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.