Etruscan jewelry

Etruscan gold jewelry especially flourished during the Orientalizing period due to the very affluent trading system which had evolved during this time.

Syro-Phoenician jewelers settled in southern Etruria and taught local apprentices the art of granulation and filigree.

Later Etruscans loosened up their very stern geometric standards and added in their designs floral and figurative elements of oriental inspiration.

Gorgons, pomegranates, acorns, lotus flowers and palms were a clear indicator of Greek influence in Etruscan jewelry.

The modelling of heads, which was a typical practice from the Greek severe period, was a technique that spread throughout the Etruscan territory.

In the northern city-states however, jewelry was more sober and refined pieces from Vetrulonia, for example, are decorated with minute particles known as pulviscolo (gold dust).

These practices came to them from the (at the time) distant Middle East, along with imported objects who inspired them to widen their range of jewelry.

It was invented in Mesopotamia in the third millennium BC and was subsequently introduced to Anatolia, Syria, Egypt, Cyprus and Mycenaean Greece.

Filigree is a decorative open work made from thin twisted wire mainly in silver and gold but also in other type of metals.

The disc earring is originally a Lydian type of jewelry and became a fashionable trend during the archaic period with the strong East Greek influence spreading in the second half of the 6th century BCE.

The heavy pendants started becoming fashionable along with the Middle Eastern floral elements and all the other types of influence the Etruscans received from elsewhere in the Mediterranean.

Large hanging earrings, long necklaces and heavy pendants or bullae were in style and worn by both men and woman alike.

In the early 3rd century, bead necklaces and bullae remain popular as do torcs, which were rings of color hair (of an animal) or feathers around the neck.

In the late classical era body jewelry became more and more popular as the fashions tended towards a progressive state of undress.

During the Hellenistic periods, technical decline and excessively complex shapes and decoration characterized the jewelry.

Etruscan Bulla with the Greek mythical figures Daedalus and Icarus. Walters Art Museum , Baltimore .
Ear-stud decorated with a rosette surrounded by concentric bands. Gold with vitreous glass paste insets, 530–480 BC. British Museum .
Ear-stud decorated with a rosette surrounded by concentric bands, globules and flowers. Gold with vitreous glass paste insets, 530–480 BC. British Museum.
Vulci set of jewelry , 5th century, Metropolitan Museum of Art .
Morgan Amber fibula, 5th century, Metropolitan Museum of Art .
Earring decorated with bosses, globule clusters, rosettes and filigree. Stamped gold sheet , 400–300 BC. British Museum.
Wreath with ivy leaves and berries, a satyr's head at either end. Gold sheet, artwork, from a tomb near Tarquinia , 400–350 BC. British Museum.