Page:The American Cyclopædia (1879) Volume XIV.djvu/746

 720 SCULPTURE Greek sculpture, about 320 B. C., found the schools of Praxiteles and Lysippus in consid- erable vigor, although the artists contented themselves with imitating their predecessors rather than opening any original path of de- sign. Sculpture consequently began to decline, its decay being hastened by the disturbances which followed the dismemberment of Alex- ander's vast empire. Until the middle of the 3d century B. C., however, there appears to have been no lack of reputable artists, and new schools sprang up in Rhodes, Alexandria, Per- gamus, Ephesus, and elsewhere in the East, the followers of which too frequently lent their talents to the execution of grossly tiatter- ing portraits of kings, and other unworthy pur- poses. The school of Rhodes could boast of Chares, the sculptor of the famous Colossus. To this period are generally attributed by art critics Agesander's group of Laoeoon and his sons, which, together with the Farnese bull at Naples, emanated, according to Pliny, from the Rhodian school; the Apollo Belvedere in the Vatican, the " Hermaphrodite " at Paris, the torso of the Belvedere at Rome, the Far- nese Hercules, and the " Dying Gladiator." Bronze and marble were the materials princi- pally in vogue, and the former was gradually superseded by the latter. Shortly before the capture of Corinth by the Roman general Mummius, 146 B. C., a transient revival took place in Athens, during which the statue known as the Venus de' Medici was produced by Cleomenes, although according to some au- thorities it is possibly the work of Alcamenes, the pupil of Phidias ; but the reduction of Greece to the condition of a Roman province gave the death blow to the art, which degen- erated into a mere handicraft. The ancient seats of civilization, stripped by the conquer- ors of their choicest art treasures, no longer afforded to the sculptor the models consecrated by time and national pride ; and the Greeks, having neither the means nor the high in- ducements to practise their art at home pos- sessed by preceding generations, transferred their labors in the 1st century B. C. to Italy. As early as the consulship of P. Cornelius Scipio Nasica, 162 B. C., the city of Rome pos- sessed numerous statues of gods and public men, executed probably by Greek and Etrus- can sculptors, the latter of whom had long previously made the Romans familiar with their peculiar artistic creations. The over- throw of Greece and her colonies, however, gave the first impulse to the cultivation of sculpture in Rome ; and after the wholesale plundering of Greek cities by Sulla in 86 B. C., a taste for art and for collecting choice specimens of sculpture and painting began to be developed among the wealthy Romans. Toward the close of the republic Rome was full of Greek sculptors, some of whom, with- out having originality of conception, were not unworthy descendants of the great schools of their native country. A creditable specimen of their skill is afforded in the so-called statue of Germanicus in the Louvre. Julius Csesar was an intelligent collector of statuary, and during the reign of Augustus the art was lib- erally encouraged by the emperor and other powerful patrons. Caligula and Nero ran- sacked Greece for sculptures, and the former introduced the barbarous custom of decapita- ting the statues of gods and illustrious men for the purpose of substituting his own like- ness, in which he was imitated by many of his successors. Down to the time of Trajan, the principal sculptured works consisted of reliefs on public monuments, such as those adorning the arches of Titus and Trajan, and statues and busts of the emperors, many of which are meritorious in point of execution, and display considerable fancy and invention in the treatment. The vigorous character of Trajan gave new life to the arts in Greece and Rome, and his reign and those of his succes- sors Hadrian and Antoninus Pius have been called the golden age of Italian sculpture. Hadrian was one of the most accomplished connoisseurs of the time, as was evinced by the modern excavations at his villa near Tivoli, and by his influence induced contemporary sculptors to exchange the representations of common subjects, to which they had gradually begun to confine themselves, for those more characteristic of earlier artists. The pure Greek style was revived with considerable suc- cess, and contemporary with it flourished an- other, half Greek and half Egyptian, suggested by the recent introduction of the worship of Egyptian deities into Italy. The portrait stat- ues of this period are particularly fine, and the ideal creations, of which the statues and busts of the emperor's favorite Antinous may be re- garded as specimens, have been placed on an equality with the works of the most finished Greek period. The efforts of Herodes Atti- cus, one of the most liberal and enlightened patrons of art on record, also did much to prolong this revival ; but after the middle of the 2d century of our era the art exhibited an uninterrupted decline. The sculptures on the arch of Septimius Severus (A. D. 203) are far inferior to the productions of Hadrian's time; and those on the arch of Constantino, erected a century later, show that originality of design and executive ability were then near- ly extinct. The dismemberment of the em- pire completed the destruction of the arts in Italy, and during the troubled ages which suc- ceeded, the finest efforts of the old sculptors fell a prey to barbarian or iconoclastic fury, or were destroyed in conflagrations. Constan- tinople, in which a vast number of bronzes, marbles, and pictures had been collected by the eastern emperors, continued for several centuries to be almost the only repository of such objects; but the capture of the city by the Latins in 1204 having involved these in destruction, the knowledge of antique art for a time passed away from the world. Roman