Help our mission to provide free history education to the world! Please donate and contribute to covering our server costs in 2024. With your support, millions of people learn about history entirely for free every month.
In this gallery, we showcase 25 pieces of art produced by the Etruscan civilization which flourished in central Italy between the 8th and 3rd century BCE. Etruscan art is celebrated for its vitality, colour and capturing of everyday life. In their wall paintings, sculptures, terracottas and jewellery pieces, the Etruscans have transmitted through the centuries their joy of living.
The Etruscans greatly appreciated foreign art (their tombs are full of imported pieces) and they readily adopted ideas and forms prevalent in the art of other cultures, but they also added their own twists to conventions. The Etruscans, for example, produced nude statues of female deities before the Greeks did, and they uniquely blended Eastern motifs and subjects with thier own indigenous art.
A pair of terracotta winged-horses from the Temple of the Ara della Regina, Tarquinia. Etruscan, c. 350 BCE. (National Archaeological Museum, Tarquinia, Italy)
Based on Wikipedia content that has been reviewed, edited, and republished.
Original image by Paolo Villa. Uploaded by Mark Cartwright, published on 16 January 2017. The copyright holder has published this content under the following license: Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike. This license lets others remix, tweak, and build upon a work even for commercial reasons, as long as they credit the author and license their new creations under the identical terms. When republishing on the web a hyperlink back to the original content source URL must be included. Please note that content linked from this page may have different licensing terms.