~ SCULPTURE. 25 
B. The Romans. 
1. First Pertop. (Previous to tak YEAR 600 a. v. 0c.) In the period 
during which Rome remained under the Etruscan kings, it also, as an 
Etruscan capital, received its temple statues (of which it had none previously) 
from the hands of Etruscan artists, although they consisted of nothing but 
images of wood and clay. Even during the times of the republic, the 
Romans, in their zeal to promote the common welfare, applied their prac- 
tical sense so exclusively to grand and practically useful undertakings, 
such as making aqueducts and roads, that but little attention was bestowed 
on the cultivation of art for its own sake. Nevertheless political ambition 
gradually gave an importance to the plastic arts. The senate and people, 
and also grateful foreign states, erected statues of brass in the public places 
to men of desert; and the first statue of this metal, according to Pliny, 
was a Ceres, which was paid for out of the confiscated property of Spurius 
Cassius. When in the time of the Samnite war the dominion of Rome was 
extended over Magna Grecia, they began, after the manner of the Greeks, 
to dedicate statues and colossi to the gods out of the spoils of war. 
The coins of those times and the productions of the gem-engraver show 
a very rude state of art: the impress is flat, the figures coarse, and the head 
of Roma without beauty. Apart from the coins, no specimens of the imitative 
arts of that period have come down to us. 
-2. Second Prriop. (From rHenYxrar 600 a. v. c. To THE MippiE Agzs.) 
During this period art was concentrated at Rome. This, however, was 
owing merely to political ascendency, and by no means to high artistic 
talent; for the Roman genius always remained too wholly devoted to 
practical and political life, to allow full scope to that careless ease and free 
play of the fancy which give birth to art. The taste of the Romans for art may 
be best divided into the following epochs. 1. From the taking of Corinth to 
the reign of Augustus. The fondness of the great for splendor attracted 
artists to Rome, and in consequence a certain taste for art was awakened, 
the artists occupied themselves in imitating and emulating the ancient 
works, and connoisseurship and learning in art took up their abode in Rome. 
2. The time of the Juli and Flavu. The emperors understood how, by 
promoting art and by great structural undertakings, to turn the people’s 
attention from political matters, and even the half crazy enterprises of some 
of them were the means of furnishing employment to artists and fostering 
art. Although the artists had already departed considerably from the noble 
simplicity of the old masters, still a decided decline of art was not yet 
perceptible. 3. Hrom Nerva to the tume of the Thirty Tyrants. During 
the long continued peace there was a transitory flickering up of art in 
Greece and in Rome under Hadrian; but gradually a want of inner life 
and spirit became manifest, and was succeeded by jejuneness and pom- 
posity. The transplanting of the worship of Isis to Rome was not without 
an injurious influence on art, as it weakened the spirit of Greco-Roman 
culture. 4. Prom the Thirty Tyrants to the Byzantine period. The 
ancient world fell, and with it ancient art. With the declining faith in 
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