Date: Sunday May 19, 2024
Time: 3 pm – 4 pm
Location: Tampa Museum of Art
The Red and the Black: Potters’ Conversations between Etruria and Greece
In the first millennium BCE, the Mediterranean was a vast networking area for economic and intercultural interactions among a mosaic of people: Phoenicians, Etruscans, Greeks and many others. Between the late 8th and the late 4th century BCE, the exchanges between Greece and Etruria formed a significant part of this network. Though not the only type of goods exchanged—and certainly not the most important—pottery exported to Etruria, especially Corinthian and Attic black- and red-figure vases, is the most striking and famous witness of this context. For decades, scholarship analyzed this relation, its economic, artistic and cultural impact from a predominant Greek perspective, considering the Etruscan cities as a mere receptor of an acculturating Greek civilization.
Today scholarship tends to pay more attention to Etruscan agency and the impact of Etruscan tastes on Greek potters and painters. Etruscan exports in the Aegean are now better identified and documented. This more inclusive angle of approach is far from new, however, and indebted to earlier individual research dedicated to specific case studies. As early as 1952, for instance, Pierre Courbin identified the Etruscan origin of the archaic Attic kantharos. Bearing in mind Joseph Veach Nobles’s interest for pottery techniques and starting from some of his collected pieces, this talk will place the focus on some striking cases of mutual inspiration between Etruria and Greece, focusing on the black and red-and-black appearance of the vases.
Lectures are offered:
Biography
Delphine Tonglet is Assistant Curator at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. She is an art historian and archaeologist specialized in the study of ancient Greece and Etruria (PhD 2014, Université libre de Bruxelles). Tonglet has established an international career participating in archaeological excavations in Crete (Greece), Tuscany and Latium (Italy) and as recipient of scholarships at the University of Pisa, the Academia Belgica in Rome, the Collegio dei Fiamminghi in Bologna, and the Metropolitan Museum of New York (Andrew W. Mellon Senior Fellowship 2015–2016). She is particularly interested in the cultural exchanges between Etruria and the Greek world as well as the broader Mediterranean region, through the study of ancient material culture.
Presenting Sponsors: Nancy & Harry de Waart
Community Sponsors:
Belinda R. Dumont
Victoria & Paul Hasse
Dr. Daniel & Alicia Murphy
Bill Zewadski
Image: Two geese flanking a palmette on a ceramic drinking cup (black-figure kantharos of so-called Pontic style with added red); Etruria, Italy; late Archaic period, ca. 520-500 BCE. Joseph Veach Noble Collection, purchased in part with funds donated by The Moody Group, Inc., 1986.128