Terracotte figurate da Leptis Magna

Among a very few examples of figured terracottas found at Leptis Magna, two, of notable quality, one of a retiarius, the other a pandura player and a mould belonging to a criophoros (third to fourth century A.D.) show marked similarities to products of Africa Proconsularis, Carthage in particular.
Some of these, from figured lamps, bear signatures that recur on various types of lamps, not all from local workshops, and which attest the dependence of the African workshops on ateliers of south-central Italy. There results a greater articulation of the individual late Roman North African workshops, no longer specializing in the manufacture of single categories of materials and equipped for a diversified production, also from the point of view of quality, whose better products were able to impose themselves on the foreign market. The Alexandrian elements, distinguishable in the choice of genre subjects, more than direct contact, must have been present in archetypes by now chronologically distant and received through the mediation of and re-elaboration by workshops in Italy.