ROMAN ART. Modern archaeology has fully vindicated the significance of the Roman output in the field of art ; yet the Romans do not, at the outset, present themselves as belonging to that small group of peoples endowed, as it were, with a spontane ous capacity for art, and the impulse to artistic creation latent in their character hardly began to develop before the 4th century B.C. Up to that time such works of art as were produced in, or im ported into, Rome were apparently in the main Etruscan or Graeco-Etruscan; and in Rome, as in Latium, Etruscan artists were commissioned to decorate the temples of wood and terra cotta which preceded the more sumptuous marble structures of the late republic and the empire. The discovery at Veii in 1917 of a magnificent Apollo in terra-cotta (see ETRURIA) of early 5th century style, satisfactorily confirms the tradition that Volca, an artist from Veii, made the cultus statue of the god for the temple of Jupiter Capitolinus and executed statuary for other Roman temples as well, while from considerations of style and technique the celebrated Capitoline Wolf is now assigned to the same cycle of Veientine art. Etruscan art, though originally dependent for many of its motives and for its technique on Greek models, de veloped an art of portraiture in which we can from the first trace that naturalism and close attention to detail which afterwards blossomed into the realism characteristic of Rome. The same desire for making permanent the memory of their dead, which led the Etruscans to decorate their funeral urns with a lid in the form of the human head, prompted the Romans to produce waxen masks, or imagines, which were preserved in the houses of the Roman aristocracy and were carried in funeral processions of members of the family. The Barberini statue illustrates the custom.
In architecture, too, Roman builders learnt much from their Etruscan neighbours, from whom they borrowed the characteristic form of their temples, and perhaps also the prominent use of the arch and vault. But the stream of Etruscan influence was met by a counter-current from the south, where the Greek colonies in Campania provided a natural channel by which Hellenic ideas reached the Latin race, and, at an early date, Roman architects modified the purely Etruscan type of temple under the influence of western Greek models. Greek modellers in terra-cotta came to Rome (first in 496 B.C., to decorate the temple of Ceres Liber and Libera) and worked by the side of the Etruscans. The con quests of the later republic, however, brought the Romans into more direct contact with the art of Greece proper; victorious generals adorned their triumphs with masterpieces of Greek art, and, when Philhellenism became the ruling fashion at Rome, wealthy connoisseurs formed private collections drawn from the Greek provinces, while Greek craftsmen were employed in the decoration of the palaces of the Roman nobles and capitalists.
Every empire-builder—Sulla, Pompey, Caesar—dreamed in turn of modelling Rome on the plan of an Hellenistic city. Even por traiture borrowed an Hellenic character in the time of Caesar and Cicero. Yet this period also saw the beginning of the historical, or, more properly, the commemorative method to whose develop ment the empire gave so powerful an impulse. An early example is afforded by the reliefs representing a Roman sacrifice and other episodes from the life of the army, which adorn the front face of an altar believed to have been set up by Cn. Domitius Aheno barbus shortly before 3o B.c. (Plate II., fig. II).
Augustus enlisted art, as he did literature, in the service of the new order. The technical dexterity which characterizes all forms of art in this period—silver plate and stucco decoration, as well as sculpture in the round or in relief—is largely due to Greek influence; but the form is filled with a new content, the result of a determination on the part of Augustus to shift the centre of artistic activity from Greece to Rome by associating it with new religious and political ideals. But the Roman spirit, after pro ducing in harmony with that of Greece such brilliant results, triumphed once more under Trajan in that novel "epic in stone" with which the column that bears his name is adorned. Along the path thus marked out, Roman art continued to progress, scarcely disturbed by a brief renaissance of classicism under Hadrian. The historical reliefs which survive from the Antonine period, and more especially the sarcophagi, show that the new leaven was at work, though it soon .mingled with new influences which brought about radical changes in the whole domain of plastic art. Colour, rather than form, began to take the highest place in the gamut of artistic values. Painting, as recent discoveries show, continued to be practised with conspicuous success; the sister art of mosaic was carried to a high degree of technical perfection; and in sculp ture new conventions, such as the plastic rendering of the iris and pupil of the eye, were dictated by the ever-growing need for con trasts of light and shadow. By the close of the 3rd century a fur ther transformation had taken place, which coincided with the political revolution whereby the absolute monarchy of Diocle tian succeeded the principate of Augustus. The portraits of Con stantine and his house have dropped all traces of naturalism ; they are monumental, both in scale and in conception, and their rigid "frontality" carries us back to the primitive art of the East.