OF THE ANCIENTS. 77 



In Borne, from the time of the Caesars, landscape painting 

 became a separate branch of art, but so far as we can judge 

 by what the excavations at Herculaneum, Pompeii, and 

 Stabia, have shewn us, the pictures were often mere bird's- 

 eye 'views, resembling maps, and aimed rather at the repre- 

 sentation of seaport towns, villas, and artificial gardens, 

 than of nature in her freedom. That which the Greeks and 

 the Romans regarded as attractive in a landscape, seems to 

 have been almost exclusively the agreeably habitable, and 

 not what we call the wild and romantic. In their pictures, 

 the imitation might possess as great a degree of exactness 

 as could consist with frequent inaccuracy in regard to per- 

 spective, and with a disposition to conventional arrangement ; 

 their compositions of the nature of arabesques, to the 

 Mse of which the severe Yitruvius was averse, contained 

 rhythmically recurring and tastefully arranged forms of 

 plants and animals ; but, to avail myself of an expression of 

 Otfried Miiller's, " the dreamy twilight of mind which 

 speaks to us in landscape appeared to the ancients, accord- 

 ing to their mode of feeling, incapable of artistic represen- 

 tation." ("*) 



The specimens of ancient landscape-painting in the man- 

 ner of Ludius, which have been brought to light by the 

 excavations at Pompeii (lately so successful), belong most 

 probably to a single and very limited epoch ( 115 ), namely, 

 from Nero to Titus ; for the town had been entirely destroyed 

 by earthquake sixteen years before the catastrophe caused 

 by the celebrated eruption of Yesuvius 



Erom Constantino the Great to the beginning of the 

 middle ages, painting, though connected with Christian 

 subjects, preserved a close affinity to its earlier character. 



