44 THE FINE ARTS. 
d. The Chase and Rural Life. Representations of the chase, especially 
of the boar-hunt and hunting the hare, are very frequently found in ancient 
reliefs and paintings. The occupations of rural life, however, are seldom 
represented by immediate imitation of the reality, since the occasion for 
depicting them was frequently furnished by the worship of Ceres and 
Bacchus ; at all events we almost always find mythological figures inter- 
woven in representations of this sort. Still in the domain of ancient art 
there are not wanting delineations of rustic simplicity and sturdiness; while 
in youthful figures this rustic character acquires an expression of harmless 
innocence and naiveté. A representation of this sort from rustic life of truly 
touching simplicity is seen in the Boy extracting a Thorn from his Foot, in 
the Capitoline Museum (jig. 13), a bronze statue of the size of life; the Boy 
wrestling with a Goose (after Boethos’s statue in bronze), especially the group 
in the Capitoline Museum (pl. 6, jig. 6), also belongs here. Reliefs and 
paintings on houses designed to announce the professions of the occupants 
gave occasion for manifold representations of handicrafts and_ trades. 
Frequently the subject was taken from domestic and married life, as for 
instance social banquets, which on sarcophagi, &c., appear as feasts of 
the dead, the feasters being often represented as gods of the lower world. 
4, Tae Mippre Aces. 
A. From the Decline of the Plastic Art in the 8d Century down to the 13th 
Century. 
The decay as well as the flourishing growth of the arts and sciences 
has ever been dependent on those two mighty sources of all movement 
in the moral world, religion and the form of government. Sometimes 
one, sometimes the other, determines the fate of the arts; but generally 
speaking the influence of both causes has operated so uninterruptedly from 
the very birth of the arts down to our own times, that their history is almost 
inseparably connected with the history of religious opinion and of political 
revolutions. Accordingly the mighty revolution which accompanied the down- 
fall of the Roman empire and the introduction of an entirely new religion 
could not fail to exercise an influence upon art and its forms, and this all 
the more as even under the first emperors a decline of correct taste had 
become perceptible. Even the apparent restoration of the arts under the 
Antonines was of no duration; it was a last fleeting effort, like the sudden 
flashing up of a candle before it utterly expires. 
In the time of Constantine the Great, art was already at so low an ebb 
and there was such a dearth of able artists, as we have already had occasion 
to observe, that in order to adorn with sculptures the triumphal arch which 
the senate and people erected to the emperor after his victory over Maxentius, 
they were forced to take the sculptures from Trajan’s arch and attach them 
to that of Constantine, so that only a few reliefs were made new which have 
reference to the deeds of Constantine. But these last are as inferior to the 
others in composition as they are in drawing and execution. One of the 
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