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Show 174 THE AHT OF ROME. sculptor- Roman nati nality imprc. sed its stamp on the coins and O'Cms, reliefs a.nd statues, marbles and bronzes, of the time of the Emp rors. Tho principal £ atmes of Roman art arc a somewhat I ond rons dignity, and a want of pooticoJ inspiration, but withal a close imitation of native, national trnthfulness, and great regard for inclividnality; without that Greek freshness, freedom and harmony, which rouse in tho beholder the consciousness of tho diviM nature of onr soul. Tho compoRition of the Roman works of art is heavy, the execution 0ftcn over-polished and empty. Whilst the reck artiRt select d his subjects fi·om mythology, the Roman liked to rcpr sent sacrifices, triumphal processions, military marches, battles, and "allooutions," marriage-feasts and other scenes of domestic lifo. The Gr ek idealized the features of groat men; the Roman did not ennoble the urrlincss of old Tiborius, tho idiocy of Domitian, and the ferocious looks of Commodus and Caracalla. Tho Greek made scarcely any distinction, in sculpture, between tho Greek and the barbarian-tho same idealism surrounds them both, and assimilates th m to one anoth r; tho Roman artist made a characteristical difference between enemies of Rorno and tho oivis Romanus. Still, at the time of tho Emperors, tho Roman typo itself had coas d to be constant. Citizenship having been extended to half a world, barbal'ians con titnted the bulk of the army, and their equally-barbarian officers w rc raised first into the Senate, then to the imperial throne. Accordingly, the artists of Rome gave, on the whole, loss importance to the type than to the costume of the foreign hostile nations, by wll ich alone they dift' red from the mongrel Romans, who thou represented a cosmopolitan amalgam of all the white races. On the great cameos of the time of Augustus and Tihcrius, at Vienna and Paris (whic~, by t~e~r dramatic and picturesque compo ition of the groups, matcnally d1fl:cr from Greek r li ef~;), the Pannonian and Vindclician prisoners have no individual £ aturcs; nor is the statue of the "river Jordan" on the triumphal arch of the emperor Titus characterized by a Shcmitic physiognomy; but, on the column and arch of Trajan which ~ontaius t~e best of all the Roman works of art, we ca il; rcco~msc the Daeum [70] whose features are perpetuated in the Wallacluau of our days. In the dying gladiator of the Capitol, and on the sarcophagus of the Vigna Ammcndola, '88 we see the Celtic Gaul [71] ~·oprcscntcd; and Mr. Gottlina- recognises an ancient G rman [G9] l1l the statue of a prisoner which adorned a triumphal arch at Rome. 71 After the o~lectio idealism prevalent under the reign of the Emp ror lladrtan, we no longer find any endeavor to fix the 186 Mormmenti Inediti dell' ln8tituto Arcl1eologica di Roma, 1, Pl. TilE ART OF ROME. 175 national peculiarities of foreign nations on monuments of art. Tho Teutonic Markomanr; on the columns of Autoninus, the Turanian Parthians on tlw arch of Septimus Scvcrus, cliifcr only by their· costume fi·om Dacians, and f•·om the Roman soldiers who fight against tlrcm; and we must admit that the pharaonic Egyptian artists remained unsurpassed, even by Greeks and Romar1R, in the accmacy wiLh which they observed and rcnclcrod the national type of allo.the tribes with which they happened to come in to contact. The Assyrians and Pol'sians wct·c s cond in this respect to the Erryptians; still tb y were, on the wh lc, faithful enough, whcroar; with tltc Greeks any national peculiarity merged in the glorification of the human form: accordingly, Egyptians and Asiatics arc by them drawn and scnlptur d with Hellenic features. The Roman is by fhr more truthful, but his art is short-lived. Before Augnstu it is either Etruscan or Greek; after S ptimus Scvcrus it loses its national character, and step by st p tmns£orms its Jf into the By zan tine Cllri tian. Two centuries carry us from the beginning of Homan art to its decay; its full bloom lasted only just for the score of year wlrich ombrac s the reign of the cm1'cror Trajan, sin c und r IIadl'inn it lost its Roman features, and. was swamp cl by an elegant and refined imitation of every style of art. About the same time that the imperial throne fell into the hands of Asiatic Syrians, of Africans, Arabs, and northcm barbarians, Roman art bocamu barbarous, n.nd revived only when, about the time of Justinian and his successors, a new nationality,- thc Grroco-Byzantine-consolidatcd and crystoJlizcd itself under the influences of Christianity out of the mixture of all the races in the Roman empire. Tho earliest authentic Roman portrait Fig. 67. we know is the likeness of 1"). Comolius cipio Mricanus [67J.I80 All earlier cfligioB were either not portraits at all,-as for instance, the seven Tuscan statues of the 1 ings, mentioned in the old autl1ors, which stood bofot·c the Capitol,- or they arc too indistinct to be of usc for ethnology. This applies to the heads we sec on the family coins ofRomc, upon which the magistrates liked to perpetuate the memory of illustrious ancestors. None of these silver coins arc anterior to Somo ArmoANus. tho year 269 n. o; their size is small 189 V1BOON1'I, Iconoyrapliie romaine, Paris, 1817, pl. III, fig. 2. ( ) |