Master of the Apollo of Veii

Nobody knows the name of the sculptor who modelled the life-size terracotta Apollo of Veii, so scholars call him after that statue. He worked at the end of the 6th century BC in Veii, a rich Etruscan city about 16 kilometres from Rome, and made the clay figures that stood along the ridge of the temple roof at Portonaccio, a sanctuary just outside the town.

The Roman writer Pliny the Elder names an earlier sculptor from Veii, Vulca, whom King Tarquinius Priscus called to Rome to make the clay statue of Jupiter for the great temple on the Capitol. The Villa Giulia museum places the Master of the Apollo in the last generation of Vulca's workshop. It also suggests, with a cautious perhaps, that he was the craftsman from Veii whom Rome's last king, Tarquin the Proud, asked for the terracotta four-horse chariot on the roof of that same temple. Some scholars have gone further and proposed Vulca himself as the maker of the Apollo, a hypothesis that remains open.