ANCIENT ITALIAN POTTERY North and south Italy were separate cultural provinces in pre historic times. The south, with Sicily, produced some elaborately painted pottery, which may be related to the Neolithic wares of mainland Greece, and some incised with rectilinear patterns like those on the earliest fabrics of Troy and Crete. But there is no evidence of contact between the Aegean and Italian areas be fore the Late Mycenaean age (c. 1300 B.c.), and the mutual re semblances in the pottery are equally referable to the universal similarity of primitive abstract decoration. In any case this south Italian art lived and died in isolation. Contemporary pottery of the north and central regions was of much coarser type, seldom decorated at all and never painted. But the Bronze age (Terre mare) fabrics, though inferior in quality, had a plastic character that influenced the southern Shapes and developed through the Villanova style into classical Etruscan ware. It was probably not fortuitous that the Hellenistic relief styles were largely estab lished in Italy, and that the pottery of the Roman empire bore plastic decoration.
The decorative elements in Terremare pottery are knobs and ribs on the bodies and fantastic modelling of handles, which often end in horns and crescents. The same elements, which had Danubian affinities, persisted in early Iron age (Villanova) fabrics, and the Geometric style in which the other Villanova ornament was designed also reflects the influence of central European art. The similarity of this Villanova Geo metric to the contemporary Dipylon Geometric style of Greece has sometimes been referred to Greek influence in Italy, but there is no other trace of contact at this time (c. 90o B.c.), and it is probable that the same style penetrated both peninsulas from the north. In each case the new designs found an effective medium ready for their expression. Greek Geometric pottery was painted in the old Minoan technique, the Italian patterns were engraved or stamped or modelled in soft clay. The charac teristic maeander, which the Greeks painted in a hatched band, appears in Italy in a band of parallel incisions. The Italian style, like the technique, is far more primitive than the Hellenic. Villanova pottery is not wheel-made ; its clay is coarse, red or brown in body with a darker surface which at its best is polished black. This type of pottery is known in Italian archaeology as impasto. The surface colouring was probably done by fumiga tion. The fabric is thick and clumsy and the shapes are com posed of the simple
and conical forms that belong to ele mentary metalwork. A typical cinerary urn has a tall biconical body with a single horizontal handle on its wide middle. Its
mouth is often covered with a shallow one-handled bowl. The natural development of such pottery was towards closer imitation of metal in refinement of fabric and accuracy of form, but the process was disturbed by the intrusion of foreign influences from Greece and Asia. This contact, which began in the 8th century, coincided with the first settlements of Greeks in Italy and with the rise of Etruscan civilization.
The native Etruscan pottery is called in Italian bucchero nero, or simply bucchero. The clay is fine and coloured black throughout its substance, probably by chemi cal reduction in the kiln or by previous staining. The fabric is generally heavy, since most of the vases were made in moulds and the wheel was rarely used. There are, however, some very fine, thin pieces. Besides the simple developments from Villanova forms, among which the arched band-handle is conspicuous, are copies of Greek and oriental models, oinochoai, kantharoi, kylikes, enriched with various kinds of moulded ornament, engraved, im pressed or modelled. The three processes were often applied to one pot. Linear designs were drawn freehand with a graver or a wheel; they consist of animal and human subjects, floral orna ments, palmette and lotus and simple geometric figures, zigzags, hatched triangles, linked arcs and spiral coils. Common patterns are fan-shaped groups of dots or dashes impressed with toothed wheels. Small decorative units like rosettes and stars were applied with separate stamps, and continuous patterns such as cables (guilloche) were done with engraved wheels. Elaborate friezes in relief were similarly executed with cylinders like Babylonian seal-stones engraved with real and monstrous animals and scenes of hunts, races, banquets and funerals. They were applied to all kinds of vases, but are particularly common on the body of the characteristic Etruscan kylix or calix, a cylindrical cup on a heavy stem which was a Phoenician form, and perhaps originally Hittite. Some ivory examples carved with similar reliefs were among the foreign articles in the Barberini tomb at Praeneste. Many of these cups are supported by three or four modelled struts, in addition to or instead of the central stem, set between the edges of base and body. They are in the form of human figures or flat strips decorated in relief or openwork. Plastic ornament was also applied to these and other vessels in large reliefs, usually of single animal figures on the bodies, rows of masks on rims, and heads standing free on handles. Bodies were also ribbed and fluted and moulded with gadroons, tongues and petals.