heritage Article Portrait of an Etruscan Athletic Official: A Multi-Analytical Study of a Painted Terracotta Wall Panel Monica Ganio 1, * , Douglas MacLennan 1 , Marie Svoboda 2 , Claire Lyons 2 and Karen Trentelman 1   Citation: Ganio, M.; MacLennan, D.; Svoboda, M.; Lyons, C.; Trentelman, K. Portrait of an Etruscan Athletic Official: A Multi-Analytical Study of a Painted Terracotta Wall Panel. Heritage 2021, 4, 4596–4608. https:// doi.org/10.3390/heritage4040253 Academic Editor: Joanne Dyer Received: 28 October 2021 Accepted: 4 December 2021 Published: 9 December 2021 Publisher’s Note: MDPI stays neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affil- iations. Copyright: © 2021 by the authors. Licensee MDPI, Basel, Switzerland. This article is an open access article distributed under the terms and conditions of the Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY) license (https:// creativecommons.org/licenses/by/ 4.0/). 1 Getty Conservation Institute, Los Angeles, CA 90049, USA; dmaclennan@getty.edu (D.M.); ktrentelman@getty.edu (K.T.) 2 The J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles, CA 90049, USA; msvoboda@getty.edu (M.S.); clyons@getty.edu (C.L.) * Correspondence: mganio@getty.edu Abstract: The Getty’s Etruscan painted terracotta wall panel, Athletic Official, recently has been speculated to be associated with a Caeretan wall panel depicting a Discobolus based on a shared iconography. To better understand the materials and techniques used to create the Getty panel and investigate its relation to extant Etruscan painted terracotta panels, a multi-analytical study was conducted, using broadband visible, IR, and UV imaging, along with scanning MA-XRF, FORS, Raman, SEM-EDS, and XRD analytical techniques. The analytical results together with PCA analysis suggest the clay support of the Getty panel is most similar in composition to that of panels from Cerveteri. A manganese black was identified in the decorative scheme; not commonly employed, this appears to be an important marker for the workshop practice in Cerveteri. Most significantly, the use of MA-XRF scanning allowed for invisible ruling lines on the Athletic Official, presumably laid down at the earliest stages of the creation of the panel, to be visualized. Taken together, the results of this study provide new insights into Caeretan workshop practice as well as provide a framework for better understanding the design and execution of Etruscan polychromy. Keywords: Etruscan; MA-XRF; terracotta; provenance 1. Introduction In the mid-6th century BCE, Etruscans began to produce a characteristic and highly original series of painted terracotta panels. They devised innovative techniques of painting with clay, applying polychrome earth pigments to unbaked tiles that were then fired to create vivid mythological, ceremonial, and heroic narratives. Less well known than the funerary frescoes of the necropolises at Tarquinia and Chiusi [1,2], the rectangular plaques were mounted side-by-side on the walls of elite residences, temples, and occasionally tombs to create continuous pictorial panoramas. Precedents for this approach to building decorative programs can be traced to the early Greek tradition of painting on ceramic and whitened wood tablets (pinakes leleukoménoi), of which very few have survived [3]. Used pre- dominantly in Southern Etruria in the leading cities of Caere (modern-day Cerveteri),Veii, and Falerii, these monuments of Archaic Etruscan architectural ornament and contempo- rary painted tombs constitute the largest corpus of paintings in the Mediterranean prior to the Roman period [4,5]. In 2016, 45 cases of antiquities, looted from Italian sites and stored for more than 20 years at the free port in Geneva, were repatriated to Italy. The recovered artifacts included an extraordinary group of 1779 fragments of polychromed terracotta slabs and revetments—the so-called “Geneva group”—dating to between 530 and 480 BCE and exhibiting clear stylistic analogies with Caeretan plaques found in earlier excavations [6,7]. This recuperation sparked a renewed interest in these panels. Archaeometric investigations, by means of spectroscopic- and minero-petrological analyses, were carried out on a subset of the Geneva group [6,8,9], namely a tile with an armed warrior from Quartaccio di Ceri [10–12] and several slabs in the Museo Nazionale Etrusco di Villa Giulia in Rome [13], Heritage 2021, 4, 4596–4608. https://doi.org/10.3390/heritage4040253 https://www.mdpi.com/journal/heritage