ANCIENT PAINTING AS AMONG THE LOST ARTS. 239 



city compared more favorably with original works of the great 

 masters of Greece, than the frescoes of the hotels and villas of 

 Nice compare with the Stanzas of Raphael in the Vatican or 

 the ceilings of the Sixtlne Chapel. Yet there are in these frag- 

 ments, as it were, of another world of art, elements of beauty 

 and form and color that have made and always will make them 

 the study and admiration and wonder of all lovers of the beauti- 

 ful. Another thought. Here are wall-paintings that have pre- 

 served their fresh and lively colors for two thousand years ; while 

 those of the old Italian masters of 250 years ago have had to be 

 retouched and repainted to keep them from becoming unrecog- 

 nizable. Could there be a more convincing proof that, not only 

 the modes and the skill, but the color materials, the pigments, of 

 the ancient painters are among the Lost Arts ? 



Rome succeeded Greece as the depository, but never as the 

 creator of the wealth of the fine arts. Rome conquered the 

 whole known world, and gathered in the spoils of conquest to 

 beautify or encumber the masses of bricks and stones which 

 made her capitol. The quantity of art material that was brought 

 over from the neighboring peninsula of Greece was perfectly 

 overwhelming. The despoiling commenced in the time of Julius 

 Csesar, was continued under Augustus, Caligula, Nero, in fact as 

 long as there was anything to carry off. 



If now we seek the causes which destroyed or buried the art 

 treasures of antiquity, and which finally wiped out from the face 

 of the earth all knowledge of practical art, we come directly 

 upon the causes which made of Rome a heap of ruins, which in a 

 thousand years reduced a proud city of two million souls to a 

 miserable huddle of twenty thousand, and which buried alike the 

 trophies and the aspirations of a mighty civilization. 



In the first rank of destructive elements we must enumerate 

 that of fire. And, as the conflagration most disastrous to art, we 

 may mention that of the year of our Lord 64. Nero, desiring 

 to clear off a space on the Palatine Hill for a golden palace that he 

 had in his mind, set fire to the interiors of the marble structures 

 which Augustus had reared there. But the work of the incen- 

 diary did not stop where he intended it should. It soon passed 



