The Sculpture

The sculpture in stone remains very scarce, for many concerns the real sculpture, however there was great production of sarcophaguses in stone and of funeral pillars, both in travertine and alabaster. Strangely, the valuable marble quarries of the area, and the deposits of the Alps, were not used until Roman times.

Instead the representations in terracotta abandoned, or that is statues, that were decorative, as antefixes, often realistic portraits. The terracotta, lively painted, was used to decorate the temples wooden over structure, but also for statues of natural height between these the famous Apollo of Veio, today conserved in the Etruscan Museum of Villa Giulia.

The subjects were usually exclusively sacred and were conditioned by precise endings representing the subject itself apart from the problems of appearance. It does not belong to the Etruscans in fact that process of research of the Greek artists, their rivals that arrived at the conquest of the figurative form and the sublime appearance of expression. The little interest for the naked confirms this attitude, across these opera, were certainly characterised by a taste for the linear surfaces, as they could be confirmed by the pediment of temple A of Pyrgi, or by the Bridal couples' sarcophagus of Cerveteri, also conserved at the Etruscan Museum of Villa Giulia.