Statuettes en terre cuite de l'époque hellénistique en Italie : productions et variations

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Terracotta casting is a process of manufacturing that allows the mass production of objects with the help of molds. As a technical process, coroplasty is an example of mass production and diffusion of images.My research is focusing on building a typology for terracotta figurines of the Hellenistic era, more specifically the ones dating back to the 3rd and 2nd Centuries BC in Italy. These generic figurines, with no specific characteristics, feature a renewal in statuette iconography. The most emblematic ones usually represent women wrapped in veils, also called Tanagra figurines.Around the middle of the 19th century, with the apparition of figurines from Tanagra (circa 1870) and Myrina (circa 1880) on the art market, the statuettes began to catch the attention of connoisseurs, then scientists. Collected for themselves for a long time, these figurines have often been torn apart from their archeological environment. In Italy, thanks in great part to a retrospective study of the figurines preserved in museums, we are able to re-establish connections with groups and contexts of discoveries (votive or funerary figurines).The materials gathered for the documentation of this thesis are heterogeneous. It consists of artwork catalogues and notes from various sites where the figurines are often underexposed. The main complexity of this research follows thus: the terracotta figurines, both abundant and repetitive, often incomplete, arouse little enthusiasm; all the energy in research usually focuses mostly on the group of objects best preserved or identified. In a way, my work tries to reassert the value of numbers, as much from the point of view of handicraft as from the different religious functions of the figurines.Italy during the Hellenistic era is the field of investigation for this research, irrespective of cultural context (Italic, Greek, Etruscan or Roman) from which sometimes historiography has a tendency to confine small terracotta figures. Despite their number and variety, or rather because of them, these figurines remain largely ignored. My approach tries to break free from the usual iconographic typologies and technical classifications. I tried to observe and analyze the Tanagra figurines – mostly consisting of veiled feminine silhouettes, but also including some mythologicaltopics (Eros, Aphrodite, Athena, Hermes…) personalized through an array of superimposed attributes – taking into account their shape, and presenting them according to a morphological typology. This typology has been created in the prospect of offering a new frame of reference and interpretation, in order to build tools of research better fitted to these figurines, all lacking in apparent meaning, entangled in the serialization of its shapes, from which sometimes uniqueness emerge. The form and its variations are at the heart of the topic, leading to developments on main production scales, or on the interpretation of the images they conveyed depending on their topographical, historical and cultural environment.