THE ROMAN EMPIRE Rome, after the 1st century B.C., became the chief patron of the realistic sculpture of Greece. The production of copies and imita tions for the Roman market amounted almost to an industry in Antioch, Alexandria, and in certain cities in Asia Minor. Prece dent and convention necessarily take the place of nature and archi tecture under these conditions as the determining element in the art of sculpture. The spirit of the Orient was increasingly felt, dissolving the Greek forms under an opulence of ornamental mo tives; and when, in the and and 3rd centuries, Christianity and monasticism robbed the sculptor of the patronage of the temples, the human body gradually ceased to play its ennobling part in his art. The Hellenic types remained. The narratives of the Old and New Testament, the martyrdoms of the Saints, are illustrated by a rearrangement of Alexandrine groups. Hermes, the Ram-bearer, becomes the Good Shepherd ; the genre fisherman becomes Christ, the Fisher of Men. But these are reduced in scale, oftentimes little more than the decorative detail of wall-panel or sarcophagus, and charged with a ritualistic meaning which obscures nature and renders her unnecessary.
In Rome itself a parallel transformation took place, although the Greek tradition found there a more virile continuation than in the East. The imagination of Rome, like that of the East, was
captured by the realism of the art of the Age of Alexander rather than by the architectonic beauty of Athenian art, but in her com memorative monuments, such as the Arch of Titus and the Col umn of Trajan, the episodic style of Alexandria is given a wider range and a more vigorous technique than is found elsewhere. Sculpture, on these structures, is a purely pictorial art. Intent on an illusionist treatment of nature and of events the sculptor sel dom permits the monumental harmonies to invade his work. In Rome, the rendering of foliated ornament attained a perfect bal ance between nature and convention not excelled except in the Renaissance decoration of the 15th century; the art of realistic portraiture reached a technical perfection; and at times, as in the Ara Pacis Augustae, the Hellenistic precedents of dignity and grace in the rendering of draperies and of flesh are exquisitely re vived. But in Rome, as in the East, the form-giving role of sculpture is gradually forgotten.