Terracottas from Campania

Actor of the new comedy	Eros with goose	Mask of a river god (Acheloos)
Female face	Toddler with bulla

Campania stretches along the coast of the Tyrrhenian Sea between Latium and Lucania (today's Basilicata). It was already a melting pot of different peoples in the first half of the 1st millennium BC. Greek settlers, who settled there from the 2nd quarter of the 8th century BC, met indigenous peoples (natives) with local cultural traditions and different Italic languages. Above all, the Samnites and the Lucanians, who were related to them, achieved greater importance. From the 7th century BC, the inhabitants of Campania came under the influence of the Etruscans, who increasingly controlled the land east of the Greek colonies on the Gulf of Naples down to Paestum. The most important Etruscan city in this region was the rich, powerful Capua[1].
In 474 BC, Etruscan supremacy ended in a naval battle against the Greeks at Kyme. A little later, Samnite tribes occupied Capua and Nola, Pompeii and Herculaneum, then also Greek Kyme (Cumae). In 400 BC, the likewise Greek Poseidonia became the Lucanian Paestum[2]. 
Enlivened by the diverse cultural influences, the terracotta sculpture of Campania developed in two different directions. One, mediated by the neighbourhood of Sicily and Magna Graecia, is entirely in the Greek tradition. Even the products remodelled in the taste of local coroplastic centres usually still reveal Greek models[3]. The other direction clearly sets itself apart from any "classical" form and goes its own way[4].
The following five terracottas in the Giessen collection are characterised not only by Greek art but also by a certain intellectual and artistic independence.