Roman Art

Contemporary portraiture also shows the invasion of new prin ciples and a tendency to emphasize the contrast between hair and flesh, the face often showing signs of high polish. In the latter half of the and century the contrast is heightened by a new method of treating the hair, which is rendered as a mass of curls deeply undercut and honey-combed with drill-holes ; a fine example is the Commodus of the Palazzo dei Conservatori. The aim of the sculptor is to obtain an ornamental effect by the violent contrast of light and dark. This pictorial influence may be seen at work in all branches of sculpture. The sarcophagi of the An tonine and later periods, with their crowded compositions and deep shadows, attain the same effect. A tendency to isolate figures and groups also makes its appearance in Antonine relief, and is strikingly exemplified in the famous sarcofagi a colonette, found both in Italy and in Asia Minor, and decorated with figures placed like statues within niches between columns. We may quote as conspicuous examples the sarcophagus of "Homer and the Muses" at Constantinople (from Sidamaria) ; the fragment of a similar example in the British Museum (Cat. 3,312) ; the marriage sar cophagus at Florence in the Riccardi Palace, and the grand sar cophagus at Melfi in Apulia. The Melfi example is adorned by figures symbolic of the soul's ultra-mundane destiny and has a full-length portrait of the deceased girl on the lid (Plate III., fig. 5). Many of the statues inserted into the niches of these sarcophagi are considerable works of art and exhibit the same quality of pathos that informs the remarkable tomb-statue, also of the Antonine period, recently discovered near Rome (Plate II., fig. 5). It represents a mourning woman, closely draped and veiled, with strongly individualized features; the splendid movement of the drapery, with the broken rhythm between the hands, preannounces Gothic sculpture and has little or nothing in common with its Greek prototypes.

Later Sculpture.

Under Septimius Severus and his suc cessors, Roman art drifts steadily in its new direction. The re liefs of his arch at the entrance to the Forum represent the em peror's campaigns in the East in a compromise between bird's eye perspective and the "continuous" style, which, though in sharp opposition to plastic and perspectival laws, has the mag nificently decorative effect of Flemish tapestry. Other examples of the art of the period are the reliefs of the little gateway of the Argentarii in the Velabrum (Plate III., fig. 8) and the relief now in the Palazzo Sacchetti, on which is carved the presentation of Caracalla to the senate as the destined successor of his father. The political troubles of the 3rd century, the threatened in roads of barbarism, the imminence of economic ruin did not affect the production of art as seriously as might be supposed, nor did they check the continued "progress along the ascending line" of certain of its manifestations. In the portraiture we first become aware of two different currents : the naturalistic in most imperial effigies, e.g., the bronze statue of Severus in Brussels, and the

more monumental which invests with a new spiritual dignity the masterly portrait in the Stettiner collection (Plate I., fig. 7). It is conceived in accordance with the laws of frontality, which are still more operative in the grandiose head of an imperial personage (unidentified) from the middle of the 3rd century, found at Ostia (Terme). If we turn to technical methods, we note that the busts of the second quarter of the 3rd century A.D. are distinguished by the treatment of the hair and beard, which seem to have been closely clipped, and are indicated by a multi tude of fine chisel strokes on a roughened surface, a technique practised with wonderful effect in the heads of Maximinus the Thracian (A.D. 235-238) in Berlin; of the emperors Pupienus (A.D. 238) and Philip the Arabian (A.D. both in the Vatican; in the remarkable bronze, Balbinus (A.D. 238) of the Vatican library; and in a head of the Capitol (Strong, Rom. Sc., Pl. 127). In these heads the expressiveness is astonishing, the Capitoline head being justly noted for its sly look of craft and cunning. Under Gallienus (A.D. 253-268) there is a momentary return to a greater naturalism, evident in the treatment of hair and beard, and in the emotional look ; but in the so-called Probus (A.D. 276-282) of the Capitol, and the Carinus (A.D. 283-285) of the Palazzo dei Conservatori, frontality gets the better of natural ism till it prevails in the portraiture of Constantine (Plate I., fig. 12) and his successors. Organic has been transformed into architectonic structure; the bust (or statue) is no longer a true portrait—a block of marble made to pulsate with the life of the subject represented—but a monument.

In the togate statues of the Constantinian and later period, the deep cutting of the rigid folds contributes to the monumental effect of the figure. Among the finer examples are the two cele brated statues of consuls, in the Conservatori, attributable to the 5th century. By the side of these togate examples a place must be accorded to the statue in armour at Barletta (it has also been called Theodosius and Heraclius, but is more probably Valentinian I.), whose powerful head (Plate I., fig. 8) and splendidly poised body show post-Constantinian art at its best. The narrow bands of relief on the Arch of Constantine, some of which may even date back to the reign of Diocletian, partake of the same monumental character as the single statues of the time. Where the subject permits, as in the reliefs showing Constantine in the Forum and Constantine distributing a dole, the frontality of the central figure and the strict symmetry of the grouping, which imparts an almost geometrical regularity to the main lines of the composition, show that Constantinian reliefs, like the por traits, are calculated for architectonic rather than for plastic effect.