Westward empire

by Elias Lyman Magoon

The triumphal monuments raised to commemorate the conquests of Titus, Trajan, Marcus Aurelius, Severus, and Constantine, together with the Trajan, Antonine, and Theodosian columns, bear the principal compositions of national sculpture; and these, it is believed, were mostly executed by Greeks. The coerced hand must perform its task, and the results were made to breathe the spirit of war, conquest, and universal dominion. But in vain do we search for one graceful figure or attractive charm. They are mere military bulletins carved in stone, petrified paragraphs of ostentatious success, gross in conception, and pernicious in sentiment. They owe no inspiration to the muses, and can claim neither epic dignity nor dramatic force. The principal groups are mobs of Romans, as insensible to beauty as the armor they bear, and dealing death to their equally barbarian foes, or driving them in chains to the mount Capitoline. Subjects are often chosen still more unfit for art, such as soldiers felling timber, carrying rubbish, driving piles, building walls, working battering-rams, or dragging victims to mortal torture. The expression of their heads is so ferocious and savage, as to excite the deepest compassion for the weaker combatants who might fall into their hands.

If we would know the source of all Roman art, plastic as well as monumental, we must visit the shores of venerable and plundered Hellas, with Pausanias and Strabo for our guides. Despite desolating domestic wars, the inroads of barbarian hordes, and the hostilities of Macedonian and Roman conquerors, innumerable remains of ancient art are still there to be found. But, as Cicero says, that at Syracuse, after the temples had been plundered by the hand of Verres, those who guided travellers showed them not what still existed there, but enumerated what had been taken away, so the contemplation of what had been preserved from those times, and what has since been brought to light, reminds us of the infinitely greater affluence which, in the age of bloom and vigor, had adorned the plains and glorified the cities of Greece. Mummius completed the conquest of that land B.C. 146, the same year that Carthage was razed to the ground, and plundered more works of art than all his predecessors put together. He destroyed many works through ignorance, and his soldiers were seen playing at dice upon one of the most precious pictures of Aristides. When Octavius won the victory at Actium, he enlarged the temple of Apollo upon that promontory, and expressed his gratitude by dedicating the statue of Apollo, by Scopas, in a temple at Rome, on the Palatine hill. His declaration that he had found Rome of brick, and would leave it of marble, Augustus probably hoped to realize after that mode of procedure. Nero threw down the statues of victors in Greece out of envy, and illustrated his own taste by gilding a statue of Alexander, by Lysippus. Imperial vanity and infamous extravagance may be further estimated by his having had his portrait painted one hundred and twenty feet high, while he wrested five hundred statues from Delphi alone to adorn his Golden House. The amount of sculpture accumulated at Rome must have been immense. Marcus Scaurus decorated his temporary theatre with three thousand statues. Two thousand were taken from the Volscians; Lucullus captured many; and, after the conquest of Acaia, Mummius filled the city. Three thousand were added from Rhodes, and not fewer from Olympia, beside a multitude from Delphi and Athens. The imperial palaces and baths of Dioclesian and Caracalla, mausolea of Augustus, and of Hadrian, were stored with vast treasures stolen from rightful proprietors, or executed by inferior sculptors, beside rows of plastic art which lined the Flaminian way. But neither their abundance nor magnificence could produce that vivid impression on the refined which never failed to result from the study of pure taste and skill in their native home.

Literature and art were never primary pursuits with the Romans, but secondary only and subordinate, adopted without fervor, and employed for their one great intent, the extension and consolidation of a martial empire. The honors which Greece bestowed on artists and authors, Rome gave only to soldiers of high or low degree. The former was forced into a provincial relation to the latter, but Rome was never more than a mental and artistic colony to the intellectual people thus reduced to political subjection. Grecian invention continued its admirable productions under the emperors of the new West, and at the same time furnished them literature, science, philosophy, religion, and the arts. Menelaus and Patrocles, Antigone and Hæmon, Pætus and Arria, Orestes and Electra, the Toro Farnese, and Laocoon, were sculptured between the middle of the Roman Republic and the last of the Cæsars. Before the lowest debasement of art had arrived, some few tolerable basso-relievos were also produced from Homer and the ancient tragedians, and were among the latest creations of free and legitimate art. Then came the cumbrous pediments, imperial statues, consular portraits, gems and coins, wrought by the dependent Greek, to feed the impious ambition or ignorant vanity of his insolent master during the latter ferocities of the empire.

When the great depositories of art in Greece and her western colonies fell under the control of the Romans, the villas of the rich in the metropolis and chief cities were converted into great halls of art. Earlier, martial Rome, which, according to the expression of Plutarch, knew no ornaments but arms and spoils, furnished to the unwarlike and luxurious spectators no pleasing or unalarming spectacle. "To melt brass, and breathe into it the soul of art, or to create living forms in marble," the Roman had not learned. "His art was government and war." Etrurian artists had furnished him with what religion required, of wood or clay, sufficient for all the devotional sensibility he possessed. But after Marcellus had turned the rude minds of the citizens to the admiration of the works he obtained by conquest over Syracuse, all military leaders became anxious to add splendor to their triumphs by trophies of art. Thus, in the course of a century, most of the finest art extant traveled to Rome, at first a metropolitan decoration, but anon, an ambitious ornament to private dwellings. At length, the common soldier learned to despise the temples of the gods; to confound what was sacred with what was profane; to covet fine sculptures and rich furniture, and to nourish a mercenary ambition, which became a new pretext for violence in war, and extravagance in peace. As in the Republic, Lucullus and others regarded the masterpieces of the Greeks as the fairest embellishments of their rural mansions, so the imperial Cæsars grasped at all within reach, and never had enough. Soon there dwelt in Rome as many statues as men; and the treasures disinterred in modern times at Tibur and Tusculum, on the Alban Mount, at Antium, and elsewhere in the neighborhood of the original seat of power, indicate that the surrounding region was not less rich than the capital itself. But a profound sense of art was never created at Rome, and, notwithstanding all the variety of excellence they brought together from afar, not one distinguished Roman artist lives on the record of fame.

History testifies that the carrying away works of art appeared as robbery of sanctuaries in mythological times, as base plundering in the Persian invasions, and to be excused only on the score of pecuniary want in the Phocian war. But under the Romans, this became a regular recompense, which they appropriated on account of their victories. For instance, when Corinth was destroyed by the army under Lucius Mummius, its most precious treasure of sculptures and paintings was preserved. These he resolved to send to Rome; but the orders which he issued on the occasion curiously illustrate the artistic taste and capacities of the age. "If any of these spoils," he said to those who were to transport them, "be lost or injured, you shall repair or replace them at your own expense." The successors of Augustus sometimes patronized sculpture, but no native merit was produced. Nero, somewhat educated in art by his tutor, Seneca, ordered a statue of himself, a hundred and ten feet high, to be cast by Zenodorus, and virtually stole at one time five hundred statues from Delphi, among which, as is supposed, were the Apollo Belvidere and Fighting Gladiator. According to Winklemann, the encouragement which the Antonines gave to the arts was only that apparent revivescence which is the precursor of death. Under the brutal Commodus, the arts, which the school of Adrian had freely nourished, sunk, like a river which is lost in a subterranean channel, to rise again further on with a wider and richer flow.

Down even to the reigns of Julian and Theodosius, Greek artists continued to repair to their mother country to copy the two great masterpieces of Phidias, his Jupiter at Elis, and his Minerva at Athens. And it is pleasing to see how Horace entered into the spirit of ancient art, when he declared to his friend Censorinus that he would give him all the riches of the world, provided he had but the chief productions of Parrhasius and Scopas. Cicero also entered into like feelings, when he desired to collect together the works of Greek artists, declaring that this was "his greatest delight." He tells his friend Atticus that if he had but his collection he should exceed Crassus in riches, and would despise all the villas and territories that might be offered to him. The real love of art in the vain orator, however, was very moderate, as he was afraid to be held by the judges as a connoisseur.

The public games of Greece were peaceful and intellectual, adapted as much to invigorate moral strength as to develop manly beauty. Those of Rome were exhibitions, not of mental, but of physical energy, and were both sanguinary and brutalizing. The former were often theatrical to an exalted degree, but never amphitheatrical, as was always the case with the latter. The tragic feeling of Greece is represented by the sculptured grief of Niobe, that of Rome by the death-struggles which distort the features and muscles of Laocoon. The latter work, together with the Tauro Farnese, the Dying Gladiator, the Gladiator of Agesias, and several kindred works, were all executed in the Augustan age, some of them at a late period. The Meleager and Mercury of the Vatican, the Venus of Capua, and the Ludovisi Mars, must also be regarded as the productions of Greek art, so modified as to please Roman taste. What a radical change was wrought in sculpture, in its westward progress, is best exemplified in the colossal Nile and Tiber of the Vatican and Louvre. It is obvious that these representations of river-gods are based on that original Greek type which was so nobly embodied in the Ilissus of the Parthenon; the general reclining attitude is the same, but the whole motive of the art is altered; new symbols and accessories are added, to express an inferior idea in more copious but less eloquent language. The same general statement applies to the numerous allegorical figures which are preserved in Italian galleries, with the collateral illustration of Roman coins.

Augustan art was formed from Greek models, in the same time and mode as Augustan literature, with one important exception. The latter was engrafted on an original stock of ballad-poetry, the process of adaptation being their own work; but Greek art was transferred rather than engrafted, the cultivation of the exotic being entrusted to strangers and hirelings. Augustan letters were formed by the Romans themselves, Augustan sculptures by Greek artists working under Roman dictation. The monuments of Rome afford the best examples on a great scale of the historic style of sculpture peculiar to that people, which is valuable in reference to their portrait art, a collateral department, such as biography is to general history. The series of busts in the Vatican, the Capitol, the Museo Borbonico, and at Florence, show how successfully this class of art was cultivated down to a very late period of the empire. The Roman sarcophagi form a distinct order of monuments, and are also of the later period. The bas-reliefs with which they are decorated generally, are borrowed from Greek myths, such as the story of Niobe, but in treatment, the delicate wisdom of the original is gradually ignored.

When Greece fell, there were but three superior artists, Lysippus the sculptor, Apelles the painter, and Pyrgoteles the gem-engraver. The first introduced a new style of art, which foretokened the age already begun. He made his figures larger than life, and the huge instead of the beautiful followed evermore, till the empire of force had in turn perished. A hundred colossi of the sun arose in the single island of Rhodes, the most famous of which, by Chares of Lindus, was completed B.C. 280. The imposing group of Dirce and the Bull, executed by artists born at Tralles, is another expression of that time. But the most significant symbol of the Augustan age and its spirit is that famous work made by three Rhodian sculptors, the Laocoon. It was probably executed about the time of Titus, as Pliny first saw it in the palace of that emperor, and referred to it as a novelty. In that group, violent action and intense suffering are shown in the same instant simultaneously; we pity the younger son, tremblingly hope for the elder, and despair of all three as that horrid shriek rings from the distorted mouth of the father, maddened by agony into a forgetfulness of his own offspring writhing with him in serpent-folds, and fatally crushed by the meshes of a living net. What the transcendent statue by Phidias was to the majestic Jupiter of Homer, the sculptured Laocoon was to the description by Virgil, but in a very inferior degree. From the time the haughty dwellers on mount Capitoline had been obliged to adopt old Etruscan statues to perpetuate their own historical events, the Romans never excelled in noble art. It was a characteristic fact, that Clodius, after the banishment of Cicero, on the ruins of his palace dedicated to Liberty a statue which in its primary use had represented a Bœotian courtesan. To the end, that rough race never possessed the enlightened eyes, purged of their blinding film, like those of Diomed, to discern the fine texture of celestial forms, or to admire their charms.

Roman painting will require but a brief notice. Early in the Augustan age, easel-painting was neglected, and wall-decoration came into special favor, as the handmaid of luxury. In the time of Vespasian, according to Pliny, painting was a perishing art, and with the most splendid colors nothing worth speaking of was produced. Scenography, originally derived from Asia Minor, was cultivated at Rome, by Ludius. He executed, as room decorations, villas and porticoes, artificial gardens, parks, streams, canals, and marine views, enlivened with comical figures in all sorts of rural occupations. The perspective theatrical paintings, by which the Greek drama was illustrated, gradually extended the art of landscape, since it increased the demand for a deceptive imagination of inanimate objects, such as buildings, woods, and rocks. This was imitated by the Romans, and transferred from the playhouse to their halls adorned with pillars, where the long surfaces of the wall were at first covered with pictures in small, and afterwards with wide prospects of towns, shores of the sea, and extensive pastures upon which the cattle are feeding. In the time of the later Cæsars, landscape painting became a distinct branch; but, according to the specimens preserved to us in Herculaneum, Pompeii, and Stabiæ, these pictures of nature were more allied to private villas and artificial gardens, than to broad views of the open country.