74 THE FINE ARTS. 
now demanded that the floors as well as the walls should be decorated with 
eolors, the mosaic art arose, which quickly developed itself, and undertook 
to represent great combats of heroes and animated battle scenes. The 
painting of fictile vases, on the other hand, ceased about this time: for we find 
none whose style indicates a later period of art. The first mosaic pavements 
were made by Sosos of Pergamus, and consisted of fictile cubes, which were 
mostly laid in beautiful patterns (pl. 13, jigs. 19 and 21), although they 
often had a separate mosaic picture in the centre. One of these mosaics 
exhibited in the middle a cantharus (drinking-vessel) with doves drinking 
and sunning themselves, a picture which was afterwards repeated in the 
villa of Hadrian and is now preserved in the Capitoline Museum (jig. 17). 
Another centre-piece of a mosaic pavement of this sort exhibits several 
masks, an ancient imitation of which is now in the Vatican (jig. 16). 
Several of the decks in the state vessel of King Hiero of Syracuse were 
inlaid with mosaics. Pl. 14, jig. 6, is a copy of a very beautiful mosaic, 
now in the Villa Albani, which was found in 1760 at Arpino in the King- 
dom of Naples, and on which is represented the deliverance of Hesione by 
Hercules. The hero has slain the sea-monster with arrows, and Telamon is 
helping Hesione down from the rock, on which we see the traces of chains. 
In the background appears a burning house, alluding to the destruction of 
Troy, whereby Hercules avenged the faithlessness of King Laomedon, the 
father of Hesione. Relief-mosaics were also made use of as medallions, of 
which the head, pl. 13, jig. 18, and the statue of Theodorie, of which we 
have already slat p- £7, are specimens. 
The plunderings and denecieiian to which Greece was subjected and 
the transportation of its treasures of art to Rome, occurrences of which we 
have already treated in our history of the plastic art, produced also the 
downfall of painting in Greece, and the artists betook themselves to Rome, 
in which new abode Greek art is to be looked for from this time forth. 
In the age of Cesar the art of painting bloomed once more, but soon 
again faded. Subjects were then chosen of the deepest tragic pathos, as for 
instance the pictures by Timomachos of Byzantium, of Ajax and Medea 
before the murder of her Children; although portrait-painting was also 
much in vogue. Under the emperors we find the main branch of the art, 
easel-painting, entirely neglected ; while wall-painting, as the handmaid of 
luxury, was practised in preference. Scenography, which, especially in 
Asia Minor, had taken a fantastic direction, and spurned all the rules of 
architecture, was transferred to the decoration of apartments, where it was 
developed if possible in a still more arbitrary manner ; and artists pleased 
themselves with working up a transparent and airy architecture into forms 
of vegetation and other fantastic shapes. An example is furnished in the 
architecture of the two wall-paintings from Pompeii (pl. 12, jig. 8,a Roman 
priestess, and jig. 9 a songstress), where the excessively slender columns 
are crowned by the ornamental pinnacles which we have placed at the sides 
of the pictures. 
A peculiar style of landscape painting was introduced in the reign of 
Augustus by Ludius, who produced wall-paintings containing villas, towns, 
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