Their reliefs are all decorative in purpose, for the adornment of altars, candelabra, fountains, well-heads, or wall-panels; and therefore they are not unnaturally attracted by the most decorative of all the archaic schools, the late Ionian or Attic-Ionian art of the end of the sixth century. They make use also of later models, of the Victories of the Balustrade, of Scopaic Maenads, of Praxitelean satyrs, but all the models which they adopt are treated in a uniform style, a new style of exaggerated daintiness of pose and gesture accompanied by an archaistic formality of drapery and modelling. In this detail they contrast strongly with the realism of the pre-Raphaelites. Their daintiness and formality are derived from Ionian models, but reproduced in a wholly different setting.
The vase of Sosibios in the Louvre[120] reproduces some of their favourite types, which occur over and over again in the decorative art of the early empire. The flute-playing satyr, the dancing maenad, the armed dancer, and all the other types are reproduced in every variety of combination, but in identical form. The Neo-Attic sculptors were content with the elaboration of a few types which they combined at pleasure. They never attempted more intricate groups than their variant of the two Victories with a bull from the Acropolis Balustrade. Usually they merely group single figures in long rows without any connexion in thought. Nothing could bring out more clearly their essential poverty of ideas and the purely commercial character of their art. The designs are like so many stencil patterns which can be applied to any form of monument.
When we examine the figures more closely, we can see the elements which make up their characteristic style. The figures invariably march on tiptoe. Their fingers are extended and the little finger is usually bent back in an affected manner. This detail is derived from the archaic pose of the hand holding out a flower, so common in late Ionian art. The tiptoe pose is also found on ancient reliefs. The drapery is based mainly on that of the late fifth-century Attic school, but with various additions and refinements. The fluttering ends of cloaks and mantles recall fourth-century reliefs, while the curving swallow-tail ends of flying drapery are imitated directly from the sixth century. The drapery on the figure itself usually hangs in straight archaic lines as in the Artemis of Pompeii,[121] where the zigzag shape of ancient folds is reproduced with great formality; or it follows an almost equally artificial system of wavy folds, based on the school of the Balustrade, as in the fine relief of a dancing Maenad in the Conservatori Museum.[122] The elegant lounging poses with bent head, which remind us somewhat of Burne-Jones figures, are based no doubt on Praxiteles. The delineation of the surface muscles of the nude body also follows a uniform rule derived rather from the middle fifth-century Attic art than from that of Ionia. The muscles of the male figures tend to be over-emphasized, so far as that is conformable with the elegant slenderness of their figures. But a description of the figure-types of Neo-Attic art is incomplete without some notice of the intricate decorative designs of plants and animals which always frame and enshrine the reliefs on altar or candelabrum. Archaic Greek decoration was always formal and conventional in character. The exquisite mouldings of the Erechtheum or of the later Corinthian capital are not naturalistic but highly stylized. Naturalistic floral or animal decoration begins with the Hellenistic age, and is especially prominent in the Neo-Attic monuments. The trailing vine, grape-clusters, wreaths of flowers, new heraldic sphinxes, lions’ heads, &c., are carefully worked out from nature and combined with the remnants of the old decoration of palmettes, volutes, and tongue and dart mouldings. The vase of Sosibios shows a combination of the two principles, which is truly symbolic of the Greco-Roman combined school, for naturalistic decorative designs are just as representative of Roman art as formal ones are of Hellenic. From the combined system of the Neo-Attic reliefs we pass directly to the purely naturalistic floral designs of Augustan architectural sculpture.
Our survey of Greek sculpture must conclude with the great buildings of Augustus. In them we see for the first time the combination of Italian with Greek principles. The Greco-Roman art which we have noticed hitherto has been archaistic and eclectic, but it has been purely Greek. Roman tastes have been studied and gratified, but style and technique have remained wholly Greek and uncontaminated. Even in the new buildings this procedure still continued. Pliny tells us that Augustus, who had the fashionable taste for the archaic in Greek art, actually imported the Korai of Bupalos and Athenis for use as acroteria on his monuments. The Conservatori Museum contains an almost exact copy of one of these Korai,[123] which must belong to the age of Augustus, as well as a very inferior adaptation of the same type. The Kore figure was translated into the so-called Spes type for mirror handles and other elements of decoration.
But Augustus was not the man to submit to a complete extinction of Italian artistic principles. His system was closely identified with a revival of ancient Italy in all directions, and he was not likely to abandon Italic art. It therefore came to pass that in the greatest sculptured monument of his period—the Ara Pacis[124] erected on the Campus Martius, which is now being gradually and laboriously pieced together again—we have a combination of Greek and Italian principles of first-rate importance for the subsequent development of Roman art. One side of the altar contained a relief of Tellus or the Earth, which is hardly distinguishable from the pastoral Hellenistic reliefs, but the procession which fills the greater part of the other sides is treated in a very different manner. The general scheme is Greek, and must have been influenced by the Parthenon frieze, but the treatment in detail is Italian. Thus we have the Roman toga with its voluminous soft folds, and the Roman principle of direct realistic portraiture in all the heads. But more important than the portraiture is the appearance of a new development of perspective in relief which is destined to have a great career in the future of art, and which has been regarded by some authorities as purely Italian.
Greek reliefs had always been represented as if against a tangible background, at first practically in two planes only, and then in Hellenistic times in truer perspective, but invariably against a background of some kind. Roman art, on the other hand, in its more developed reliefs like those on the Arch of Titus,[125] eliminates the idea of background and regards the wall on which the reliefs are placed as nonexistent. The reliefs are intended to give the illusion of free sculpture, as if they were standing in the round against a background of the sky. A much greater depth must, therefore, enter into the principle of perspective. Just as in the bronze reliefs of the Florentine Baptistery Ghiberti used the principle of no background and attempted to show a whole countryside behind his figures as if the relief were a picture, so the artist of the reliefs of the Arch of Titus uses a strongly diminishing perspective and a pronounced foreshortening of his figures to produce this same effect of free sculpture.
In Greek sculpture of the Hellenistic age it is true to say that the depth of the background has been greatly increased. This is visible even as early as the Telephos frieze. But it would be hard to point to a Greek relief in which the effect was wholly pictorial and the idea of the background was entirely abolished. This principle, however, does appear in the reliefs of the Ara Pacis, and therefore they mark a new era in art. The perspective and the foreshortening are stronger and more illusional. In the background we get flat heads just incised in the marble to give the effect of the depth of the crowd. The scene is in fact not a procession in Indian file but a true crowd many ranks deep. The principle is not altogether adequately carried out in the Ara Pacis, but soon it is more completely mastered. The stucco decorations of the Villa Farnesina,[126] though in the lowest possible relief, express a depth greater than any Hellenistic landscape relief. They are purely pictorial in character.
The subordination of sculpture to pictorial ideas is Italian not Greek. Italy through Etruria, her real artistic pioneer, was always a patron of painting rather than sculpture, and therefore under the Empire sculpture becomes either wholly decorative or merely devoted to portraiture. During the reign of Augustus Greek influence still persists, and under Hadrian we have a Greek revival, but from Tiberius to the Renaissance sculpture descends from a primary to a secondary art.
Another great development of Augustan sculpture is the free use of naturalistic floral designs. Etruscan and Roman art was always realistic, and never tolerated conventions when they could be eliminated. Roman architecture and art both abandoned at once the Greek use of formal conventional mouldings. The Ara Pacis and other monuments of the Augustan age first give us the beautiful rendering of purely realistic wreaths of flowers and fruit, which are the hall-marks of Roman altars and friezes. The Imperial art of Rome as it begins under Augustus is profoundly indebted to Greek art for almost all its types and its technical procedure. Doubtless the greater number of his artists and architects were Greeks. But they were working in the midst of a new culture and a new environment, and thus they unconsciously absorbed new traditions and new ideas, just as their predecessors had done in Pergamon and Alexandria. In Greece itself no further advance was possible. Artistic production was purely commercial, and all the sources of inspiration were closed. In Rome, where alone could be found a career for a creative artist, he had gradually to submit to the genius loci. The artificers of the empire must have long remained Greeks, and all Roman art bears the stamp of Hellenic origin, but at the same time Greek art is changed along the lines of pictorial illusion and pure realism in portraiture. It loses all touch with Greek idealism and serves to express Roman narrative history. Its gods, its myths, and its outlook are changed. It becomes Roman, just as Gothic art became national in each country which it invaded.
We are left then with only one further question to discuss. What are the permanent elements of Hellenism in Roman art, and, after Roman art, in the art of the Renaissance and of modern times? What is the true character of Greek sculpture, and what has it bequeathed to all civilizations which have followed it?