Richard Daniel De Puma
This brief survey of some of the many public museums in North America that include Etruscan and Italic art will introduce the history of collecting Etruscan antiquities in this part of the world. It will also give readers an idea of cities to visit should they wish to see and study Etruscan art outside the major European collections. At the outset, it is important to realize that there are scores of college and university art museums, not to mention private collectors, that possess works of Etruscan art but that cannot be included in this necessarily short treatment.1 Only two of the largest university museum collections, in Philadelphia and Berkeley, will be discussed here.
The Museum of Fine Arts in Boston was founded in 1870, the same year as the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. As we shall see, three important connoisseurs of ancient art, Edward Robinson (1858–1931), John Marshall (1862–1928) and Edward Perry Warren (1860–1928), strongly influenced the antiquities collections of both museums in their early stages. The Etruscan collection at the Museum of Fine Arts is especially strong in stone sculpture, thanks to the 1886 acquisition of two magnificent sarcophagi from Vulci, brought to Boston by James Jackson Jarves in 1883.2 The collection is also strong in Etruscan engraved mirrors, through the work of E. P. Warren, who either sold or donated the 11 mirrors the museum acquired between 1892 and 1903 (the entire collection of 31 mirrors is published in De Puma 1993). Other areas of significant holdings include pottery and an impressive tomb-group from Chiusi, acquired in 1913 (for the pottery, see Fairbanks 1928 and Padgett et al. 1993. For the tomb-group, which contains some of the best mirrors in the collection, see De Puma 2008a: 135–149; for the mirrors, see De Puma 1993: 7–45, nos. 15–25). In general, it can be said that Boston’s approach to ancient art was very similar to that of the Metropolitan’s: it stressed artistic quality and technical proficiency over archaeological relevance, and showed a decided bias to Greek art over both Etruscan and Roman. This common trend, no doubt, was reinforced by Edward Robinson, who was trained as a classical archaeologist in Europe, where Greek art took precedence. He worked at both museums. In his many letters to John Marshall, the Metropolitan’s purchasing agent in Rome, he often stated his goals for building the collection.3
The Etruscan collection at the Metropolitan Museum of Art is one of the largest and finest in North America. In 1903 the museum acquired two major Etruscan tomb-groups: the Monteleone di Spoleto tomb-group with its splendid bronze chariot (c.575–550 BCE) and the Bolsena tomb-group containing several inscribed silver, gold and bronze objects (c.300–275 BCE) (for this collection, see now De Puma 2008b and 2013; Emiliozzi 2011; and metmuseum.org). The Monteleone tomb-group is arguably the most important Etruscan tomb-group in any North American collection. The famous chariot is the most elaborate and best-preserved Etruscan example in the world. The quality of the bronzes in the museum’s collection (statuettes, vessels, candelabra, incense burners, engraved mirrors) is exceptional. Other strong areas are bucchero pottery, Pontic ware and Volsinian silvered ware. The carved gems and gold jewelry, mostly acquired in 1881 and 1895, respectively, are additional areas of great beauty and interest (Richter 2006 (1956) 41–60; De Puma 2013: chap. VII). The museum also has one of the finest Etruscan and Italic amber collections, comprising more than 700 pieces.
The Walters Art Museum (called the Walters Art Gallery from its founding in 1934 until 2000) is the gift of Henry Walters to the city of Baltimore. Henry Walters (1848–1931) and his father William Thompson Walters (1819–94) were both avid art collectors and amassed an eclectic assortment of paintings, furniture, and antiquities. The Etruscan collection, almost exclusively the product of the younger Walters’s interests, is rich in bronzes (especially engraved cistae and mirrors) and gold jewelry.4 The first curator of ancient art, Dorothy Kent Hill (1907–1986), was in many ways like her older friend and colleague at the Metropolitan, Gisela M. A. Richter (1882–1972). Both had begun work at their respective museums at the beginnings of their professional careers (Richter in 1906 and Hill in 1934, shortly after the Walters was founded), both rose to significant positions in their institutions and remained there until their retirements, and both published numerous articles about the antiquities they acquired in their museum periodicals and elsewhere. Another similarity is the interest that both curators took in the technical aspects of ancient art, Richter especially in pottery and stone sculpture, Hill in bronze casting and engraving. What the Etruscan collection at the Walters may lack in breadth and quantity, it makes up in quality.
A major academic collection is the University of Pennsylvania Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology in Philadelphia. As a teaching collection, this museum amassed a wide range of material from many cultures, often as the result of excavations conducted by its faculty. However, the Etruscan material was mostly acquired by Arthur Lincoln Frothingham, Jr. (1859–1923), a Princeton archaeologist and art historian who was a major source in the 1890s for the Metropolitan, as well as for the Field Museum in Chicago. Because it was difficult for foreigners to obtain permission to excavate in Italy, Frothingham arranged to hire Italian archaeologists to supply him with excavated tomb-groups that he could sell to his American and European clients. Thus, much of the material that came via Frothingham now in Philadelphia and Chicago consists of various tomb-groups mostly from Narce, Vulci, Poggio Buco, Tuscania (called Toscanella in the nineteenth century), Orvieto, Saturnia, and a few other sites. These tomb-groups were supposedly the entire contents of specific tombs, although normally skeletal material was not included (for Frothingham’s methods, see De Puma and Brownlee 2013). In many cases, the materials are of inferior quality or very poorly preserved, but they do represent the context of a given burial site and thus can have important archaeological information about both regional and overseas trade contacts, relationships between different types and techniques of pottery or bronzes, and other features. This major source, which formed the basis for the Etruscan collection in Philadelphia, set the tone as archaeological, rather than aesthetic, although some artifacts could stand alone as isolated objets d’art.
The University of Pennsylvania Museum opened in 1899. It articulated “a collecting policy whereby it would be less interested in individual objects and more concerned with acquiring whole groups of objects covering a large chronological range which had come from scientific exploration and which would be accompanied by carefully and scientifically gathered documentation. The new Etruscan collection, with its complete and well-documented tomb-groups was a perfect example of the Museum’s mission” (White et al. 2002: 2; in 2005 this collection became one of the few that is authoritatively published: Turfa 2005, with the review by Serra Ridgway 2006). In 1942 Edith Hall Dohan (1877–1943) published a major treatment of a selection of the museum’s Etruscan tomb-groups: Italic Tomb-Groups in the University Museum. This meticulous study became the model for several later works investigating the various collections of Etruscan tomb-groups acquired by other museums during the late nineteenth century.
Two museums in the American Midwest have significant Etruscan collections. Established in 1893 for the World’s Columbian Exposition in Chicago, the Field Museum of Natural History has a collection of tomb-groups acquired, like those in Philadelphia, from Frothingham (these have been published by Davison 1972 and De Puma 1986). There is also a rich collection of Etruscan jewelry, several terracotta cinerary urns (see further, Chapter 30) and a series of monumental sculpted and painted stone sarcophagi.5 The monumental scale of several of these sarcophagi is unique for American collections. Unfortunately, almost all of this significant material has been in storage for more than 25 years. However, since 1994 several smaller Etruscan objects have been on loan to the Art Institute of Chicago where they are displayed with some of that museum’s Etruscan collection (see De Puma 1994).
The Detroit Institute of Arts was founded in 1885. Its Etruscan collection is relatively modest but covers a representative range of Villanovan and Etruscan artifacts and possesses some excellent pieces, especially in the area of bronze statuettes and sculpted stone cinerary urns (Caccioli 2009). Other Midwestern museums with small but often choice Etruscan holdings include the Cleveland Museum of Art, Toledo Museum of Art, St. Louis Art Museum, Minneapolis Institute of Arts, Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art (Kansas City), Dayton Art Institute, and Cincinnati Art Museum.
In the South, the Dallas Museum of Art (founded in 1903 as the Dallas Art Association) had relatively little Etruscan art until 1991 when it acquired the ancient jewelry collection of Dr. Athos Moretti of Lugano. This impressive collection was built slowly from the 1930s to the 1960s and contains material from ancient Greece, Etruria, Rome, and the Near East (Deppert-Lippitz 1996; the Etruscan jewelry is treated on 31–57; 121–131). In the tradition of the Gilded Age, this is a good example of an entire collection, formed earlier by an individual connoisseur over many years, being acquired by a public museum.
Although there are several impressive museums with antiquities in the American West, only two have significant Etruscan collections. The Phoebe A. Hearst Museum of Anthropology at the University of California, Berkeley, was founded in 1901. Although it is not well-known for its Etruscan material, it has an important archaeological collection that deserves more recognition and study. Like the other museums whose early collections were influenced by the methods of Frothingham, this one too possesses a series of tomb-groups. Many of these, however, were acquired for the museum by Alfred Emerson (1859–1943) in 1902 (Matteucig 1951; Donati 1984). More unexpected still is its extensive collection of votive terracottas, more than 800 examples, part of a huge cache of some 6,000 votives discovered at Cerveteri in December 1885 (see Nagy 1988, which treats 316 examples representing all basic types in the collection). Portions of this find ended up in museums in Boston, Siena, Vatican City, and Berlin; Berkeley also exchanged some duplicates with the Otago Museum in Dunedin, New Zealand.
The Getty Villa of the J. Paul Getty Museum is, at its core, a recreation of the Roman Villa of the Papyri at Herculaneum. It opened to the public in 1974 and contained all of the Getty collection from ancient to modern art. Later, when the collection had outgrown this space, all of the art from the Medieval period onward was moved to a new museum at the Getty Center in Brentwood so that the extensively renovated villa could be devoted exclusively to antiquities. It reopened in 2006. The Etruscan collection is especially rich in pottery, amber, carved gems, and gold jewelry.6 In 1996 the Getty acquired through donation and purchase approximately 300 antiquities, including several important Etruscan objects, from the Fleischman Collection in New York.7
The largest collection of classical antiquities in Canada is in the Royal Ontario Museum, Toronto. Founded in 1912 and associated with the University of Toronto until 1968, this is another museum with an Etruscan collection mostly acquired before 1920. The collection is especially rich in impasto and bucchero pottery, bronze vessels and engraved mirrors.8
This brief survey of North American collections demonstrates two basic approaches to the acquisition of Etruscan artifacts: an archaeological approach that emphasizes tomb-groups where all the objects in a given tomb might be presented together, and an aesthetic approach where objects are selected primarily for their artistic quality, their iconographical or technical interest, and their good state of preservation. For example, the Metropolitan’s approach was often a combination of these two trends, at least in the early years. The Monteleone di Spoleto tomb-group, acquired in 1903, has impressive archaeological value but, especially when we consider the chariot, it is also a major source of aesthetic, stylistic, iconographical, and technical interests. The fact that it is the most-often cited object in the Etruscan collection demonstrates the validity of this opinion. The museum’s two other tomb-groups, from Bolsena (also acquired in 1903) and Civita Castellana (acquired in 1912), also combine archaeological and aesthetic qualities. These tomb-groups and scores of other objects in the various museums mentioned above demonstrate both aesthetic and archaeological significance. They provide a precious glimpse into the vibrant world of the Etruscans in a North American setting.