CHAPTER X.

ROMAN ART.

The Greeks, from a poetical, artistic, and esthetical, and the Romans, from a social, legal, and political point of view, are still our masters. Historical art-critics, and a certain class of writers, who would wish to see the whole universe one great court of justice with an infinite variety of crimes, subdivided into felony, misdemeanour, petty larceny, &c., will never agree as to the place that should be assigned to the Romans in the world’s history. We are bold enough to assert that the whole of the criminal and sanguinary history of Rome, with her products in literature and art, might be wiped out, and yet philosophically, poetically, and artistically, not the slightest gap in the progressive development of humanity would be found. Socially and legally, we should be sorry to miss a state, which had a mission of its own, which, if well understood, may teach us the causes why the gentler feelings of morality were oppressed, imagination defiled, and every higher artistic aspiration deadened in Rome.

From beginning to end, ROMA, read backwards AMOR, was an ambiguous ‘state-abstraction,’ which absorbed the individual. The State with the Greeks was a concrete association of freemen. With the Romans, it was the abstract principle of an imaginary union of heterogeneous citizens. The Greeks fostered science and art, poetry and philosophy. The Romans despised science, mocked art, scorned poetry, and never condescended to trouble themselves about philosophy. The Greeks colonised and civilised their colonies, which became the free daughters of a free mother-country, attached to it by the ties of a common worship of beauty and intellectual enjoyment. The Romans conquered, and the conquered provinces were to furnish soldiers or labourers, and were tied by means of despotism to the wheels of the proud state-carriage. The Greeks humanised; the Romans demoralised and organised. The Greeks played at soldiers in a spirit of glorious patriotism. The Romans were soldiers for the sake of conquest, plunder, and vain glory. Spirited youthfulness was the Greek element. Stern and calculating manliness the essence of the Roman. The Greek was free in life, in art, in the worship of his gods, in poetry and philosophy. The Roman was cowed down in religion, politics and life, by the inexorable despotic force of legal phantoms, which turned men into mere machines. The despotism of the East was the despotism of some invisible god, or some visible ruler; and it often overlooked the individual in its almighty position. The democracy of Greece gave fair play to individual talent and genius in art and science; but the Roman self-constituted aristocracy, or rather triple theocracy, invented the inexorable and meddlesome monster authority, to which everything was to be sacrificed. Under the tragi-comical sobriquet, _Salus reipublicæ suprema lex_ (in free translation, ‘whatever we in authority find good, is good’), they committed the blackest crimes, which no historian could venture to commit to paper in their whole truthfulness.

This triple theocracy presented itself in the shape of seven mythical kings; in the form of a nominal republic, which was in reality a military and theocratic aristocracy; and lastly in the theocracy of the Cæsars, which in course of time was changed into a papal theocracy.

The Romans had to reverence and submit to theocracy under the form of a triple authority--the political authority; the paternal authority; and the legal authority. Wherever the Roman turned to, in that vast empire, which was bounded in the west by the Atlantic, in the north by the Rhine and the Danube, in the east by the Euphrates, and in the south by the deserts of Arabia and Africa, he met his triple crown of authority. He was confronted by some consul or proconsul, some law, some edict, some whim or caprice of an invisible something, that always had a visible _lictor_ at its command with a bundle of sticks, ready for flogging, or, in urgent cases, with a well-sharpened axe to sever the head from the trunk. He had to obey a power, with innumerable soldiers, ready to punish whole provinces if they resisted that ever present, ever vigilant, and ever-active State abstraction. Whilst in Greece, the individual man was developed with all his bodily and intellectual faculties in science and art, Rome disturbed and hindered this individual development, concentrating the static and dynamic forces of her citizens on brutal military enterprises.

Rome, through its theocratical spirit, oppressed the conquered by the conqueror, the poor by the rich, the ‘nihil habentes’ by the ‘possedentes,’ the client by the patron, the plebeian by the patrician, humanity by priests and gods, and the individual by the State. The Roman as individual was never a self-acting, self-conscious, and free-thinking entity, but a mere cipher after the State unit; a wheel in a large and complicated machine; a drop of water in an ocean; an atom in the universe. The Greek recognised in the State only an agglomeration of men like himself; this sum total of citizens had to serve _him_; the State was to him a means, not an aim. The Greek demanded of the State that it should protect him in the free and perfect use of his bodily and intellectual faculties. He was, if he liked, poet, magistrate, athlete, judge, dancer, philosopher, fighter, priest, wrestler, tragedian, soldier, or singer; all for his own sake, without ever becoming an over-regulated or over-regulating pedant. He worshipped his gods without restraining dogmas; he never allowed his individuality to be absorbed by some incomprehensible, shapeless, universal theocracy; his whole scientific and artistic national career was one glorious struggle against such an accomplishment. All this was the very reverse with the Romans. That Rome had no art or science of her own, was the effect of those causes which we have here tried to sketch in a general way.

The Romans, like the Greeks, were a mixture of Aryans and Turanians, with this difference, that with the Greeks the Aryan element predominated, whilst with the Romans the Turanian, and even the black elements formed a considerable portion of the national State body. The Greek element, which, at the time of the earliest formation of the Roman State, was very powerful, soon became absorbed in the Gallic, Iberian, African, Egyptian, and Syrian elements. The enervating south was not counterbalanced by the energetic north, but, on the contrary, the south predominated; and as in the south-east theocratic despotism flourished, the same principle was adopted by the Romans, and worked into a perfect system.

That the language of the Romans had a common origin with that of the Greeks, Persians, and Indians is evident from the consideration even of a few words. The verbs _sum_ (I am), _do_ (I give), and the words _pater_, _mater_, _frater_, are Sanskrit. The most important pastoral and agricultural expressions are Sanskrit, showing that a certain degree of civilisation must have been brought with them by the settlers, after their separation from their Trans-Himâlâyan brethren, when they peopled the shores of the Mediterranean, and occupied that small coast-land which was probably once connected with the African continent through Sicily.

_Pecus_, _sus_, _taurus_, and _canis_ are Sanskrit words. The Sanskrit _agras_ (meadow) is the Latin _ager_ (Germ. _acker_, acre). The Sanskrit _kurnu_ (Germ. _korn_, corn, grain) is the Latin _granum_. The settlers were undoubtedly acquainted with even higher elements of a steady and civilised life. The Sanskrit word _aritram_ (ship and oar), survived as _aratrum_ the plough, cutting through the ground like the aritram through the waves. The Sanskrit _damas_, δόμος {domos} is the Latin _domus_; _naus_ is _navis_; _akshas_ is axis (Germ. _achse_) a coach or cart; and we have in the Sanskrit _vastra_, the Latin _vestis_ (vestment), not only a proof of the connection between the Aryans of the Ganges, and those on the shores of the Tiber, but a living testimony that the former had left off tattooing their bodies and used textile fabrics. The Romans were first called Ramnes. Three races may be said to have furnished the first settlers on the Seven Hills, the Ramnes, Titians, and Lukeres. From this threefold confederation we have the word tribuere, tribus (tribe). Later Pelasgians, Sabines, Albans, Etruskans, and Hellenes joined the first settlers, and formed by degrees the Roman State.

As the Britons at one time earnestly believed that they were the direct descendants of Brutus, the son of Æneas, we need not wonder that the Romans should have indulged in the flattering faith that they were the direct descendants of Æneas himself. They had scarcely attained a settled state, when they began to work out their legends and myths, concerning the divine foundation of their town, which had taken place under _seven_ kings.

1. Romulus, a god-man, for he and his brother, Remus, were incarnations of the war-god Mars and miraculously born of a virgin. Their uncle Amulius, fearing that they might deprive him of his throne, had them exposed in the swollen Tiber in a cradle. The river subsided, and the cradle was caught by a sacred fig-tree at the foot of the Palatine hill, and a she-wolf had pity on the boys, and suckled them. The founders of Rome thus mythically imbibed, with their foster-mother’s milk, that savage brutality and thirst for blood which distinguished the citizens of the Holy City for thousands of years. Romulus and Remus were found by shepherds, and brought up by them. Subsequently a town was founded by the twins, and Romulus then killed his brother and ruled alone. He divided the people into curiæ.

2. Numa Pompilius enlarged the town and introduced a settled form of worship, not out of piety, but in order to subject the citizens to the will of the State.

3. Tullus Hostilius improved upon the theocratical institutions of Numa, and gave Rome a military organisation, as the secret tool with which her will was to be enforced throughout a vast part of the globe.

4. Ancus Martius commanded the citizens to have taste and to beautify the town, or rather had this done, superintending the improvements himself. He is stated to have been a grandson of Numa.

5. Tarquinius Priscus, of a Korinthian family, showed in his very infancy that he was destined by supernatural influences to become a benefactor of the chosen people, the Romans. When a tender boy sleeping in his cradle, his head was surrounded by a brilliant halo of flames. He conquered many Latin and Sabine towns, and showed himself worthy of his exalted position. He introduced the golden diadem, the ivory throne, the sceptre adorned with an eagle, and the purple toga, as distinctive marks of the supreme authority.

6. Servius Tullius was also of supernatural origin. He was the son of a female slave, and the protecting divinity of the royal castle. He divided the people into five classes or castes; instituted tribunes, and founded the orders of senators, knights, and commons.

7. Tarquinius Superbus, like the Chinese tyrant Ly-wang, who succeeded the five good emperors, defiled the imperial dignity, outraged all laws, divine and human, and was rebelled against by the patricians, who abolished the regal authority. The innocent Lucretia is said to have been the direct cause of the expulsion of the tyrant, and the establishment of the republic.

In the myths concerning these seven kings we have abundant elements for the most beautiful songs, epic poems, and artistic subjects full of dramatic power and vitality. The remarkable fact with the Romans was, that they preserved these myths as _historical_ truths, recorded them in dull _prose_, affixing to them dates, each of which was a flagrant falsehood, and used them in good earnest as the basis of their national existence.

The royal period ended with the seven kings. Rome had prepared in perfect silence her murderous weapons, and, suddenly dashing forward a well-trained prize-fighter, inaugurated the military theocracy. The history of this second period, with its appalling monotony, may be condensed into one terrible word--WAR.

From 342-340 B.C. war with the Samnites. From 340-337 B.C. war with the Latins. From 325-290 B.C. the second and third Latin war. From 288-264 B.C. war with Carthage and Syrakuse. From 264-241 B.C. the first Punic war. Peace was made, and to fill up the leisure hours, there was a Gallic war. From 218-201 B.C. the second Punic war. Peace was again concluded, and during the interval (183 B.C.) Greece and the Makedonian empire were subjugated. From 149-146 B.C. the third Punic war. The world was conquered, and the boundaries of the vast empire extended in all directions; but the warlike spirit of the Romans had not learnt to rest and to enjoy these conquests in peace; industry, arts, and sciences, had no charm for these wild and indomitable conquerors, and wanting a foreign enemy, they quarrelled amongst themselves. The internal dissensions began. There were the Numantian troubles, the tumults of the Gracchi, and the feud between Marius and Sulla. A foreign war happily put an end to these internal struggles. From 112-106 B.C. war with Jugurtha. From 88-80 B.C. war with Mithridates. From 72-71 B.C. the slaves rebelled and called for bread and for revenge. This was the first civil war--individual egotism conspired against the supreme power, faction fought against faction; a dissolution of all law and order threatened the State. From 54-51 B.C. the Gallic war amused the Roman spectators and war-comedians. From 49-48 B.C. there was a second civil war; from 43-30 B.C. a third; and the republic was at last absorbed by a Cæsarian theocracy.

That arts and sciences did not flourish in a state of continual warfare is quite natural. The houses were mean and low, here and there adorned with clumsy Etruskan pillars; the temples had some Greek forms; sculpture was not cultivated, and Greeks had to chisel or to carve the scanty embellishments. On the other hand, high roads of great excellence, and bold bridges with magnificent arches, were constructed, for everywhere the spirit of practical realism was served; in every stone, every column, every pillar, every statue, the spirit of theocratic despotism predominated. The charming gods of the Greeks were turned into haughty military commanders, not inviting love through beauty, but demanding blind obedience with a thundering ‘_sic volo, sic jubeo_’ (‘as I will it, so I command it’).

The period of imperial theocracy showed Rome in her pomp and splendour, covering inner hollowness and gradual decay with marble slabs. Palaces and temples, basilicæ and arcades, triumphal arches and amphitheatres, arenas and baths (of the latter Rome alone had about 768), naumachiæ and circuses, theatres and arenas, hippodromes and magnificent tombs abounded; but in all these architectural marvels, the monumental spirit of pride, self-glorification, vain ostentation, and theatrical display, is to be traced; the love of beauty, of artistic moderation, and simplicity being everywhere conspicuous by its absence. Roman art and decoration are to be carefully studied, that we may learn ‘how not to do it,’ if we earnestly intend to produce works of art, and not works of ornamentation, forming a very Paradise for ‘parvenus’ with bad taste.

We have asserted that the Romans never produced anything original in art and science. Their religion, their literature, and their products of art, bear this assertion out to the very letter.

The word ‘religion’ is of Roman origin. The Teutons have _faith_ or trust in God. The Roman word meant the tying down of everyone to certain formulas or dogmas. They borrowed their dogmas and superstitions, their gods and ceremonies, from all parts of the world; especially from the Greeks and Etruskans, and later from the Egyptians. Everything served their purpose so soon as it helped to overawe the masses. They had augurs, auspices, and sibylline oracles. From the entrails of beasts and human beings they predicted the future. Flashes of lightning, the rolling thunder, the flight of birds, meetings with hares, goats, dogs, or cats, announced the will of the gods. The conceptions of the Eastern gods were disfigured, and they were made more jealous, threatening, merciless, revengeful, and inexorable. Jupiter the thunderer (Jupiter tonans) did not govern by any moral law, but by mere force; he spoke in flashes of lightning and in thunder, in terrifying earthquakes and volcanic eruptions. Amongst the 30,000 deities with which the Roman triple theocracy peopled the visible and invisible world, there was not ONE divinity of kindness, mercy, and comfort.

They had a divinity of peace, to urge them on to war; they had divinities of plague, hunger, fever, mildew, and death. In their practical spirit they went even so far as to have a ‘Dea Cloacina.’

What subjects to paint or sculpture!

A pale-yellow woman with dishevelled hair, protruding ghastly eyes, wasted lips, fleshless and emaciated limbs, may represent the goddess of hunger; another woman deliberately and slowly tearing the limbs of helpless creatures from their bodies with diabolical delight, may be a goddess of plague; another, placidly playing with human skulls in a field surrounded by dying men, women, and children, may be the goddess of death.

In the illustration of a Dante or a Milton, a knowledge of the Roman mythology may prove full of suggestive power.

The Greeks had a principle in their anthropomorphic worship; the Romans had no aim. Roman high-priests were spiritual butchers, who tried to appease the angry gods with the smoke of burning bullocks, to nourish them with fat, with which they literally besmeared the statues, and to quench their thirst with blood which they poured over the altars. When already educated enough to consider all these divinities with a cold and sceptic indifference; when the augurs could no longer meet without laughing and sneering at each other and their sacred office, then the Roman mind became eager for a more concrete god than these stone figures, and they found a corresponding living divinity in the person of their Emperors. Earth certainly could offer nothing more divine in the form of visible majesty, recognised and obeyed, as soon as clothed in the imperial purple and crowned with the imperial diadem, than the irresponsible ‘god-man,’ who sat on the throne of the Cæsars. The creative force of the Universe, and the phenomena of nature, were moulded in visible forms; and now for the first time a political abstraction had become incarnate in the Emperor _pro tem_. The hordes of courtiers, courtezans, flatterers, poets, philosophers, historians, juris consults, orators, prætors, and consuls, supported by the thoughtless mass of the people, rendered _divine_ honours to a _mortal_, in whom, however, the _immortal_ principle of theocratic authority was concentrated. Not even the Egyptians, crouching in grateful admiration before the crocodiles of the Nile, outraged humanity to such a degree as these polite Romans, rendering divine honour to an Emperor, like Aurelius Commodus, who fought 735 times as a common gladiator in the arena before his enervated people. The Roman religion was, in fact, a cosmopolitan mixture of all the atrocious superstitions of the world.

The Romans also instituted public games in imitation of the Greeks, on the degrading ‘panis et circenses’ principle. In Greece, Apollo with his nine muses presided over the public games. The Romans had specially-trained gladiators, wrestlers, dancers, and prize-fighters. The competitors at the Greek games were free and independent citizens; with the Romans they were either criminals, runaway slaves, or men condemned to death. Bears, lions, tigers, and elephants were starved, and set against one another, to delight the spectators with their savage brutality. Soon an improvement was effected, and men were arrayed against men with deadly weapons, to amuse men and women, boys and girls, with their skill in murdering; and at last, as a further progressive development in taste, men were pitted against wild beasts. In the Greek tragedy, the ideal sufferings of humanity, struggling in an unequal combat with omnipotent and inexorable fate, were prominently set forth to purify men from their passions by showing the consequences of even unconscious guilt. The Greek tragedy was the national moral conscience brought into the most perfect poetical form. The Romans instituted a cruel reality of _bodily_ suffering; _real_ blood streaming from _real_ limbs; the _real_ rattle in the throat, which signals death; and the _real_ last gasp of an expiring man, afforded them amusement.

Like their religion and public games, their literature, with the exception of their satires and law-codes, was matter of fact and imitative. The generation of the Roman products of poetry and prose was the following: Homer engendered Virgil, Hesiod--Lucretius; Pindar--Horace; Æsop--Phædrus; Euripides--Terence; Aristophanes--Plautus; Xenophon--Sallust; Thukydides--Titus Livy; Demosthenes--Cicero. Ovid and Tacitus were the only really original writers; the first faithfully depicted the hollowness of Roman ethics; and the other, in unsurpassed language, drew a historical sketch of the Teutons, mercilessly exposing the contrast between noble simplicity, grandeur and honesty, and the demoralised state of his own country.

If art is the outgrowth of the intellectual and moral condition of a people, what kind of art could the Romans have produced? None. And this was the case. Roman art is altogether a misnomer; it is in fact Etruskan, Greek, Assyrian, and Egyptian art, dressed in an eclectic Roman garb by foreign artists. Art with the Romans was never the glorious emanation of the poet’s sacred ideal of the gods, or the irresistible civilising power of beauty; it was merely the handmaid of power, wealth, pomp, and vanity. Art was with them a slave, well fed, well clad, well housed, well paid, to make power more powerful, to dazzle the people, to proclaim the universal dominion of Rome over the world. The Roman character was dry and geometrical, and therefore in its artistic taste architectural and monumental. Anything that could serve, by means of technical perfection, to promote art, was encouraged, adopted, and supported by the Romans.

We have given a drastic picture of the evils of the Roman spirit; we must be just to the great mission which it fulfilled unconsciously and against its will. The centralisation in language, customs, and manners produced a cosmopolitan spirit. Greek artists and philosophers spread taste and learning. Distant nations were brought into closer connection. The roads constructed to facilitate the march of legions, bent on devastating a province, served as means of communication; so did their aqueducts and bridges. The wants of an increasing population forced the Romans to improve agriculture, and commerce was found necessary. Corn had to be brought from one quarter, textile fabrics from another; Greece and Egypt were pillaged of their innumerable works of art, and Rome may be said to have been at that period the greatest museum of the universe. The superstition and credulity which existed among the people, by degrees disappeared. Africa had been considered a land of monsters, with serpents large enough to entangle a whole army and to crush it; other regions of the accessible world had been thought inhabited by men without heads. Giants, kyklops, and enchantresses had been said to perform incredible feats, but were found to be without supernatural power; the golden apples of Spain turned out to be mere oranges, and graced the tables of the wealthier, and in time even of the poorer classes. The mouth of hell had been placed on the shores of the Euxine (Black Sea), but when those regions were occupied by Roman soldiers, the mouth of hell had to be removed elsewhere. East and west, south and north, were united under one great Roman vault, the four quarters of the globe were over-arched, and the broad cupola of universalism set over them. Man was made a common slave to one grand and common abstraction, typically foreshadowing the time when men would be brought as free agents under one great dome of universal brotherhood.

For this grand and really majestic soldering of humanity into one total, the Romans found the spiritual as well as the material form in

1. The arch. 2. The cross-vault. 3. The cupola.

Through the _arch_, which was used by the Etruskans, but which under the Romans became a most important part of architecture, the art of constructing was suddenly freed of all hindrances. Courts could be formed with more ease, and the ground-plan drawn with greater variety.

The _cross-vault_ may be considered a specially Roman form. Two cylindrical arches were constructed intersecting each other at right angles in a quadrangular space. The intersection takes place at the two diagonal lines, thus uniting the opposite corners. The arches in their cross-form rise from four points of support, and divide the arch into four curved triangles, called calottes.

The _cupola_, a third form of the vault, was called forth in the Romans by their preference for _circular_ buildings. The ancient mound was revived by them. It was the application of the arch to a circular ground-plan. A powerful larger or smaller member of decoration was produced, interrupting the flatness of walls, and allowing a rich variety of statuary to be used as ornament. This refers to the use of the half-cupola for semicircular niches and the apsidæ. These merely geometrical constructions would have been monotonous and without grace, like our railway stations; and would have been classed as works of engineering, but never of art; had not the Romans employed Greek forms in the shape of columns and pilasters, to adorn them. The Doric, Ionic, Attic, and Korinthian styles were all used, and a so-called composite or Roman order was added. The composite stood in the same relation to the proto-Korinthian, as Plautus to Aristophanes. The Romans, with arrogant clumsiness, placed a coarser and more contracted form of the Ionic capital on two rows of richly carved acanthus leaves. This was a bad composition, and left room for much improvement, which was effected more than fifteen hundred years later.

Nothing is known of art during the mythical period of Roman history.

During the first centuries of the Republic, the Etruskan style is said to have been prevalent, introduced by Tarquin. Square wooden huts with a rounded and tumulus-like roof of straw, were the first palaces of the Roman citizens. Only after the conquest of Greece 183 B.C., Grecian architecture and sculpture were introduced. From this date we may classify Roman art, under Greek, Assyrian, and Egyptian influences, into the following periods.

_a._ The _first_ begins in the second century B.C., under the Republic, after the destruction of Korinthum by Mummius, and ends with the reign of the Augustan house, and the beginning of the rule of the Flavians, 69 A.D. This was the _Græco-Roman Period_ of architecture and sculpture.

_b._ The _second_ period commences with the _Flavians_, 69 A.D. After the tyrannical reigns of Tiberius and Nero, the cosmopolitan Imperial state acquired an apparent stability in new social forms, which found expression in gigantic artistic constructions. This period, which lasted down to Septimus Severus, 193 A.D., has three distinct phases.

α. A phase of powerful development under the Flavians.

β. A phase of brilliant success under _Trajan_ (98-117 A.D.)

γ. A phase of revival of classic Greek forms under _Hadrian_ (117-138 A.D.)

We may designate these phases of development as the _Romano-Greek_ period.

_c._ The _third_ period under the military despotism of the prætorian guards, during which Rome ceased to be the centre of universal dominion, and each province began to feel its own vitality, lasted from _Septimus Severus_ (193-211 A.D.) to Constantine the Great. Art lost every basis--degenerated into luxurious pomp, and became heavier with each new product, and more fantastic in incredible details and impossible executions. We may best designate this as the _Romano-eclectic_ period.

A. After the destruction of Korinthum, Rome abounded in Greek immigrants, and in Greek marble and bronze statues, friezes, pillars, and various movable works of art. The spoils of Greek temples and houses were set up in Roman houses built of bricks and mortar. The contrast between the unartistic architecture of the Romans, and the master-pieces of Greek art, was so striking, that they were forced to endeavour to improve their architecture, and art became to a certain degree _fashionable_. The wealthier classes began to study it _theoretically_, and to affect an immense amount of _patronizing_ enthusiasm, without any deeper understanding of the laws of taste and beauty, but with a determination to outdo all other nations in the profession of works of art. Such sentiments often engender a _brisk trade_, but they fail to promote real art, or to benefit genuine artists. The walls of the houses of this period were generally white, with red painted ornamentations. Red is the favourite colour with children, savages, and butchers in mind. This led to the making of red bricks, which were mixed with others of different colours, and thus originated polylithic wall-decoration. The spaces between the red bricks were filled in with a black composition in imitation of different textile patterns, and this mode of decoration was called Niello. By degrees, bricks and cement were superseded by marble, and the houses became so rich, that a Puritan party of Roman ἰδιώταις {idiôtais} formed itself, and thundered against corruption and enervation, luxury and degradation. The power of this party was so great that Cicero, fearing lest these stern and dull Roman worthies should think him acquainted with the principles of artistic refinement, declared his utter ignorance of art, and expressed his high contempt for all such futile ‘allotria.’

The art of ornamentation became more and more universal. The fora and atria were overcrowded with bronze and marble statues and groups. These efforts, however, were not genuine; they did not grow out of the artistic wants and love of the people--the whole movement was strange to their minds--and was altogether a heterogeneous element grafted on their natures by the force of circumstances. They succeeded by degrees in ornamenting grandly, but there was always something in contradiction to, or in conflict with, really good taste. They used patterns meant for floors on their walls, and wall patterns on their ceilings, and that which would have fitted a ceiling, they laid on their floors; creating by this means a sad confusion. Asia always excelling in bright colours, and in a secret talent for matching them correctly, excited the admiration of the Romans, and they began to paint their walls. They often cut out the decorated parts of a pillaged Greek temple, and fixed these pieces at random in their houses, caring very little whether there was a congruity between these and their own wall-decoration or not. We have, during this period, an attempt at ‘scenography.’ The walls were painted over with architectural views, representing colonnades, interiors, landscapes, and later, Greek mythological and even historical scenes. In these, Perseus and Andromeda, or Medea meditating the murder of her children, or Herkules destroying the serpent, or some other _sensational_ deed, formed the cherished subjects. Under the influence of the Greeks of Alexandria, another custom became prevalent. The walls were more and more panelled, and the panels filled with works of art.

This ‘mania,’ or fashion, became so universal with the Romans that they could find no more works of classic art, and had to engage living artists to reproduce antique cornices, metopes, colonnades, capitals, shields, helmets, tripods, sphinxes, and griffins; but even these artists were so overwhelmed with commissions, that it was impossible for them to satisfy the feverish demand. To produce works of art more quickly, they began to paint the panels, and the Roman empire became a complete manufactory of wall-decorations. Light colonnades of slender reeds, baldachins with pointed arches and fantastic monsters, filled the walls, and sometimes mere combinations of colours were used in a conventional style. Art again sank into mere trade. The panels and walls were not decorated with the works of the good old Greek masters, but with mere imitations. Mannerism supplanted style, and arabesques, flourishes, insignificant chequered patterns, or geometrical puzzles, took the place of historical paintings--poor wall-decorations in a theatrical style, without any attempt at higher art.

The use of marble as a means of decoration was not always customary with the Romans, and was introduced by L. Crassus, the censor, who had his house decorated with six small columns of marble from Hymettus, and was very much blamed for this extravagance. M. Scaurus, the ædile, who built the famous wooden theatre, decorated with 360 pillars of marble, glass, and bronze, and about 3,000 statues and images, had the atrium and peristyle of his private house richly adorned with exquisite columns. Manurra, prefect of the armourers, under Julius Cæsar in Gaul, is set down as the first who had his walls decorated with marble incrustations; whilst M. Catulus could boast of the first marble flooring, and of thresholds in Numidian marble. Of temples, one of the first constructed of marble blocks in a purer Greek style was that of Jupiter Tonans. The temple of _Fortuna Virilis_ which rose on a lofty substructure on the banks of the Tiber, was in the Ionic style. The Vesta temple at Tivoli, enthroned on a steep and rocky height above the foaming waters of the Anio, was a circular building in the Korinthian style.

Theatres, public halls, baths, and Fora were found necessary, either to distract the public mind from political matters, or to gain the suffrages of the fickle mob, eager for amusement and excitement. The first theatre in stone was erected by Pompey. Julius Cæsar surpassed all his predecessors and rivals in magnificence. He began the theatre of Marcellus, which was completed by Augustus, and so enlarged and beautified the _Circus Maximus_ that it could accommodate 150,000 spectators; he built the beautiful Basilica Julia, a public law-court for the Centumviri or Judges to sit in, and hear causes, and for the counsellors to receive their clients, and had a new Forum constructed, and adorned it with a temple dedicated to Venus Genetrix. The Roman Forum (in imitation of the Greek Agora) was a building about three times as long as broad. The interior was surrounded by arched porticos, and flanked by the most stately edifices, such as theatres, basilicæ, and temples.

These Fora were devoted to special purposes, as Fora _civilia_ or Fora _venalia_, and were used for public meetings, or as market-places. Cæsar tried to become a Roman Perikles, but was distanced in this by the Emperor Augustus. Up to the establishment of Cæsarism, Rome had been literally a city of ‘bricks;’ now it became a ‘city of marble.’ Temples were profusely built and rebuilt. The Cæsarian theocracy required these abodes of splendour and self-glorification. One of the most imposing specimens of this _Græco-Roman_ architecture was the Pantheon, built by Agrippa, the son-in-law of Augustus. Originally it was to have been an entrance-hall to splendid Thermæ, but on its completion it was turned into a temple, and dedicated to the avenging Jupiter. It was a circular building 132 feet in diameter, and 132 feet high, and triumphantly proclaimed Rome’s wealth and might. It contained a statue of Minerva by Pheidias, and a Venus, who it is said had in her ear the half of the pearl left by Cleopatra. The pearl was valued at 125,000_l._ That a Greek marble statue should have been ornamented with part of the _ear-ring_ of an Egyptian princess, is highly characteristic of Roman taste in matters of art. One of the most splendid remains in the style of good Greek Korinthian ornamentation is the temple of Augustus at Pola in Istria. Triumphal gates, these Roman specialities, were at this period simple in design, and perfect in execution. Of the Mausoleum of Augustus nothing is left but the substructure, 220 feet in diameter, now used as a circus for equestrian performances. ‘Sic transit gloria mundi,’ if based on mere ostentation and vain pride.

During this period Nikopolis was planned and built; the Temple of Solomon was adorned with colonnades in the Greek Korinthian style, and at Nîmes (Nemausus) we possess the most complete remains of a prostylos pseudipteros temple of Roman architecture, with the purest Korinthian columns. Under Tiberius the camp of the prætorians was turned into a marble palace. Under Claudius harbours and moles were enlarged, built, and decorated. Nero burned Rome, to reconstruct it with greater pomp. The architects Celerus and Severus had to build the _golden houses_, of which the porticos were miles long. The dining-rooms surpassed in splendour anything dreamt of in Indian poetry. In the decoration of this palace, or rather cluster of palaces, we trace the greatest mistake an artist can be guilty of. The error is of Asiatic origin. It may be designated as a conscious ‘_lying_’ in the constructive elements. They tried to hide the costly material under a cheap disguise; a tendency as bad and objectionable, as a ‘lying’ in cheap substances to represent costly materials. The Romans used tortoise-shell as veneer for their furniture, and painted it to make it appear like wood; we, on the other hand, use wood, and paint it over to make it appear ‘giallo antico,’ (yellow marble), or any other costly stone. Ornamentation began to lose all symmetry and proportion. Confusion and profusion ruled supreme. The walls of the rooms looked like exhibitions of oriental carpets, tapestry, and jewelry. Art retrograded to the over-painted, over-decorated, over-ornamented shrouds, in which the mummies of old were buried. For a time art was carried with Asiatic splendour to a grave of tasteless pomposity.

B. With the Flavians, down to Septimus Severus, a new spirit of artistic universalism pervaded the Roman world. The Greek element waned, and the circular forms of the Romans, ornamented with an indiscriminate mixture of Doric, Ionic, and Korinthian columns, predominated. The Colosseum, a Flavian amphitheatre, begun by Vespasian and finished by Titus, belongs to this period. Three rows of arcades, the first of Doric, the second of Ionic, and the third of Korinthian half-columns, with their entablatures, crowned with a fourth story, adorned with Korinthian pilasters, and furnished with windows, encompassed an oval, 600 feet long by 500 feet broad, capable of holding 80,000 spectators. The circus was so constructed that it could also be used as a naumachy. In this over-decorated pompous building, the great fights of the gladiators took place; here men and wild beasts met in deadly struggle; here men, if killed, were dragged away by ropes fixed in their bodies with iron hooks; here the Imperators sat with all the nobility of Rome, and delighted in sports, which, at a later period of Rome’s spiritual dominion, were only surpassed in _cruelty_ by the pious ‘auto-da-fés’ of misguided priests.

The triumphal arch of Titus, on the heights of the Via Sacra; with one arch broken through the massive walls, ornamented on each side by half-columns; was the first to be decorated with the coarser form of the Roman _composite capital_. The ornamentation keeps within certain limits; the inner side walls of the arch have excellent reliefs, referring to the destruction of Jerusalem.

Everything yet enumerated was surpassed in splendour and magnificence by the ‘Forum Trajanum’ (A.D. 98-117), of which Apollodorus, born at Damaskus, was the architect. The great basilica Ulpia, with its _five aisles_, formed part of it. In a small courtyard, surrounded by pillars, rose the gigantic column of Trajan to a height of 92 feet. The reliefs, which in spiral windings surround the richly ornamented column, are a kind of Imperial record, chronicling with historical accuracy and dryness, scene after scene of the Dacian war. The figures are two feet high and not less than 2,500 in number; they are sculptured in a simple naturalistic style, void of all idealisation, and show the artist’s talent for grouping. The heads of the figures, as was generally the case in all sculptures by the Romans, are too small for the bodies.

The triumphal arch of Constantine, with three openings, is undoubtedly the most splendid monument of its kind. It was of Pentelic marble, taken from the fragments of an arch in honour of Trajan. The proportions are noble, and the execution is technically precise; the ornamentation, however, is too profuse. The second phase of this period degenerated very quickly. Cornices began to be fluted; triglyphs and indentations were used alternately in endless rows; even the central volutes of the Corinthian capitals (the caulicoli) were over-decorated. Everything ran wild; rosettes, cassettes, shields, consols, stereobates, and stylobates were used abundantly, without sense and reason, to heighten the effect of the horizontal lines of the buildings. Everything was out of shape, out of proportion, and out of place. An eternal repetition of the same forms proclaimed the same desperate _deification_ of the omnipotent power of the theocratic ruler.

Hadrian, the emperor, whose position constituted him a _divine_ architect, and who by his very dignity must have known art better than any other mortal, did not share, with many a self-conceited artist of our time, the idea that the ‘work and labour done’ was all that was required in art, and that any knowledge of correct principles, any feeling of beauty, any acquaintance with esthetics or with art-history, was useless, and that money and power of execution were the only things required. On the contrary, though Emperor of the Romans, he diligently studied the antique, and tried to revive classic art.

We had an _imperial architect_, with an unlimited amount of gold, silver, marble, wood, and precious material at his command, and yet he had to go back to the Greeks for elegant forms in ornamentation. He had Apollodorus executed for daring to find fault with the confused plan of the temple of Venus (_Amor_) _and Roma_, which was a building surpassing, so far as splendour went, any construction of those times. The double temple had certainly something whimsical in its plan. The Emperor was too forcibly struck by the discovery that _Roma_ read backwards gave _Amor_, and wanted to express this discovery in an architectural allegory, placing _two_ temples back to back so that they made _one_, to typify _two_ words with _two_ meanings, that yet were _one_ word. The success, so far as correctness of plan went, was doubtful. The cassettes of the bronze roof which united the _two_ temples into _one_, were most elegantly finished. The court of the temple was 500 feet by 300. Another tower-like circular monument, based on a square sub-structure, formed the Mausoleum (now the Castle of St. Angelo). The diameter of the circular part was 226 feet. The construction vies in solidity and grandeur with the Egyptian monuments. The blocks of travertin are colossal, and the immense building was covered with Parian marble, and crowned with a huge quadriga.

Under the Antonines architecture, and art in general, gradually declined. The people occupied themselves with entirely different topics. Stoicism and Christianity--the old world of heathen formality, and the new world of spiritual redemption--were placed in conflict. A disturbed state of the public mind rarely favours plastic art. A specimen exhibiting this conflict may be seen in the temple of Antoninus and Faustina, built by Antoninus Pius (A.D. 138-161). A second edition of Trajan’s column is given in that of Marcus Aurelius (A.D. 161-180), which stands on the field of Mars. The reliefs, winding round the shaft, represent scenes from the war against the Markomanni. There is a certain liveliness in the execution, but the composition is wanting in clearness and precision, and above all in idealisation. Rivers, fields, and enclosures of walls, are marked with great accuracy; and the reliefs take, in style, the forms of geographical maps. Strict realism is the leading feature in this monument.

C. During the third period architecture and sculpture, ornamentation and painting, had soon to yield to a continual use of arms. The proud mistress of the world no more expanded her sway; she was once more busy in decorating her rich palaces, but in care and sorrow, and with an anxious brow, haunted by the necessity for exerting all her powers to keep what she possessed. The provinces had learnt to do without Rome; the consuls and pro-consuls had so well imitated their _divine_ masters, that they thought themselves gods, and the supreme deity, the Imperator, lost his power over them. The State--based on an abstraction--began to vanish like a midnight phantom at daybreak. The one-sided deification of matter, during the old heathen times, had to yield to a totally new mode of feeling, thinking, speaking, and acting. The new times were seeking new forms, and had to pass from a savage state, through that of barbarism, symbolism, and mysticism, into self-consciousness, in order to find such shapes as would express a perfect harmony between spirit and matter. In the meantime, art dragged on its existence in copying what the old masters of Greece and the artists of Rome had done. The chisel, ruler, nay the very stones, trembled in the hands of the artists. They felt that they worked without a basis; that they heaped up blocks to see them soon crumble into the dust; that they constructed streets of pompous columns, some of them 3,500 feet long, to see them empty and deserted; they ornamented, but did it with a heavy heart; their soul was no more in the work. They heard already the deep _spiritual_ whisper of other tidings resounding through the world on one side, and the terrible _temporal_ shout of powerful barbarians, not yet enervated by luxury and licentiousness, armed with swords and iron clubs, on the other. The footsteps of avenging phantoms were heard in the North; the ‘hallelujahs’ of redeemed humanity in the South. This period is ushered in with the triumphal arch of Severus, on which the reliefs are placed without any regard to the architectural arrangement. Caracalla (A.D. 211-217) had baths constructed, with gigantic halls, furnished with 1,600 marble seats, with shady promenades, pompous reading-rooms, and places for games of every variety. This was to be a paradise on earth, to detach men from that _spiritual_ Eden of love and happiness, the gates of which were opened by Christ. In feverish excitement, streets, palaces, basilicæ, halls, market-places, monuments, and whole towns, were built by the heathens. The pomp of worship was increased. Diocletian constructed baths with 2,400 seats; the principal hall was under three cross-vaults, with a span of 80 feet each, resting on granite columns. Sensationalism seized upon both people and artists; a sensationalism tinged with Roman vulgarity. All the principles of architecture, sculpture, and ornamentation were neglected. Columns and arches were mixed together in doleful incongruity. The arch rested on the architrave, or often rose without interruption directly from the capital. Columns were made in spiral or screw form; the variety of details was oppressive; no rest, no cæsura distinguished their ornamentation. It was, in fact, _an ornamentation over-ornamented_. The technical execution was everywhere splendid, but utterly mechanical; principles were neglected in art, because Roman life had lost even the one guiding principle of its existence--expansion by brutal force. The vulgar in mind and taste will always be charmed by huge and imposing masses, by the richness of the material, the daring of geometrical combination, and by startling feats of mechanical contrivance. The gorgeous mouldings, the friezes of endless decorations, the capitals with their rich foliage, marshalled in precise architectural lines, like Roman legions placed in battle array, have a peculiarly mystic charm for all those, who care more for effect than for taste or severity of style, or more for show than for symmetry and proportion; but if they love the old Roman style, and wish to work in it, let them above all insist on genuine materials. Let them work in real granite, travertin, and marble; let them not work in iron and glass, or in plaster of Paris, instead of Carrara marble; or in wood painted and varnished to represent granite, _lapis lazuli_ (azure-stone), or _giallo antico_. An artist’s first duty is to know and master his material, and not to try and bring about Roman architectural effects with substances that require an altogether different treatment. Whenever we endeavour to shirk this law, we are sure to produce something small and mean, thin and wasted, notwithstanding gorgeous dimensions. Whilst trying to look grand and haughty, substantial and pompous, we tell ‘falsehoods’ in bricks and mortar, in painted friezes, sham columns, and meretricious porticos; and we are then astonished that our artistic product, instead of being admired, is laughed at as a caricature.

In Greece the dynamic force was concentrated on the reproduction of _ideal beauty_; in Rome it was exhausted in conquests and politics. Only so long as the moral force of beauty--equivalent to that of virtue--counterbalanced the eccentricities of a wild fantastic imagination, the Greeks were capable of producing models of art. The Romans never cultivated this balance; they disciplined themselves, but in a totally different direction. This technical, mechanical, and military discipline is, at a certain period of an individual’s or a nation’s life, highly necessary, in order to place the bodily and intellectual capacities under the guidance of some authority, although this may be a mere abstraction. The results which may thus be attained, can be studied in Roman art, in spite of all its shortcomings.

CHRISTIANITY now illuminated the world with its clear light; but, dazzled by the divine brilliancy, everything in art, science and social life appeared at first dark, black, and hopeless. By degrees the minds of men began to grasp the newly proclaimed eternal law, through which alone the disturbed inner and outer, spiritual and material, moral and intellectual, static and dynamic forces of humanity were to attain a perfect balance. In time man became conscious of his nature, and emancipated his spirit in life and in art. He began to strive upwards, to detach himself from mere forms, however beautiful, if there was no meaning, no soul, no sense in them; he sought in everything the redeeming IDEA, without which no _modern_ work of art is possible. Thus, ancient art had to yield to different principles. We shall have in future to distinguish between artistic products of _reality_, _feeling_, and _intellect_, till we shall find ourselves obliged to seek for a combination of these elements in order to understand modern art.