Page:The history of Rome. Translated with the author's sanction and additions.djvu/266

246 That the advance to such luxurious structures first took place in Latium under Etruscan influence, is proved by the designation of the oldest style of temple architecture and of the oldest style of house architecture respectively as Tuscanic. As concerns the character of this transference, the Grecian temple probably imitated the general outlines of the tent or dwelling-house; but it was essentially built of square stones and covered with tiles, and the nature of the hewn stone and baked clay suggested to the Greek the laws of necessity and beauty. The Etruscan on the other hand remained a stranger to the strict Greek distinction between the dwelling of man necessarily erected of wood and the dwelling of the gods necessarily formed of stone. The peculiar characteristics of the Tuscan temple, the outline approaching nearer to a square, the higher gable, the greater breadth of the intervals between the columns, above all, the increased inclination of the roof and the singular projection of the roof-corbels beyond the supporting columns, all arose out of the greater approximation of the temple to the dwelling-house, and out of the peculiarities of wooden architecture.

The plastic and delineative arts are more recent than architecture; the house must first be built ere any attempt is made to decorate gable and walls. It is not probable that these arts really gained a place in Italy during the regal period of Rome: it was only in Etruria, where commerce and piracy early gave rise to a great concentration of riches, that art or handicraft, if the term be preferred, obtained a footing in the earliest times. Greek art, when it acted on Etruria, was still, as its copy shows, at a very primitive stage, and the Etruscans probably learned from the Greeks the art of working in clay and metal at a period not much later than that at which they borrowed from them the alphabet. The silver coins of Populonia, almost the only works that can be with any precision assigned to this period, give no very high idea of Etruscan artistic skill as it then stood. It is not unlikely, however, that the best of the Etruscan works in bronze, to which the later writers of art assigned so high a place, may have belonged to this primitive age; and the Etruscan terra-cottas also cannot have been altogether despicable, for the oldest works in baked clay