensured accommodation between opposing social classes, the patricians and the plebeians.¹⁰⁸ To Niebuhr, the plebs were at the origins of private landownership, a finding that recast them under a positive light and emphasized the lesson of Archaic Rome for the nineteenth century.¹⁰⁹ Importantly, to Niebuhr who was reformist but politically moderate, the ancient plebeian battles around agrarian legislation were fought not to acquire new political power for themselves, but rather to win back rights that the Servian reforms had already established.¹¹⁰ In his own reading of the sources, Niebuhr contrasted the success of the Roman state with the Etruscan ‘nation’ of cities, ruled by noble ruling classes that maintained a feudal system throughout its history; in doing so, Niebuhr illustrated the doomed fate of oligarchic constitutions.¹¹¹ Moreover, because Niebuhr saw the Etruscan ‘nation’ as born out of conquest from Raetia, the Alpine area of north-eastern Italy,¹¹² the relationship between the ruling classes, the nobility and the clients was always one of serfdom or subjugation even in extreme circumstances, as in the case of the serf revolt at Volsinii; the Etruscan state, in other words, never developed a plebeian estate.¹¹³ Niebuhr’s thought on these developments became richer in the second edition of his History, which famously included comparisons with the modern Indian caste system.¹¹⁴ Here, the Etruscan debt to Rome was reduced to such an extent that the Tarquins themselves had no Etruscan origins, a minimalism on which contemporary historians, including Theodor Mommsen, concurred.¹¹⁵

Müller took over much from Niebuhr in his own views of Etruscan political systems, particularly the assessment of the Etruscan constitution as inherently aristocratic and dominated by a religious or priestly aristocracy; it may not be far-fetched to claim that he lifted this assessment almost wholesale from Niebuhr.¹¹⁶ At the same time, however, in some ways he distanced himself from him: Müller’s Etruscan political systems¹¹⁷ resemble Rome in many respects, from the concept of the magistrates’ imperium, unknown to Greek cities, but present in Etruscan cities, to the existence of some form of senate formed by the lucumoni.¹¹⁸ Where Müller’s assessment of the Etruscan constitution is most distant from Niebuhr’s is over the existence of a free class, not subjugated to the aristocracy, about which, Müller argued, we know very little.¹¹⁹ Furthermore, Müller supposed the existence of social revolts in Etruria, by analogy with Greek states, and changes in the constitution and law similar to those occurring in Rome; he even suggested that many ancient Roman laws derived from Etruscan ones.¹²⁰ This view of an Etruscanized Rome may in part explain Niebuhr’s ‘annoyed’ reaction at Müller’s Die Etrusker, which Niebuhr knew as member on the judging panel of the Berlin Academy in 1826 when Müller won his prize for the manuscript.¹²¹ The truth is that Müller had no real interest in the ‘political’; indeed, by establishing relationships between the different components of Etruscan culture, religion, art and language, and framing them into an organic whole, Müller ‘neutralizes’ the political’ and renders it abstract.¹²² We are, in other words, miles away from Niebuhr’s vision of Etruscan political systems and yet, simultaneously, at the heart of it: Müller thus solidified this aristocracy-centred vision of Etruscan antiquity for future scholarship.

Die Etrusker’s chapter on art, on the other hand, reflects Müller’s difficulty in characterizing Etruscan art beyond asserting its emulative disposition towards Greek art, which he explained by portraying Etruscan art as an offshoot of Greek artistic roots on foreign soil.¹²³ This view does not stem from any nexus between art and the political, for Müller has none, as noted above. Rather, I suggest, there are two key reasons for this. First, as Settis argued,¹²⁴ Müller’s method involved building a template or a system through the analysis of texts, both literary and epigraphic; on the basis of this system, according to Müller, and only at a second stage, could one analyse the archaeological monuments and insert them into that system. As noted above, this was Altertumswissenschaft’s method to put texts before monuments. Second, and more importantly, Müller’s difficulty lay in the primary, or rather essential, role that he attributed to religion and mythology in the study of ancient art, a role well elaborated in the Handbook of Ancient Art, first published in 1830. There, art is the embodiment of religion.¹²⁵ To Müller and many of his contemporaries, myth and religion were the core of history, or rather were the inner history as much as the economy and political systems were external history.¹²⁶ History was contained in myth which, although independent from history, had to be deciphered in order to identify the earliest phases of a people’s history. The clearest expression of this view is found in Müller’s theory for a scientific study of mythology, Prolegomena zu einer wissenschaftlichen Mythologie (1825). Here, he provided a systematic approach to the problem of studying myth in order to extract historical knowledge, an approach based upon the principle that local geographical and historical circumstances, including language, determined the formation of a specific mythology and therefore culture.¹²⁷ Language itself constituted in his eyes the means through which myth was expressed; hence, the key role of the philological and etymological study of language in the study of myth.¹²⁸

Müller’s inability to read the Etruscan-specific character of the art through its mythology was therefore to do with Etruscan art’s borrowing from Greek mythology, but, even more importantly, with the specific nature of Etruscan religion which he, a much more skilled and reliable reader of ancient sources than Niebuhr, saw as dominated by superstition.¹²⁹ In his Handbook, written a few years later than Die Etrusker and perhaps reflecting more mature ideas about the tight link between art and mythology following the debate on the Etruscan/Greek vases reignited by Luciano Bonaparte’s excavations at Vulci,¹³⁰ Müller declared that a religion steeped in superstition is ill-suited to figurative representations:

[…] the art of design was always a foreign plant in Etruria, foreign in forms, foreign in materials, which she borrowed almost entirely, not from the national superstition, which was but ill-adapted to artistic representations, but from the divine and heroic myth of the Greeks.¹³¹

Herein lies Müller’s problem with Etruscan art and its originality.¹³²

The development of these ideas was contemporary with the progressive periodization of art and archaeology that was fuelled by the new excavations, not just in Italy, but across the entire Mediterranean, from Egypt and Anatolia to the Aegean, from the middle to the late nineteenth century. The Etruscan Regolini-Galassi Tomb was excavated in 1836 and put on display at the newly established Museo Gregoriano Etrusco in Rome in 1838; ten years later, in 1847, the first Assyrian museum in the world was inaugurated at the Louvre to house newly excavated finds from Khorsabad; in 1853, Henry Layard published the engravings of a selection of bronze bowls he excavated at the North-West Palace at Nimrud. Examination of these finds and their style gave rise to the conceptualization of the ancient Orient in artistic and cultural terms, and the eventual recognition of an Orientalizing period in ancient art. It was Alexander Conze who first applied the term ‘Orientalizing’ to distinguish the Geometric style of Greek vase painting, and then to Etruscan art in 1870.¹³³ That Conze was a pupil of Edward Gerhard who was, in turn, a friend of Müller and first director of the Instituto di Corrispondenza Archeologica (the future German Archaeological Institute) in Rome partly explains Conze’s proximity to and impact upon new perspectives on Etruscan art and its Orientalizing period.¹³⁴ The Instituto, in fact, was not simply at the centre of Classical research in Italy but also the centre of international scholarship of the Classical world: it was conceived as a centre of scholarly exchange amongst archaeologists and for gathering news and publications of new findings and excavations across the Mediterranean.¹³⁵ Despite its tumultuous history in the first half of the nineteenth century, the Instituto grew thanks to the Prussian government’s financial support that included post-doctoral scholarships allowing young scholars to travel and learn about Classical monuments; one of the first of such scholars was Conze himself.¹³⁶ A few years later, from 1863, the appointment of Wolfgang Helbig as secondo segretario of the Instituto ensured continuity of interest in fieldwork at and activities involving Etruscan sites.

Conclusion

From Conze and the application of the term ‘Orientalizing’ to Etruria, it is was not a far step to the re-establishment of the nexus between art and the political via the religious dimension, so central in Müller’s vision of antiquity. The pervading Orientalism of nineteenth- and twentieth-century archaeology amidst the flurry of increasingly larger-scale excavations across the Mediterranean basin and in Italy eventually cemented the view that an eastern princely culture shaped the beginnings of Etruscan art. This view becomes manifest in 1920s Italian Etruscology,¹³⁷ but one finds its seeds less than a century earlier, notably in the work of Giuseppe Micali, author of a monumental history of pre-Roman Italy (L’Italia avanti il Dominio dei Romani), first published in 1810 in four volumes, and then re-edited several times.¹³⁸ While its narrative of an autochthonous and yet culturally diverse ancient Italy proved very influential to different visions of national unification during the Italian Risorgimento,¹³⁹ Micali’s L’Italia was, in fact, highly criticized by German scholars of antiquity – including Niebuhr – who were becoming increasingly authoritative in late-nineteenth-century Italy, and not simply because of the strong dismissal, on their part, of the argument in favour of autochthony. Combining the eighteenth-century antiquarian tradition of local Etruscan studies (so-called etruscheria) with the application of Montesquieu’s thinking on federal republics to ancient Italy, L’Italia, in fact, proved traditional, even obsolete to the new sciences of antiquity.¹⁴⁰ Micali subsequently published a History of ancient Italian Peoples (Storia degli antichi Popoli italiani, Florence 1832), which was equally, if not more, inspiring to the Risorgimento,¹⁴¹ and did not depart much from L’Italia except for a key adjustment concerning the relationship between Etruria and the Orient: here, the Orient and Egypt had much to teach the Etruscans and played a role in ‘civilizing’ them, particularly insofar as religion was concerned.¹⁴² Indeed, this adjustment enabled Micali to emphasize the emergence, in Etruria, of a powerful priestly aristocracy,¹⁴³ that the ‘engine’ of the Etruscan government that brought the greatest prosperity to the Etruscans in Italy was religious in nature,¹⁴⁴ and that eventually, by the fifth century BC, Etruscan priestly authority and ‘the yoke of superstition’ waned thanks to the influence of Greek mythology and customs.¹⁴⁵ It is not implausible to detect traces of Müller’s vision here, especially since Micali explicitly referred to both him and Niebuhr somewhat scornfully in his preface.¹⁴⁶ At the same time, explicit comparisons with Egyptian, Persian and Indian religions disclose an approach towards the study of ancient religion and myth that had been at the centre of a violent controversy in the 1820s amongst German Classical philologists, including Müller himself, and that was ultimately rejected.¹⁴⁷ By placing his claims into the context of the ancient monuments, from scarabs to sphinxes, monstrous animals and other images that harked back to the Orient and Egypt, and in the context of Etruscan sea contacts with Phoenicians and Carthaginians between Sicily and Sardinia,¹⁴⁸ Micali’s Storia ultimately set the tone further for an Orientalizing vision that was beginning to take shape.

If autochthony was an object of heated debate amongst nineteenth-century scholars against the background of European nationalism,¹⁴⁹ the question of ‘origins’ of the Etruscans was finally resolved in the post-war era of the twentieth century by Massimo Pallottino. To Pallottino, the argument for autochthony could easily coexist with an emphasis on the role of foreign material and visual culture in the emergence of first-millennium-BC Etruria – a vision not unlike that of Micali.¹⁵⁰ Although he was art-historically trained by Giulio Quirino Giglioli,¹⁵¹ Pallottino devoted his early work mostly to the epigraphic and linguistic study of Etruscan: this led to the identification of political offices and institutions that were set against those known from ancient Roman sources. Through this study Pallottino not only achieved the first direct grasp of Etruscan political formation and evolution, the subject of an entire chapter in his Etruscologia, first published in 1942;¹⁵² he also re-established the link between art and the political by framing that formation and evolution within the art-historical and archaeological Orientalist vision of Etruscan princes and eastern-type monarchic political authority, which Müller, with his aristocracy-centred perspective upon Etruria, helped establish, and which is still with us today.¹⁵³

If this investigation into the intellectual genealogy of debates on the Hellenization of Etruria ends by highlighting the pervading force of Orientalism in twentieth-century Etruscology, this is not fortuitous: in fact, it demonstrates that it is not simply classicism and Hellenism or indeed cultural Germanism, as Mazzarino called it,¹⁵⁴ that explain the paradigm driving those debates in Etruscology in more recent times. It is rather, and more specifically, the changing perspectives upon the link between art and the political, which Winckelmann first addressed in his Geschichte, Lanzi re-evaluated, Müller severed and Pallottino finally resumed in the middle of the twentieth century as the once-and-for-all autochthonous Etruscans were artistically and politically orientalized before becoming hellenized. By then, Italian Etruscology had witnessed an important resurgence that had taken place between the early 1920s and the end of World War Two partly as the result of a widely spread nationalistic agenda;¹⁵⁵ according to this agenda, which emerged in the post-Risorgimento phase and antedates fascism, the Etruscans represented ‘the earliest Italy’, understood through an evolutionist perspective.¹⁵⁶

Pallottino’s scholarship turned Etruscology into a truly archaeological discipline further removed from art history and more concerned with social and political change;¹⁵⁷ that change, however, was greatly informed by the method he first introduced, namely the study of political institutions identified in the epigraphic sources and understood vis-à-vis their better-known Roman counterparts. In doing so, furthermore, it left the link between art and the political unresolved and unproblematized. Later Etruscological research on art has successfully shifted emphasis upon the relationship between craftsman and (elite) patron in artistic production¹⁵⁸ and the re-elaboration of Greek myth and symbolism in Etruria through an iconological-structuralist perspective;¹⁵⁹ it might therefore be argued that this shift has severed the link between art and the political in so far as Hellenization is concerned. Indeed, recent scholarship recognizes the distinctively Etruscan character of political development and institutions to the extent that the phrase ‘Etruscan non-polis’, first coined by Bruno d’Agostino, has come to the fore.¹⁶⁰

Furthermore, the increasing attention that Classical archaeologists and Etruscologists, particularly foreign ones, have devoted to settlement and landscape archaeology from the late 1960s onwards has successfully shifted scholarly interests towards broader themes of social and political change, from urban growth and the evolution of domestic and public spaces to political boundaries and the structuration of rural landscapes. Large-scale archaeological landscape surveys, particularly in southern Etruria,¹⁶¹ and the excavation of settlements like Acquarossa and Poggio Civitate by Swedish and North American Etruscologists, respectively¹⁶² have vastly enriched our views of Etruscan political formation and change: the debt that Etruscology owes to these scholarly developments cannot be overstated.

Despite all this, however, Etruscology still remains unable to move away from an analytical framework that gives precedence to the Greek form, whether political or artistic, in defining the Etruscan form;¹⁶³ at the same time, it remains notably resistant in understanding the latter in a Mediterranean-wide context and against the background of the multifarious cross-cultural relations and interaction that shaped the broad cultural geography of the basin in the first millennium BC. This is all the more surprising given that this is the background against which we have recently come to study the Greek world itself, no longer seen as a world innovating in splendid isolation or a top-down catalyst of change across the basin.¹⁶⁴ Symptomatically, the aforementioned term ‘non-polis’ defines Etruscan urbanism and its political institutions for what they are not in relation to Greek urbanism; that contrast only reinforces that link between art and the political by tacitly conforming to the view of an eastern princely culture informing political models that preceded the non-polis. Ultimately, the contrast remains between the artistic–political East identified in princely political authority and the West identified in the democratic polis mediated by Etruria. Nowadays, heir to the momentous developments of the second half of the twentieth century outlined above, Etruscology remains a variegated discipline, rich in different approaches and research questions. The picture I offered above may therefore be seen as too schematic or rigid and misrepresentative of that richness. Yet, the question remains as to why Etruscology, in all of its richness, continues to elude the theoretical and methodological foundation of Mediterranean archaeology which, by moving away from Hellenism, has decolonized and decentred the first-millennium-BC Mediterranean; this paper represents an attempt to answer such a question.