236 ANCIENT PAINTING AS AMONG THE LOST ARTS. 



statiies which adorned their temples and public halls. They all 

 unite in saying that the arts of painting and sculpture were 

 equally advanced. They had no more occasion or motive to 

 deceive in ,the one case than in the other. For they never could 

 have imagined that the time would come when sculpture would 

 be represented by some of their most beautiful and wonderful 

 specimens, while the sister art of painting would be represented 

 by absolutely nothing. Therefore if we find that they told the 

 truth in one case, we are bound to believe that they did so in the 

 other. 



Now what are the facts in regard to Greek sculpture ? Leaving 

 out of the question all the rest of Greece, we will only take 

 notice of the small island of Rhodes, some forty miles long by 

 fifteen wide. When the Romans took it, in the year 42 before 

 Christ, they carried away 3,000 statues, among which, mere 

 chance preservations we must suppose, were those remarkable 

 groups of the Laocoon and the Farnese Bull. If there were 

 many of them like these, what a proof of the amazing richness 

 of art in the ancient times ! There is not, in all the realm of 

 sculpture, a more elaborate and splendid work, than that called 

 the Farnese Bull, found among the ruins in the Baths of Cari- 

 calla at Rome, and now in the Museum of Naples. It is carved 

 out of one solid block of the purest white marble, and contains 

 four life-size figures, besides the wild animal to the horns of 

 which Dirce is attached and dragged by her long hair. It repre- 

 sents the pitiless vengeance that one woman can take upon another 

 for wrongs endured. Antiope, the mother of the two youths 

 who are holding the plunging bull, had been persecuted, and for 

 a long time confined by her relatives, because her early affections 

 had not chanced to run in the line of family interest. But now, 

 by a turn of fortune, she has in her power the chief instigator of 

 her persecutions; and she stands there as cold as the marble, to 

 witness the most atrocious vengeance that ever yet was executed. 



The Laocoon, also according to the testimony of Pliny, from 

 one block of marble, was found in 1506, beneath a vineyard in 

 the ruins of the Baths of Titus, and is now in the Vatican col- 

 lection. Laocoon, the priest of Neptune, had strongly urged the 



