ROMAN SCULPTURE.* ONLY a few years ago it would have
been thought scarcely credible that Roman sculpture should furnish the material for a work of four hundred pages, illustrated by a hundred and thirty plates. Art critics did not, indeed, deny to the Romans the credit of having created a school of realistic portraiture—Mrs. Strong quotes most appositely a passage from " Vernon Lee's "Euphorion, written in 1884, which speaks of the busts " which ought to be so ugly and yet are so beautiful "—but they paid no heed to the great monuments of historical sculpture the remains of which adorned triumphal arches and other buildings, nor to the splendid ornament which lent distinction to Roman architecture. Then Franz Wickhoff burst into that silent sea on a voyage of dis- covery, whence he returned richly laden, having recognised in the sculptors of the Arch of Titus the precursors of Velazquez, and the true significance of Roman art at once became a question of absorbing interest. Wickhoff's treatise was published in German in 1895 and translated into English in 1900 by Mrs. Strong, who has never ceased to claim serious aesthetic consideration for the works of Roman artists, and is admirably equipped for the task which she has here under- taken. A word of special praise is due for the excellent selection of illustrations, which leave no phase of Roman sculpture unrepresented, and include several unfamiliar subjects. For example, we find the recently discovered slab with the figures of famines from the Are Pads Augustae, photographed in. situ beneath the foundations of the Palazzo Piano and reproduced on Pl. XV., and the figured capital from the Forum on which is portrayed the Black Stone of Emesa worshipped by Elagabalus (Pl. XCIV.) Above all, we have a fine portrait-bead of Flavian date in the British Museum, but lately brought to light by Mr. Cecil Smith (Pl. CXIII.) Two questions must present themselves to every student of the subject here treated. The first is,—Was there ever an art which could be called truly Roman, or have we to deal with the handiwork of Greek craftsmen working for their Imperial masters ? The second is,—Was the achievement of these name- less artists, whether Greek or Roman, such as to win for them a prominent place in the development of the world's art ? Mrs. Strong gives a decided answer, and in the main (we think) the right answer, to both questions. The brilliant Polish archae- ologist, Josef Strzygowski, has devoted all the resources of his boundless versatility to the proof of his thesis that Roman art is nothing but the latest phase of Hellenistic art, which falls gradually under the sway of Oriental influences until it issues in the art which we call Byzantine. Mrs. Strong is fully alive to the importance of Strzygowski's work ; indeed, she has quite recently translated an essay in which he claims an Asiatic origin for a remarkable class of sarcophagi of the later Roman period. But she very justly remarks in her introductory chapter that the transference of interest from the human form to problems of pure ornament, rightly claimed by Strzygowski as the note of declining Hellenism, is not found in true Roman art
" Interest in the human form flagged somewhat in Rome towards the Constantinian Epoch, partly because artists were attracted by new problems of ornament and by new specific effects, partly also under religious influences which, like Christianity, directly discouraged and discountenanced the imitation of living objects. But so strong were the anthropo- morphic tendencies of the antique that we shall find them emerging triumphant from a period of ordeal, capturing Christianity itself, and then moving forward once more under the stimulus of new ideas. One claim of Roman art upon the gratitude of posterity is that it preserved the human form as the central and dominating idea of art, and was sufficiently powerful to impose it upon a religion of its essence hostile to such repre- sentations." (p. 19.)
This is well said, and it was worth saying well. When we look for the answer to our second question we shall perhaps find reason to question the justice of some of the claims here advanced on behalf of Roman art. However ready we may be to recognise positive aesthetic values in works which fall
* Roman Sculpture from Augustus to Constantine. By Yrs. S. Arthur Strong, LL.D. London : Duckworth and Co. [10s. net.]
short of the ideal standard of Hellas, it is hard to see "a new spiritual seriousness," " the sadness of the meditations of Marcus Aurelius," in the scenes unfolded on the windings of the Antonine column, where the rain-god, we are told, " bears in his melancholy, riddled countenance some touch of the man of sorrows '" ; it is harder still to subscribe to Mrs. Strong's verdict on the well-known relief representing the devotio of Marcus Curtius that "the delightfully fresh fantasy of the composition strikes an agreeable note amid the sculptures of declining Rome." Here, as in many other instances, the champion of a long-neglected phase of art attempts to prove too much, and spoils a good case by over- statement.
Mrs. Strong limits her subject in respect of time to the period beginning with the reign of Augustus and ending with that of Constantine. In her first chapter she combats the " learned fallacy" which regards Augustan art as a brilliant episode inspired by the founder of the Principate. She asks— and the question is a pertinent one—whether Napoleon is to be held responsible for the "Empire" style; she contends, and not without reason, that the composition of the Ara Pads Augustae—our chief Augustan monument—is faulty, and draws the inference that " we are in presence of an embryonic art as yet far from maturity." Her arguments deserve to be carefully weighed; yet they fail to convince us of two things, —the first, that Augustus, with his infinite attention to detail, failed to influence profoundly an art which is so unmistakably dominated by the same ideas as the Court poetry of Horace and Virgil ; the second, that Augustan art, with its extra- ordinary virtuosity of technique, is immature rather than academic. It is true, no doubt, that the civil procession of the north frieze of the Ara Pads finds a most incongruous continuation in the group, beautiful as that is in itself, of Tellus and the Aurae ; but it must be remembered—the fact is strangely omitted by Mrs. Strong—that the analogies as well as the differences of a relief discovered at Carthage prove that that group is borrowed from a more spacious Hellenistic composition which must have enjoyed a world-wide celebrity. It is difficult to see where this learned art, summoned from the Greek East to adorn the Rome which Augustus turned from brick to marble, gives promise of that which was to take its place In the Flavian period after an interval of comparative sterility.
Flavian " illusionist " sculpture has of late years received its due—some may think more than its due—from various critics, and our acquaintance with its monuments has been increased by recent researches. Mrs. Strong turns the new knowledge to good account, and does full justice, not merely to the reliefs of the Arms Titi and the so-called "Portrait of Mark Antony" in the Braccio Nuovo, but to the admirable medallions which now adorn the Arch of Constantine. We are not, however, inclined to adopt her view that these medallions once decorated an arch built by Domitian and converted by Trajan into the entrance of his Forum. The medallions shown on a well- known coin of Trajan representing that entrance seem to have contained, not reliefs, but colossal busts; Antonio da. Sangallo speaks of the discovery of tondi per mettere una testa in the Forum.
We could have wished that Mrs. Strong had found space to discuss at greater length the monuments which lie outside the stream of official tradition. The Arch of Augustus at Susa is barely mentioned: the " still-vexed " question of the Tropaeum. Trajani at Adam-Klissi is only touched in a parenthesis. Here Mrs. Strong sides with Furtwiingler in his gallant attempt to vindicate its uncouth sculptures for the Augustan period, and in his recognition of an Italian, as distinct from a Roman, art, surviving amongst the legionaries. These are hard sayings, and we should have liked to see them justified by illustration and analysis.
We cannot now follow Mrs. Strong in her discussion of later Imperial art. It was an excellent idea to select typical and salient monuments, and to treat them with some fulness. The reader will be most grateful for the running commentary here furnished on the spiral reliefs of the columns of Trajan and Marcus Aurelius, which will reveal the merits and defects of those poems in stone to a public hitherto content to regard merely their general effect. In tracing the later evolution of Roman art Mrs. Strong surrenders herself mainly to the guidance of Riegl, and succeeds in making his abstruse theories intelligible to the plain man. She shows that spatial
perspective does not enter into the calculations of the artists who created the crowded compositions of later sarcophagi, where the violent chiaroscuro causes the background of true relief- sculpture to disappear, and is rightly explained as the outcome of a novel apprehension of colour and search after" colouristic " effects. Finally, however, in the architectonic figure-sculpture of the fourth century, with its return to the rigid frontality of archaic art, the feeling for mass reasserts itself; and in the statues of the Constantinian epoch, as Mrs. Strong rightly remarks, are to be seen "the germs of that wonderful Romanesque' which will find its noblest expression in the great French schools of Cathedral sculpture in the twelfth century."
Mrs. Strong's statements sometimes lend themselves to criticisms of detail. For example, the Ara Path, though begun in B.C. 13, was not completed until B.C. 9, and thus Augustus could be portrayed as Pontifex Maximus, for he attained that dignity in B.C. 12 (see pp. 40, 47, 94). The key- stones of the Arcus Till have been probably explained as representing Honos and Virtus (p. 106). The cancelling of arrears of taxes shown on the well-known relief in the Forum benefited others besides "provincials" (p. 154). The dates of the wars of Marcus Aurelius need revision; at present they are inconsistently given (p. 275f. and p. 286). The altar of Scipio Orfitus (Pl. XCVII.), if compared with that in the Villa Albani dedicated by a person of the same name and title, will be seen to be much earlier in date; probably Orfitus turned it to his own use (p. 314). Bassaeus Rufus was not " prefect of the camp "-i.e., praefectus castrorum (p. 392)-but proefectus praetorio, a -much more exalted personage. But these are small blemishes, and should not prevent us from expressing our deep gratitude to Mrs. Strong for a book produced at the right time and in the right way.
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