La ricezione del linguaggio artistico tarentino tra la Grecia continentale e l’Italia centrale

Abstract

In Magna Graecia, and in Taranto itself, the shortage of marble was one of the causes for the formation of excellent artistic production in terracotta
and local stone. The discovery of the vegetal frieze of Castro, whose chronology between the third and fourth quarter of the 4th century B.C. has been
ascertained, has, on the one hand, made it possible to understand much better the very high level reached by the artists of Taranto in architectural decoration
in soft stone (‘pietra tenera’), but also to review in a new light the chronology of many Tarentine monuments that, for numerous reasons, had
suffered a lowering of their date as far back as the advanced 2nd century B.C. We can also better understand the reasons why certain figurative patterns
created in Taranto had a considerable success and, therefore, a wide diffusion along two directions: towards central Italy on the one hand, to Epirus and
Macedonia on the other, and even further to the Scythian areas of the Black Sea. At the same time, it seems necessary to point out the genesis in Taranto
of a pathetic current that, contrary to the widespread conception of an artistic production dominated by the Praxitelic model, had, on the contrary, a
wide diffusion in the artistic panorama of the city and Apulia in the last decades of the 4th and early 3rd century B.C., well before the formation of the
so-called Pergamene art, as evidenced by a rich series of terracottas found in Taranto and Apulia, among which several protomes applied on askoi from
Canosa. It can be assumed that in this period many elements of Tarentine figurative culture, including the pathetic component, had penetrated, probably
with the transfer of Tarentine and Apulian craftsmen to local workshops, into Central Italy and Etruria. This phenomenon should have been accentuated
when, with the massive Roman penetration in southern Italy during the Second Samnite War, Canusium definitively entered the Roman orbit (318 BC),
and when the Latin-law colony of Luceria was founded (314 BC). In these centres, to which one should also add Cales, which became a Latin colony as
early as 334 BC, some of the terracottas found in old and new excavations show no small affinity with the most beautiful of Faliscan terracotta sculptures,
and seem to identify a directive of penetration of the Tarentine language towards Latium. It is inevitable that Rome itself, victorious over Tarent in
272 B.C., was an important centre of production and/or reception, as can be deduced from the presence in the city of architectural terracottas of the
same level as those from the temple of the Scasato in Falerii. We cannot know whether Rome was a centre of production or only of reception through
itinerant craftsmen, but the most recent discoveries dictate that we should not underestimate the city’s direct contribution to artistic and artisanal production
in central Italy as early as the mid-Republican age.