Plate XXVII. M. VIPSANIUS AGRIPPA
In sculpture, too, the most ardent supporters of Roman originality can find little to comfort them in the closing century of the Republic. We have seen how the victories of Mummius and his successors had created a taste and a market for Greek works of art. With those of Sulla and Lucullus immense quantities of loot had crossed the Adriatic, and Rome began to be what New York is now, the home of connoisseurs and collectors. As connoisseurs are wont to do, the Roman millionaires studied commercial values rather than artistic qualities. No doubt in time their taste improved from the days when Mummius had warned his men that any of the Greek masterpieces destroyed in transit would have to be replaced by new ones. But they still went very largely by the names of the artists: a genuine Praxiteles or Scopas was worth immense sums. Every villa now required statues for its adornment—Greek originals, if possible; if not, copies. For the most part they were reckoned purely as objects of value along with handsome tables, vases, bowls, and signet-rings. When Cicero buys Greek statues he prefers Muses to Bacchantes as being more appropriate to his studies. The question of artistic value scarcely enters his mind. The most famous named sculptor of this period is the Italian-Greek Pasiteles, who visited Rome about 90 B.C. and there made original statues for Roman temples. Pasiteles, of course, was of the Hellenic decline. He was a metal-worker by training, and his work is like that of Cellini, more decorative than creative. It is jewellery on a large scale. He evolved no new style of his own, but set himself to copy and elaborate ancient types to meet the artificial demand for antiquities. Many of the “archaistic” works in our museums belong to this period of production, and as decoration many of them are extremely charming. We have other names of the Pasitelean school, all Greek, such as Stephanus and Menelaus, but there is very little originality or interest in them. The Venus Genetrix in the Louvre is undoubtedly a fine statue, and is probably a faithful copy of the original by Arcesilaus of the first century B.C.[34] But the face, at any rate, quite visibly goes back to the Greek sculpture of the fifth century, and perhaps, as has been suggested, to Alcamenes. It is in the treatment of the transparent drapery that the present artist shows his skill. Skill there was in abundance in those Greek chisels of the first century; even the Farnese Hercules of Glycon and the Medici Venus[35] are astonishing as efforts of chisel-craft, utterly debased and debasing as they are.
FIG. 1. ROMAN BRIDGE AT RIMINI
FIG. 2. ROMAN AMPHITHEATRE AT VERONA
Plate XXVIII.
We know from history that portrait statues had long been common at Rome. The forum was full of them. We saw in an earlier chapter how the old Etruscans had placed terra-cotta portraits of the deceased upon their tombs, and how the old Romans preserved wax images of their forefathers for use at funerals. Most primitive peoples have an instinctive dread of portraiture as a sort of blasphemy. Perhaps the early growth of facial portraiture at Rome was helped by the worship of a man’s genius, his luck, his spirit, his guardian angel. The genius naturally was depicted in the likeness of the man himself. So the imagines in a Roman atrium were no mere portraits of defunct ancestors. Rather they were visible presentments of invisible presences. Unfortunately very few unquestionably genuine examples of republican portraiture have survived. Portraits of ancient celebrities were freely constructed at all times, and it is not easy to date them. We have not at Rome as we have in Greece a clear line of artistic development which enables the trained archæologist to date any casual work of art to within half a century almost at a glance. It is now a question of employing more or less skilful Greeks. It is probable that most of the portraits already illustrated in this book were executed under the Cæsars, but they may well go back to earlier if ruder likenesses, and in any case the portraits are interesting for their own sake. The portraits of Julius Cæsar, both the white marble bust in the Vatican Museum[36] and the still more striking example in black basalt in the Barracco Museum at Rome, are, however, almost certainly of contemporary or, at the latest, Augustan date, so real and vivid is the portraiture. There is another very fine black basalt head of Julius in Berlin,[37] but its authenticity has been questioned. It certainly corresponds very closely with the profile of the dictator on his coins.[38] The bust of M. Brutus may also be identified by comparison with the coins. That of Cicero is probable but not so certain.