It was also in Etruria, at Arezzo (Ar retium), that the first Italian fabric was established of the fine red pottery, variously called Arretine or Samian or terra sigillata, which became the standard ware throughout the Roman world for several centuries. Terra sigillata is the modern archaeological name for the whole class. Samian is a misnomer; it may perhaps be applied to some Greek fabrics, but means nothing definite. Pliny says that the reputation formerly held by Samian table pottery had passed in his day to Arretium and other places in Italy, Spain and Asia Minor. There is no trace of a Spanish fabric in the existing material, but examples of Asiatic origin have been found at Laodicea, Pergamon, Myrina and elsewhere. It is a purely Hellenistic type of pottery, whether made in Italy or Greece.
Arretine is the name of the Italian fabric, which was not made solely at Arezzo. Provincial Roman varieties, mostly Gaulish, are named from their places of manufacture, La Graufesenque, Lezoux, etc. All this pottery is made of bright red clay and, when ornamented, moulded with reliefs (sigilla). Some early (2nd century B.c.) products of Arezzo are black glazed, but they hardly enter into the series. The vases are gen erally small, for table use, and very rarely have handles; they are mostly bowls, cups and saucers of shallow cylindrical and globular forms. Their lustre was produced with a thin alkaline glaze, which gives an extraordinary depth and richness to the colour of the clay. The earliest decoration was copied from the embossed silverware which was originally a speciality of Alexan dria and Antioch. (See SILVERSMITHS' AND GOLDSMITHS' WORK.) The bodies are completely covered with floral and foliate designs, masks and decorative furniture, human and animal figures, alle gorical and mythological scenes, processions, sacrifices, battles, hunts, dances, feasts and similar episodes of social life. The vases, or their decorated bodies, were cast complete in clay moulds, which were prepared mechanically by means of separate stamps, for the component elements of the design. The final artistic effect was therefore dependent on the potters' manipulative skill. The potters' signatures were stamped into the moulds, sometimes appearing in relief on small tablets among the ornamental figures, sometimes in sunk spaces, rectangular, round or fancifully shaped as footprints, wreaths or stars on rims or bases, inside or outside the vessels. Plain wares are ordinarily stamped inside the base. The names of Arretine pot ters begin about ioo B.C. They represent owners of factories, whose names are sometimes given in the formal Roman manner, sometimes greatly abbreviated and in monogram, and the actual potters, slaves, who often have foreign names. The master potter Marcus Perennius signed M. Perenni, M. Peren, M. Pere, M. Per, and M. Pe. Seventeen slave names occur on his vases, sometimes in conjunction with the master's, sometimes alone. Bargates and Tigranes are the best known ; the latter signed Tigran, Tigra and Tigr. Aulus Titius signed A. Titi. Figvl(ina) Arret(ina). The factory of Rasinius was directed by Lucius of that family in the Augustan period and by Gaius Rasinius Pisanus in the Flavian, by which time the Arretine potteries were turning out replicas of Gaulish work. The large numbers of names and the many varieties of vase shapes and types of ornament that were produced during the long life of this pottery, have been very ac curately recorded, and the pottery has become a valuable archae ological index for determining the dates of other Roman objects, buildings and sites, with which it is found in excavation.
The Italian fabric came to an end about A.D. I oo, being displaced in Italy and the provinces by
terra sigillata made in France Italy still produced its own coarse pottery for ordinary domestic use, unglazed and undecorated vessels, which formed the bulk of ancient pottery at all periods. The new Gaulish ware was precisely the same as Arretine in fabric, and at least as good in technical quality; its colour is even superior, a darker and brighter red, and its paste is usually harder than the Arretine. But the decoration is inferior, the ornament is in very low relief, and designs and figures are gen erally small and mean. It is found all over the Roman world, but most abundantly in central France. Finds of moulds and kilns have fixed the localities of the two principal fabrics at La Graufesenque (Aveyron) and Lezoux (Puy-de-Dome), in the ancient Rutenian and Arvernian territories. The Gaulish fabrics began before the middle of the 1st century A.D. and ended about the middle of the 3rd, but ornamented vases were probably not cast from moulds after the middle of the and century. The names are often Gaulish, and even Roman names are spelt in Gaulish fashion, Tornos for Turnus. It is a strange fact that native ele ments do not appear in the designs. The forms were at first identical with Arretine or derivative, and there was the same distinction of shapes for ornamented and plain wares. The commonest type of ornamented vase was a carinated bowl with a band of design on each plane (Form 29). It was succeeded in popularity about A.D. 150 by a bowl cylindrical in form, which in its turn gave place to a type of hemispherical shape (Form 37). The commonest plain red vessels are very wide and shallow cylindrical and conical bowls or flat saucers. The earliest orna ment consists of purely decorative motives, wreaths and scrolls, with a few animals incorporated in the foliate designs. These bands are continuous, but the figure-subjects, which began about A.D. 75, are broken up in panels, medallions and arcades, and a free style of figure composition was not reached until the and century. It is characteristic of Lezoux bowls. The figures are minute and were generally taken from well-known Hellenistic sculptural types. There are a few mythological groups. A purely Roman subject, the gladiatorial duel, is very frequent. In the free style hunters chasing animals are popular subjects.
A technical innovation of the and century was relief applied in barbotine, slip clay laid on by piping. It seems to have been a German invention, since it appears first on native Rhenish pottery of the I st century. Its early use in terra sigillata was for small foliate patterns on the rims of flat bowls and dishes, but in the 3rd century it began to replace moulded work on bowls of the standard Roman shape. Another Teutonic element in the Roman fabrics of this date is a globular jar with narrow neck (olla), which could not be cast entire. Its ornament was therefore made in separate plaques or medallions and affixed to the pot ; scrolls in barbotine form a setting for these reliefs, which are largely topical in subject, portraits of emperors, gladiatorial contests and theatrical scenes, often accompanied by explanatory inscriptions. These were made in Provence and also at Lezoux, where they were the last products of the Roman in dustry. The Gaulish output was not large in Roman times and its forms were trifling, small vases and lamps and toys ornamented with reliefs or modelled in the shapes of animals and common ob jects. But in the Eastern empire the process was generally used for Byzantine pottery. It was adopted by the conquering nations after the fall of Rome, and became the medium of ceramic dec oration in mediaeval Europe. (E. J. F.)