Indagini archeometriche su tre urnette fittili dipinte

The recent discovery in the stores of the Roman National Museum of a painted clay urn pertaining to the Gorga Collection has caused an immediate and great interest. The object constitutes in fact a copy of the very famous cinerary urn of Tarquinia, of Etruscan production, datable around 500 B.C. The simple visual examination of the Gorga urn, united with the analyses on its technique of execution, did not resolve some doubts concerning the authenticity not only of the object, but also of the painted decoration. Therefore it has been constituted a team of archaeologists, restorers and physicists, that worked in synergy facing the various aspects of the realization of the object. Of all urns the aspects more properly "archaeological", that is those technical, stylistics, iconographical and chronological, has been investigated initially. Later we performed the analysis of chemical elements of the ceramics and of pigments by X-ray fluorescence and, at last, the thermoluminescence analysis of the urns. It turns out that the Gorga urn is a copy of modern age. In the painted decorations we found elements not present in ancient pigments and, in any case, different from those used in the Tarquinia urn (authentic). In recent times it has been possible to recover another urn, also identical to the Tarquinia one, making part of the patrimony of the Museo dell'Opera del Duomo of Orvieto, that resulted to be a false, realized in the 1800's. The "synergy" of competences has concurred to the solution of the problem of authenticity of the urns, confirming, once more, that the "dialogue" between different professionals turns out to be the most valid system for approaching complex problems.