Page:The Classical Heritage of the Middle Ages.djvu/352

 334 THE CLASSICAL HERITAGE [chap. tecture; but painting and sculpture at Kome were rather Graeco-Roman. They had come from Greece and were pi*actised by Greeks.^ In the latter years of the Republic and through the first centuries of the Empire, these arts, as practised by Greeks in the service of Romans, tended toward the production of types differing from those of the classical art of Greece and from those of the contemporary art of the eastern portions of the Empire. Greek sculpture at Rome would be subject to special influences and would undergo modifications. These influences are barbarized through restorations; they may never have been as good as the conventional pagan compositions on the vault. Artists of the fourth century, struggling with new subjects, might commit faults not found in earlier, frequently repeated designs, which were merely decorative and contained no large drawings of the human form. Of. E. Miintz, Revue ArcMologique, 1875, Vol. 30, pp. 224- 230, 273-284. 1 Were there ever any Roman sculptors or Roman sculpture properly speaking? In early days at Rome there was Etruscan in- fluence. Then came the Greek wave, and sculpture was carried on by Greeks, some of whom, however, may have been born in Italy. Maxime Collignon, in the concluding pages of the second volume of his Histoire de la Sculture Grecque, speaks of sculpture at Rome at the beginning of the Empire as being entirely in the hands of Greeks. See also Ernest Gardner, Handbook of Greek Sculpture, Vol. n. Chap. 6. Pliny in his lists of sculptors has only Greek names, Naturalis Historiae, Lib. XXXVI, §§ 9-44 ; cf. Jex-Blake and Sellers, Pliny* s Chapters on the History of Art (1896). Schnaase, Geschichte der Bildenden Kunste, Vol. II, Chap. 4. Nor was there any specifi- cally Roman painting ; that was also Greek. See Schnaase, op. cit., II, Chap. 4 ; Woltmann and Woermann, History of Painting, Bk. II, Chap. I et seq. Yet the opposite view of Wickhoff, Roman Art, is of interest. There were Roman names among the painters at Homo, from the time of the curious example of the noble Fabius Pictor (303 B.C.) onward. Cf. Friedlander, Sittengeschichte Roma, 6th ed., m,300.