The bowl and stand were favourite archaic forms. The Greek stand was a fusion of the cast-rod tripod and the embossed cone. Some early examples have large triangular plates between the legs, worked in relief; but the developed type has separate legs and stays of which the joints are masked with decorative rims and feet and covering-plates. These ornaments are cast and chased, and are modelled in floral, animal and human forms. The feet are lions' paws, which sometimes clasp a ball or stands on toads; the rims and plaques bear groups of fighting animals, warriors, revelles or athletes, nymphs and satyrs, or mythological subjects in relief. Feasters recline and horsemen gallop on the rims of bowls; handles are formed by single standing figures, arched pairs of wrestlers, lovers holding hands, or two vertical soldiers carrying a horizontal comrade. Nude athletes serve as handles for all kinds of lids and vessels, draped women support mirror-disks around which love-gods fly, and similar figures crown tall shafts of candelabra. Handle-bases are modelled as satyr-masks, palmettes and sphinxes. This is Greek ornament of the 6th and later centuries. Its centres of manufacture are not precisely known, but the style of much archaic work points to Ionia.
Etruscan fabrics approach their Greek originals so closely that it is not possible to separate them in technique or design, and the Etruscan style is no more than provincial Greek. Bronze was quite plentiful in Italy, the earliest Roman coinage was of heavy bronze, and there is literary evidence that Etruscan bronzes were exported. The process of line engraving seems to have been a Latin speciality; it was applied in pictorial subjects on the backs of mirrors and on the sides large cylindrical boxes, both of which are particularly connected with Praeneste. The finest of all such boxes, the Firconi cista in the Villa Giulia at Rome, bears the signature of a Roman artist. These belong to the 4th and 3rd centuries BC. Greek mirrors of the same period are seldom engraved; the disk is usually contained in a flat box which has a repoussé design on its lid.