ROMAN ART.
The Greeks, from a poetical, artistic, and esthetical, and the Romans,
from a social, legal, and political point of view, are still our
masters. Historical art-critics, and a certain class of writers, who
would wish to see the whole universe one great court of justice with
an infinite variety of crimes, subdivided into felony, misdemeanour,
petty larceny, &c., will never agree as to the place that should be
assigned to the Romans in the world’s history. We are bold enough to
assert that the whole of the criminal and sanguinary history of Rome,
with her products in literature and art, might be wiped out, and yet
philosophically, poetically, and artistically, not the slightest gap in
the progressive development of humanity would be found. Socially and
legally, we should be sorry to miss a state, which had a mission of its
own, which, if well understood, may teach us the causes why the gentler
feelings of morality were oppressed, imagination defiled, and every
higher artistic aspiration deadened in Rome.
From beginning to end, ROMA, read backwards AMOR, was an ambiguous
‘state-abstraction,’ which absorbed the individual. The State with the
Greeks was a concrete association of freemen. With the Romans, it was
the abstract principle of an imaginary union of heterogeneous citizens.
The Greeks fostered science and art, poetry and philosophy. The Romans
despised science, mocked art, scorned poetry, and never condescended
to trouble themselves about philosophy. The Greeks colonised and
civilised their colonies, which became the free daughters of a free
mother-country, attached to it by the ties of a common worship of
beauty and intellectual enjoyment. The Romans conquered, and the
conquered provinces were to furnish soldiers or labourers, and were
tied by means of despotism to the wheels of the proud state-carriage.
The Greeks humanised; the Romans demoralised and organised. The Greeks
played at soldiers in a spirit of glorious patriotism. The Romans were
soldiers for the sake of conquest, plunder, and vain glory. Spirited
youthfulness was the Greek element. Stern and calculating manliness
the essence of the Roman. The Greek was free in life, in art, in the
worship of his gods, in poetry and philosophy. The Roman was cowed
down in religion, politics and life, by the inexorable despotic
force of legal phantoms, which turned men into mere machines. The
despotism of the East was the despotism of some invisible god, or
some visible ruler; and it often overlooked the individual in its
almighty position. The democracy of Greece gave fair play to individual
talent and genius in art and science; but the Roman self-constituted
aristocracy, or rather triple theocracy, invented the inexorable and
meddlesome monster authority, to which everything was to be sacrificed.
Under the tragi-comical sobriquet, _Salus reipublicæ suprema lex_ (in
free translation, ‘whatever we in authority find good, is good’), they
committed the blackest crimes, which no historian could venture to
commit to paper in their whole truthfulness.
This triple theocracy presented itself in the shape of seven mythical
kings; in the form of a nominal republic, which was in reality a
military and theocratic aristocracy; and lastly in the theocracy of the
Cæsars, which in course of time was changed into a papal theocracy.
The Romans had to reverence and submit to theocracy under the form of a
triple authority--the political authority; the paternal authority; and
the legal authority. Wherever the Roman turned to, in that vast empire,
which was bounded in the west by the Atlantic, in the north by the
Rhine and the Danube, in the east by the Euphrates, and in the south by
the deserts of Arabia and Africa, he met his triple crown of authority.
He was confronted by some consul or proconsul, some law, some edict,
some whim or caprice of an invisible something, that always had a
visible _lictor_ at its command with a bundle of sticks, ready for
flogging, or, in urgent cases, with a well-sharpened axe to sever the
head from the trunk. He had to obey a power, with innumerable soldiers,
ready to punish whole provinces if they resisted that ever present,
ever vigilant, and ever-active State abstraction. Whilst in Greece,
the individual man was developed with all his bodily and intellectual
faculties in science and art, Rome disturbed and hindered this
individual development, concentrating the static and dynamic forces of
her citizens on brutal military enterprises.
Rome, through its theocratical spirit, oppressed the conquered by
the conqueror, the poor by the rich, the ‘nihil habentes’ by the
‘possedentes,’ the client by the patron, the plebeian by the patrician,
humanity by priests and gods, and the individual by the State. The
Roman as individual was never a self-acting, self-conscious, and
free-thinking entity, but a mere cipher after the State unit; a wheel
in a large and complicated machine; a drop of water in an ocean;
an atom in the universe. The Greek recognised in the State only an
agglomeration of men like himself; this sum total of citizens had
to serve _him_; the State was to him a means, not an aim. The Greek
demanded of the State that it should protect him in the free and
perfect use of his bodily and intellectual faculties. He was, if he
liked, poet, magistrate, athlete, judge, dancer, philosopher, fighter,
priest, wrestler, tragedian, soldier, or singer; all for his own sake,
without ever becoming an over-regulated or over-regulating pedant.
He worshipped his gods without restraining dogmas; he never allowed
his individuality to be absorbed by some incomprehensible, shapeless,
universal theocracy; his whole scientific and artistic national career
was one glorious struggle against such an accomplishment. All this was
the very reverse with the Romans. That Rome had no art or science of
her own, was the effect of those causes which we have here tried to
sketch in a general way.
The Romans, like the Greeks, were a mixture of Aryans and Turanians,
with this difference, that with the Greeks the Aryan element
predominated, whilst with the Romans the Turanian, and even the black
elements formed a considerable portion of the national State body. The
Greek element, which, at the time of the earliest formation of the
Roman State, was very powerful, soon became absorbed in the Gallic,
Iberian, African, Egyptian, and Syrian elements. The enervating south
was not counterbalanced by the energetic north, but, on the contrary,
the south predominated; and as in the south-east theocratic despotism
flourished, the same principle was adopted by the Romans, and worked
into a perfect system.
That the language of the Romans had a common origin with that of
the Greeks, Persians, and Indians is evident from the consideration
even of a few words. The verbs _sum_ (I am), _do_ (I give), and the
words _pater_, _mater_, _frater_, are Sanskrit. The most important
pastoral and agricultural expressions are Sanskrit, showing that a
certain degree of civilisation must have been brought with them by the
settlers, after their separation from their Trans-Himâlâyan brethren,
when they peopled the shores of the Mediterranean, and occupied that
small coast-land which was probably once connected with the African
continent through Sicily.
_Pecus_, _sus_, _taurus_, and _canis_ are Sanskrit words. The Sanskrit
_agras_ (meadow) is the Latin _ager_ (Germ. _acker_, acre). The
Sanskrit _kurnu_ (Germ. _korn_, corn, grain) is the Latin _granum_. The
settlers were undoubtedly acquainted with even higher elements of a
steady and civilised life. The Sanskrit word _aritram_ (ship and oar),
survived as _aratrum_ the plough, cutting through the ground like the
aritram through the waves. The Sanskrit _damas_, δόμος {domos} is the
Latin _domus_; _naus_ is _navis_; _akshas_ is axis (Germ. _achse_) a
coach or cart; and we have in the Sanskrit _vastra_, the Latin _vestis_
(vestment), not only a proof of the connection between the Aryans
of the Ganges, and those on the shores of the Tiber, but a living
testimony that the former had left off tattooing their bodies and used
textile fabrics. The Romans were first called Ramnes. Three races may
be said to have furnished the first settlers on the Seven Hills, the
Ramnes, Titians, and Lukeres. From this threefold confederation we have
the word tribuere, tribus (tribe). Later Pelasgians, Sabines, Albans,
Etruskans, and Hellenes joined the first settlers, and formed by
degrees the Roman State.
As the Britons at one time earnestly believed that they were the
direct descendants of Brutus, the son of Æneas, we need not wonder that
the Romans should have indulged in the flattering faith that they were
the direct descendants of Æneas himself. They had scarcely attained a
settled state, when they began to work out their legends and myths,
concerning the divine foundation of their town, which had taken place
under _seven_ kings.
1. Romulus, a god-man, for he and his brother, Remus, were incarnations
of the war-god Mars and miraculously born of a virgin. Their uncle
Amulius, fearing that they might deprive him of his throne, had them
exposed in the swollen Tiber in a cradle. The river subsided, and the
cradle was caught by a sacred fig-tree at the foot of the Palatine
hill, and a she-wolf had pity on the boys, and suckled them. The
founders of Rome thus mythically imbibed, with their foster-mother’s
milk, that savage brutality and thirst for blood which distinguished
the citizens of the Holy City for thousands of years. Romulus and Remus
were found by shepherds, and brought up by them. Subsequently a town
was founded by the twins, and Romulus then killed his brother and ruled
alone. He divided the people into curiæ.
2. Numa Pompilius enlarged the town and introduced a settled form of
worship, not out of piety, but in order to subject the citizens to the
will of the State.
3. Tullus Hostilius improved upon the theocratical institutions of
Numa, and gave Rome a military organisation, as the secret tool with
which her will was to be enforced throughout a vast part of the globe.
4. Ancus Martius commanded the citizens to have taste and to beautify
the town, or rather had this done, superintending the improvements
himself. He is stated to have been a grandson of Numa.
5. Tarquinius Priscus, of a Korinthian family, showed in his very
infancy that he was destined by supernatural influences to become a
benefactor of the chosen people, the Romans. When a tender boy sleeping
in his cradle, his head was surrounded by a brilliant halo of flames.
He conquered many Latin and Sabine towns, and showed himself worthy
of his exalted position. He introduced the golden diadem, the ivory
throne, the sceptre adorned with an eagle, and the purple toga, as
distinctive marks of the supreme authority.
6. Servius Tullius was also of supernatural origin. He was the son of
a female slave, and the protecting divinity of the royal castle. He
divided the people into five classes or castes; instituted tribunes,
and founded the orders of senators, knights, and commons.
7. Tarquinius Superbus, like the Chinese tyrant Ly-wang, who succeeded
the five good emperors, defiled the imperial dignity, outraged all
laws, divine and human, and was rebelled against by the patricians,
who abolished the regal authority. The innocent Lucretia is said to
have been the direct cause of the expulsion of the tyrant, and the
establishment of the republic.
In the myths concerning these seven kings we have abundant elements for
the most beautiful songs, epic poems, and artistic subjects full of
dramatic power and vitality. The remarkable fact with the Romans was,
that they preserved these myths as _historical_ truths, recorded them
in dull _prose_, affixing to them dates, each of which was a flagrant
falsehood, and used them in good earnest as the basis of their national
existence.
The royal period ended with the seven kings. Rome had prepared in
perfect silence her murderous weapons, and, suddenly dashing forward
a well-trained prize-fighter, inaugurated the military theocracy. The
history of this second period, with its appalling monotony, may be
condensed into one terrible word--WAR.
From 342-340 B.C. war with the Samnites. From 340-337 B.C. war with
the Latins. From 325-290 B.C. the second and third Latin war. From
288-264 B.C. war with Carthage and Syrakuse. From 264-241 B.C. the
first Punic war. Peace was made, and to fill up the leisure hours,
there was a Gallic war. From 218-201 B.C. the second Punic war.
Peace was again concluded, and during the interval (183 B.C.) Greece
and the Makedonian empire were subjugated. From 149-146 B.C. the
third Punic war. The world was conquered, and the boundaries of the
vast empire extended in all directions; but the warlike spirit of
the Romans had not learnt to rest and to enjoy these conquests in
peace; industry, arts, and sciences, had no charm for these wild and
indomitable conquerors, and wanting a foreign enemy, they quarrelled
amongst themselves. The internal dissensions began. There were the
Numantian troubles, the tumults of the Gracchi, and the feud between
Marius and Sulla. A foreign war happily put an end to these internal
struggles. From 112-106 B.C. war with Jugurtha. From 88-80 B.C. war
with Mithridates. From 72-71 B.C. the slaves rebelled and called for
bread and for revenge. This was the first civil war--individual egotism
conspired against the supreme power, faction fought against faction;
a dissolution of all law and order threatened the State. From 54-51
B.C. the Gallic war amused the Roman spectators and war-comedians. From
49-48 B.C. there was a second civil war; from 43-30 B.C. a third; and
the republic was at last absorbed by a Cæsarian theocracy.
That arts and sciences did not flourish in a state of continual warfare
is quite natural. The houses were mean and low, here and there adorned
with clumsy Etruskan pillars; the temples had some Greek forms;
sculpture was not cultivated, and Greeks had to chisel or to carve
the scanty embellishments. On the other hand, high roads of great
excellence, and bold bridges with magnificent arches, were constructed,
for everywhere the spirit of practical realism was served; in every
stone, every column, every pillar, every statue, the spirit of
theocratic despotism predominated. The charming gods of the Greeks were
turned into haughty military commanders, not inviting love through
beauty, but demanding blind obedience with a thundering ‘_sic volo, sic
jubeo_’ (‘as I will it, so I command it’).
The period of imperial theocracy showed Rome in her pomp and splendour,
covering inner hollowness and gradual decay with marble slabs. Palaces
and temples, basilicæ and arcades, triumphal arches and amphitheatres,
arenas and baths (of the latter Rome alone had about 768), naumachiæ
and circuses, theatres and arenas, hippodromes and magnificent tombs
abounded; but in all these architectural marvels, the monumental spirit
of pride, self-glorification, vain ostentation, and theatrical display,
is to be traced; the love of beauty, of artistic moderation, and
simplicity being everywhere conspicuous by its absence. Roman art and
decoration are to be carefully studied, that we may learn ‘how not to
do it,’ if we earnestly intend to produce works of art, and not works
of ornamentation, forming a very Paradise for ‘parvenus’ with bad taste.
We have asserted that the Romans never produced anything original in
art and science. Their religion, their literature, and their products
of art, bear this assertion out to the very letter.
The word ‘religion’ is of Roman origin. The Teutons have _faith_
or trust in God. The Roman word meant the tying down of everyone
to certain formulas or dogmas. They borrowed their dogmas and
superstitions, their gods and ceremonies, from all parts of the world;
especially from the Greeks and Etruskans, and later from the Egyptians.
Everything served their purpose so soon as it helped to overawe the
masses. They had augurs, auspices, and sibylline oracles. From the
entrails of beasts and human beings they predicted the future. Flashes
of lightning, the rolling thunder, the flight of birds, meetings with
hares, goats, dogs, or cats, announced the will of the gods. The
conceptions of the Eastern gods were disfigured, and they were made
more jealous, threatening, merciless, revengeful, and inexorable.
Jupiter the thunderer (Jupiter tonans) did not govern by any moral law,
but by mere force; he spoke in flashes of lightning and in thunder,
in terrifying earthquakes and volcanic eruptions. Amongst the 30,000
deities with which the Roman triple theocracy peopled the visible and
invisible world, there was not ONE divinity of kindness, mercy, and
comfort.
They had a divinity of peace, to urge them on to war; they had
divinities of plague, hunger, fever, mildew, and death. In their
practical spirit they went even so far as to have a ‘Dea Cloacina.’
What subjects to paint or sculpture!
A pale-yellow woman with dishevelled hair, protruding ghastly eyes,
wasted lips, fleshless and emaciated limbs, may represent the goddess
of hunger; another woman deliberately and slowly tearing the limbs of
helpless creatures from their bodies with diabolical delight, may be
a goddess of plague; another, placidly playing with human skulls in a
field surrounded by dying men, women, and children, may be the goddess
of death.
In the illustration of a Dante or a Milton, a knowledge of the Roman
mythology may prove full of suggestive power.
The Greeks had a principle in their anthropomorphic worship; the Romans
had no aim. Roman high-priests were spiritual butchers, who tried to
appease the angry gods with the smoke of burning bullocks, to nourish
them with fat, with which they literally besmeared the statues, and
to quench their thirst with blood which they poured over the altars.
When already educated enough to consider all these divinities with a
cold and sceptic indifference; when the augurs could no longer meet
without laughing and sneering at each other and their sacred office,
then the Roman mind became eager for a more concrete god than these
stone figures, and they found a corresponding living divinity in the
person of their Emperors. Earth certainly could offer nothing more
divine in the form of visible majesty, recognised and obeyed, as
soon as clothed in the imperial purple and crowned with the imperial
diadem, than the irresponsible ‘god-man,’ who sat on the throne of
the Cæsars. The creative force of the Universe, and the phenomena of
nature, were moulded in visible forms; and now for the first time a
political abstraction had become incarnate in the Emperor _pro tem_.
The hordes of courtiers, courtezans, flatterers, poets, philosophers,
historians, juris consults, orators, prætors, and consuls, supported
by the thoughtless mass of the people, rendered _divine_ honours to
a _mortal_, in whom, however, the _immortal_ principle of theocratic
authority was concentrated. Not even the Egyptians, crouching in
grateful admiration before the crocodiles of the Nile, outraged
humanity to such a degree as these polite Romans, rendering divine
honour to an Emperor, like Aurelius Commodus, who fought 735 times as
a common gladiator in the arena before his enervated people. The Roman
religion was, in fact, a cosmopolitan mixture of all the atrocious
superstitions of the world.
The Romans also instituted public games in imitation of the Greeks,
on the degrading ‘panis et circenses’ principle. In Greece, Apollo
with his nine muses presided over the public games. The Romans had
specially-trained gladiators, wrestlers, dancers, and prize-fighters.
The competitors at the Greek games were free and independent citizens;
with the Romans they were either criminals, runaway slaves, or men
condemned to death. Bears, lions, tigers, and elephants were starved,
and set against one another, to delight the spectators with their
savage brutality. Soon an improvement was effected, and men were
arrayed against men with deadly weapons, to amuse men and women, boys
and girls, with their skill in murdering; and at last, as a further
progressive development in taste, men were pitted against wild beasts.
In the Greek tragedy, the ideal sufferings of humanity, struggling in
an unequal combat with omnipotent and inexorable fate, were prominently
set forth to purify men from their passions by showing the consequences
of even unconscious guilt. The Greek tragedy was the national moral
conscience brought into the most perfect poetical form. The Romans
instituted a cruel reality of _bodily_ suffering; _real_ blood
streaming from _real_ limbs; the _real_ rattle in the throat, which
signals death; and the _real_ last gasp of an expiring man, afforded
them amusement.
Like their religion and public games, their literature, with
the exception of their satires and law-codes, was matter of
fact and imitative. The generation of the Roman products of
poetry and prose was the following: Homer engendered Virgil,
Hesiod--Lucretius; Pindar--Horace; Æsop--Phædrus; Euripides--Terence;
Aristophanes--Plautus; Xenophon--Sallust; Thukydides--Titus Livy;
Demosthenes--Cicero. Ovid and Tacitus were the only really original
writers; the first faithfully depicted the hollowness of Roman ethics;
and the other, in unsurpassed language, drew a historical sketch of the
Teutons, mercilessly exposing the contrast between noble simplicity,
grandeur and honesty, and the demoralised state of his own country.
If art is the outgrowth of the intellectual and moral condition of a
people, what kind of art could the Romans have produced? None. And
this was the case. Roman art is altogether a misnomer; it is in fact
Etruskan, Greek, Assyrian, and Egyptian art, dressed in an eclectic
Roman garb by foreign artists. Art with the Romans was never the
glorious emanation of the poet’s sacred ideal of the gods, or the
irresistible civilising power of beauty; it was merely the handmaid
of power, wealth, pomp, and vanity. Art was with them a slave, well
fed, well clad, well housed, well paid, to make power more powerful,
to dazzle the people, to proclaim the universal dominion of Rome over
the world. The Roman character was dry and geometrical, and therefore
in its artistic taste architectural and monumental. Anything that
could serve, by means of technical perfection, to promote art, was
encouraged, adopted, and supported by the Romans.
We have given a drastic picture of the evils of the Roman spirit; we
must be just to the great mission which it fulfilled unconsciously
and against its will. The centralisation in language, customs, and
manners produced a cosmopolitan spirit. Greek artists and philosophers
spread taste and learning. Distant nations were brought into closer
connection. The roads constructed to facilitate the march of legions,
bent on devastating a province, served as means of communication; so
did their aqueducts and bridges. The wants of an increasing population
forced the Romans to improve agriculture, and commerce was found
necessary. Corn had to be brought from one quarter, textile fabrics
from another; Greece and Egypt were pillaged of their innumerable works
of art, and Rome may be said to have been at that period the greatest
museum of the universe. The superstition and credulity which existed
among the people, by degrees disappeared. Africa had been considered a
land of monsters, with serpents large enough to entangle a whole army
and to crush it; other regions of the accessible world had been thought
inhabited by men without heads. Giants, kyklops, and enchantresses had
been said to perform incredible feats, but were found to be without
supernatural power; the golden apples of Spain turned out to be mere
oranges, and graced the tables of the wealthier, and in time even of
the poorer classes. The mouth of hell had been placed on the shores
of the Euxine (Black Sea), but when those regions were occupied by
Roman soldiers, the mouth of hell had to be removed elsewhere. East
and west, south and north, were united under one great Roman vault,
the four quarters of the globe were over-arched, and the broad cupola
of universalism set over them. Man was made a common slave to one
grand and common abstraction, typically foreshadowing the time when
men would be brought as free agents under one great dome of universal
brotherhood.
For this grand and really majestic soldering of humanity into one
total, the Romans found the spiritual as well as the material form in
1. The arch.
2. The cross-vault.
3. The cupola.
Through the _arch_, which was used by the Etruskans, but which under
the Romans became a most important part of architecture, the art of
constructing was suddenly freed of all hindrances. Courts could be
formed with more ease, and the ground-plan drawn with greater variety.
The _cross-vault_ may be considered a specially Roman form. Two
cylindrical arches were constructed intersecting each other at right
angles in a quadrangular space. The intersection takes place at the two
diagonal lines, thus uniting the opposite corners. The arches in their
cross-form rise from four points of support, and divide the arch into
four curved triangles, called calottes.
The _cupola_, a third form of the vault, was called forth in the Romans
by their preference for _circular_ buildings. The ancient mound was
revived by them. It was the application of the arch to a circular
ground-plan. A powerful larger or smaller member of decoration was
produced, interrupting the flatness of walls, and allowing a rich
variety of statuary to be used as ornament. This refers to the use of
the half-cupola for semicircular niches and the apsidæ. These merely
geometrical constructions would have been monotonous and without grace,
like our railway stations; and would have been classed as works of
engineering, but never of art; had not the Romans employed Greek forms
in the shape of columns and pilasters, to adorn them. The Doric, Ionic,
Attic, and Korinthian styles were all used, and a so-called composite
or Roman order was added. The composite stood in the same relation to
the proto-Korinthian, as Plautus to Aristophanes. The Romans, with
arrogant clumsiness, placed a coarser and more contracted form of the
Ionic capital on two rows of richly carved acanthus leaves. This was a
bad composition, and left room for much improvement, which was effected
more than fifteen hundred years later.
Nothing is known of art during the mythical period of Roman history.
During the first centuries of the Republic, the Etruskan style is said
to have been prevalent, introduced by Tarquin. Square wooden huts with
a rounded and tumulus-like roof of straw, were the first palaces of the
Roman citizens. Only after the conquest of Greece 183 B.C., Grecian
architecture and sculpture were introduced. From this date we may
classify Roman art, under Greek, Assyrian, and Egyptian influences,
into the following periods.
_a._ The _first_ begins in the second century B.C., under the Republic,
after the destruction of Korinthum by Mummius, and ends with the reign
of the Augustan house, and the beginning of the rule of the Flavians,
69 A.D. This was the _Græco-Roman Period_ of architecture and sculpture.
_b._ The _second_ period commences with the _Flavians_, 69 A.D. After
the tyrannical reigns of Tiberius and Nero, the cosmopolitan Imperial
state acquired an apparent stability in new social forms, which found
expression in gigantic artistic constructions. This period, which
lasted down to Septimus Severus, 193 A.D., has three distinct phases.
α. A phase of powerful development under the Flavians.
β. A phase of brilliant success under _Trajan_ (98-117 A.D.)
γ. A phase of revival of classic Greek forms under _Hadrian_
(117-138 A.D.)
We may designate these phases of development as the _Romano-Greek_
period.
_c._ The _third_ period under the military despotism of the prætorian
guards, during which Rome ceased to be the centre of universal
dominion, and each province began to feel its own vitality, lasted
from _Septimus Severus_ (193-211 A.D.) to Constantine the Great.
Art lost every basis--degenerated into luxurious pomp, and became
heavier with each new product, and more fantastic in incredible
details and impossible executions. We may best designate this as the
_Romano-eclectic_ period.
A. After the destruction of Korinthum, Rome abounded in Greek
immigrants, and in Greek marble and bronze statues, friezes, pillars,
and various movable works of art. The spoils of Greek temples and
houses were set up in Roman houses built of bricks and mortar. The
contrast between the unartistic architecture of the Romans, and the
master-pieces of Greek art, was so striking, that they were forced
to endeavour to improve their architecture, and art became to a
certain degree _fashionable_. The wealthier classes began to study
it _theoretically_, and to affect an immense amount of _patronizing_
enthusiasm, without any deeper understanding of the laws of taste and
beauty, but with a determination to outdo all other nations in the
profession of works of art. Such sentiments often engender a _brisk
trade_, but they fail to promote real art, or to benefit genuine
artists. The walls of the houses of this period were generally white,
with red painted ornamentations. Red is the favourite colour with
children, savages, and butchers in mind. This led to the making of
red bricks, which were mixed with others of different colours, and
thus originated polylithic wall-decoration. The spaces between the
red bricks were filled in with a black composition in imitation of
different textile patterns, and this mode of decoration was called
Niello. By degrees, bricks and cement were superseded by marble, and
the houses became so rich, that a Puritan party of Roman ἰδιώταις
{idiôtais} formed itself, and thundered against corruption and
enervation, luxury and degradation. The power of this party was so
great that Cicero, fearing lest these stern and dull Roman worthies
should think him acquainted with the principles of artistic refinement,
declared his utter ignorance of art, and expressed his high contempt
for all such futile ‘allotria.’
The art of ornamentation became more and more universal. The fora and
atria were overcrowded with bronze and marble statues and groups.
These efforts, however, were not genuine; they did not grow out of the
artistic wants and love of the people--the whole movement was strange
to their minds--and was altogether a heterogeneous element grafted on
their natures by the force of circumstances. They succeeded by degrees
in ornamenting grandly, but there was always something in contradiction
to, or in conflict with, really good taste. They used patterns meant
for floors on their walls, and wall patterns on their ceilings, and
that which would have fitted a ceiling, they laid on their floors;
creating by this means a sad confusion. Asia always excelling in bright
colours, and in a secret talent for matching them correctly, excited
the admiration of the Romans, and they began to paint their walls. They
often cut out the decorated parts of a pillaged Greek temple, and fixed
these pieces at random in their houses, caring very little whether
there was a congruity between these and their own wall-decoration
or not. We have, during this period, an attempt at ‘scenography.’
The walls were painted over with architectural views, representing
colonnades, interiors, landscapes, and later, Greek mythological and
even historical scenes. In these, Perseus and Andromeda, or Medea
meditating the murder of her children, or Herkules destroying the
serpent, or some other _sensational_ deed, formed the cherished
subjects. Under the influence of the Greeks of Alexandria, another
custom became prevalent. The walls were more and more panelled, and the
panels filled with works of art.
This ‘mania,’ or fashion, became so universal with the Romans that
they could find no more works of classic art, and had to engage living
artists to reproduce antique cornices, metopes, colonnades, capitals,
shields, helmets, tripods, sphinxes, and griffins; but even these
artists were so overwhelmed with commissions, that it was impossible
for them to satisfy the feverish demand. To produce works of art more
quickly, they began to paint the panels, and the Roman empire became a
complete manufactory of wall-decorations. Light colonnades of slender
reeds, baldachins with pointed arches and fantastic monsters, filled
the walls, and sometimes mere combinations of colours were used in a
conventional style. Art again sank into mere trade. The panels and
walls were not decorated with the works of the good old Greek masters,
but with mere imitations. Mannerism supplanted style, and arabesques,
flourishes, insignificant chequered patterns, or geometrical puzzles,
took the place of historical paintings--poor wall-decorations in a
theatrical style, without any attempt at higher art.
The use of marble as a means of decoration was not always customary
with the Romans, and was introduced by L. Crassus, the censor, who had
his house decorated with six small columns of marble from Hymettus,
and was very much blamed for this extravagance. M. Scaurus, the ædile,
who built the famous wooden theatre, decorated with 360 pillars of
marble, glass, and bronze, and about 3,000 statues and images, had the
atrium and peristyle of his private house richly adorned with exquisite
columns. Manurra, prefect of the armourers, under Julius Cæsar in
Gaul, is set down as the first who had his walls decorated with marble
incrustations; whilst M. Catulus could boast of the first marble
flooring, and of thresholds in Numidian marble. Of temples, one of the
first constructed of marble blocks in a purer Greek style was that of
Jupiter Tonans. The temple of _Fortuna Virilis_ which rose on a lofty
substructure on the banks of the Tiber, was in the Ionic style. The
Vesta temple at Tivoli, enthroned on a steep and rocky height above the
foaming waters of the Anio, was a circular building in the Korinthian
style.
Theatres, public halls, baths, and Fora were found necessary, either
to distract the public mind from political matters, or to gain the
suffrages of the fickle mob, eager for amusement and excitement. The
first theatre in stone was erected by Pompey. Julius Cæsar surpassed
all his predecessors and rivals in magnificence. He began the theatre
of Marcellus, which was completed by Augustus, and so enlarged and
beautified the _Circus Maximus_ that it could accommodate 150,000
spectators; he built the beautiful Basilica Julia, a public law-court
for the Centumviri or Judges to sit in, and hear causes, and for the
counsellors to receive their clients, and had a new Forum constructed,
and adorned it with a temple dedicated to Venus Genetrix. The Roman
Forum (in imitation of the Greek Agora) was a building about three
times as long as broad. The interior was surrounded by arched porticos,
and flanked by the most stately edifices, such as theatres, basilicæ,
and temples.
These Fora were devoted to special purposes, as Fora _civilia_ or Fora
_venalia_, and were used for public meetings, or as market-places.
Cæsar tried to become a Roman Perikles, but was distanced in this by
the Emperor Augustus. Up to the establishment of Cæsarism, Rome had
been literally a city of ‘bricks;’ now it became a ‘city of marble.’
Temples were profusely built and rebuilt. The Cæsarian theocracy
required these abodes of splendour and self-glorification. One of the
most imposing specimens of this _Græco-Roman_ architecture was the
Pantheon, built by Agrippa, the son-in-law of Augustus. Originally
it was to have been an entrance-hall to splendid Thermæ, but on its
completion it was turned into a temple, and dedicated to the avenging
Jupiter. It was a circular building 132 feet in diameter, and 132
feet high, and triumphantly proclaimed Rome’s wealth and might. It
contained a statue of Minerva by Pheidias, and a Venus, who it is said
had in her ear the half of the pearl left by Cleopatra. The pearl was
valued at 125,000_l._ That a Greek marble statue should have been
ornamented with part of the _ear-ring_ of an Egyptian princess, is
highly characteristic of Roman taste in matters of art. One of the most
splendid remains in the style of good Greek Korinthian ornamentation
is the temple of Augustus at Pola in Istria. Triumphal gates, these
Roman specialities, were at this period simple in design, and perfect
in execution. Of the Mausoleum of Augustus nothing is left but the
substructure, 220 feet in diameter, now used as a circus for equestrian
performances. ‘Sic transit gloria mundi,’ if based on mere ostentation
and vain pride.
During this period Nikopolis was planned and built; the Temple of
Solomon was adorned with colonnades in the Greek Korinthian style,
and at Nîmes (Nemausus) we possess the most complete remains of a
prostylos pseudipteros temple of Roman architecture, with the purest
Korinthian columns. Under Tiberius the camp of the prætorians was
turned into a marble palace. Under Claudius harbours and moles were
enlarged, built, and decorated. Nero burned Rome, to reconstruct
it with greater pomp. The architects Celerus and Severus had to
build the _golden houses_, of which the porticos were miles long.
The dining-rooms surpassed in splendour anything dreamt of in Indian
poetry. In the decoration of this palace, or rather cluster of palaces,
we trace the greatest mistake an artist can be guilty of. The error
is of Asiatic origin. It may be designated as a conscious ‘_lying_’
in the constructive elements. They tried to hide the costly material
under a cheap disguise; a tendency as bad and objectionable, as a
‘lying’ in cheap substances to represent costly materials. The Romans
used tortoise-shell as veneer for their furniture, and painted it to
make it appear like wood; we, on the other hand, use wood, and paint it
over to make it appear ‘giallo antico,’ (yellow marble), or any other
costly stone. Ornamentation began to lose all symmetry and proportion.
Confusion and profusion ruled supreme. The walls of the rooms looked
like exhibitions of oriental carpets, tapestry, and jewelry. Art
retrograded to the over-painted, over-decorated, over-ornamented
shrouds, in which the mummies of old were buried. For a time art was
carried with Asiatic splendour to a grave of tasteless pomposity.
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.