Tradition and Innovation: the Ring-Askos in the Late Red-figured Faliscan Pottery

The shape of the ring askos has a long tradition: it had already appeared in the Bronze Age in Cyprus and Greece in the Late Mycenaean Age. In Medium-Tyrrhenian Italy the ring askoi, placed horizontally, were common during the Orientalizing period, with some specific exceptions relating to the Villanovan period. Examples in the Villanovan impasto pottery from Tarquinia, Veji, Bisenzio and Vetulonia with a bull, ram or horse protomes were also well known (IX-VIII century B.C.). As in Greece, also in Italy, animal heads are present on ring askoi of ancient production, but of a later date. However, after the Archaic period they disappeared. U.H. Rüdiger, who studied the askos, does not mention any ring askos with an animal head after the Archaic period. This study intends to highlight the traditional and innovative characteristics of the Faliscan Pottery workshop that produced the ring askos with an animal protome. Etruscan pottery of the Hellenistic age shows a preference for zoomorphic askoi commonly duck, deer and lion shaped. Extraordinary are, for this reason, five ring askoi with a griffin, or fawn or bird (?) protome respectively, produced at the same Faliscan Red-Figured Pottery workshop during the last three decades of the fourth century BC.