Pottery passed into sculpture through baked clay—terra-cotta reliefs and statuettes, toys, imitations of fruit, grapes, fish—at last full-sized statues. Glazed terra cotta—majolica—abounded in the ruins of Pompeii. Temple pediments and eaves were adorned with terra-cotta palmettes, acroteria, gargoyles, and reliefs. The Greeks laughed at these ornaments, and under the Empire they went out of fashion; Augustus was no friend of clay.
It was probably through his Attic taste that relief and sculpture attained in Rome an excellence comparable with the best Hellenistic work. For a generation the artists of Rome carved fountains, tombstones, arches, and altars with a refinement of feeling, a precision of execution, a quiet dignity of form, a measure of modeling and perspective, that rank Roman reliefs among the masterpieces of the world’s art. In 13 B.C. the Senate celebrated the return of Augustus from the pacification of Spain and Gaul by decreeing that an Ara Pacis Augustae, or “Altar of the Augustan Peace,” should be erected in the Field of Mars. This is the noblest of all the sculptural remains of Rome. Perhaps the monument owed its form to the altar at Pergamum, and its processional motif to the Parthenon frieze; the altar was raised on a platform in an enclosure whose surrounding walls were partly carved in marble relief; the extant pieces are slabs from these walls.V One slab represents Tellus—Mother Earth—with two children in her arms, corn and flowers growing beside her, and animals lying contentedly at her feet. These were the leading ideas of the Augustan reformation: the family restored to parentage, the nation to agriculture, the Empire to peace. The central figure is unsurpassed; indeed, in its union of mature motherhood and womanly beauty, tenderness, and grace, there is a soft perfection unmatched by the stately goddesses of the Parthenon. The frieze of the outer wall had a lower panel of acanthus scrolls, broad-petaled peonies and poppies, and rich clusters of ivy berries; this too is unequaled in its class. Another panel showed two processions moving in opposite directions to meet before the altar of the Goddess of Peace. In these groups are grave and quiet figures, probably of Augustus, Livia, and the imperial family, with nobles, priests, Vestal Virgins, and children. These last are engagingly real in their shy innocence. One is a baby toddling along with no taste for ceremony; another is a boy already proud of his years; another a little girl with a nosegay; another, after some mischief, is being gently admonished by his mother. Henceforth children would play a rising role in Italian art. But never again would Roman sculpture show such mastery of drapery, such natural and effective grouping, such modulations of light and shade. Here, as in Virgil, propaganda had found a perfect medium.
The only Roman rivals of these reliefs are the carvings on the arches raised for the entry of triumphing generals. The finest survivor is the Arch of Titus, begun by Vespasian and completed by Domitian to commemorate the capture of Jerusalem. One relief shows the burning city, its walls in ruins, its people wild with fear, its wealth looted by legionaries; another pictures Titus riding into Rome in his chariot amid soldiers, animals, magistrates, priests, and prisoners, followed by the holy candelabra of the Temple, and varied spoils of war. The artists here experimented bravely: they cut different figures to different levels, and distributed them on diverse planes; they chiseled the background to give an illusion of depth; and they painted the whole to convey additional shades of fullness and distance. The action was shown not in separate episodes but in continuity, as on the friezes of Mesopotamia and Egypt, and later on the columns of Trajan and Aurelius; so the sense of motion and life was better conveyed. The figures were not idealized and softened into a mood of Attic repose as in the Hellenistic Ara Pacis; they were taken from the flesh and the dirt, and carved in the earthy tradition of Italian realism and vitality. The subject was not perfect gods but living men.
It is this vigorous realism that distinguishes Roman sculpture from the Greek; but for this recurrent fidelity to their own bent the Romans would have added little to art. About 90 B.C.. a Greek from south Italy, Pasiteles, went to Rome, lived there for sixty years, did excellent work in silver, ivory, and gold, introduced silver mirrors, made skillful copies of Greek masterpieces, and wrote five volumes on the history of art; he was both the Vasari and the Cellini of his time. Another Greek, Arcesilaus, made for Caesar a famous statue of his distant relative, Venus Genetrix. Apollonius of Athens, probably in Rome, carved the powerful Torso Belvedere of the Vatican: a work conceived with moderation, proclaiming no bulging muscles, but showing a man in the fullness of healthy strength; we can only say of it that it is perfect so far as it goes. For a time the studios busied themselves giving Greek form to Italian gods, even to divine abstractions like Chance and Chastity. Presumably in this period and in Rome Glycon of Athens carved the Farnese Hercules. We cannot tell to what age or country the Apollo Belvedere belongs; perhaps it was a Roman copy of an original by Leochares of Athens. Every student knows how its calm beauty stirred Winckelmann to Uranian ecstasy.21 Juno received now two renowned embodiments: the porphyry Farnese Juno of the Naples Museum and the Ludovisi Juno of the Terme—cold and stern, righteous and just; one begins to understand Jove’s wanderings.
All these, and the graceful Perseus and Andromeda of the Capitoline Museum, were in the Greek style, idealized and generalized, and tiresomely divine. More arresting are the portrait busts that constitute a bronze-and-marble dictionary of Roman physiognomy from Pompey to Constantine. Some of these too are idealized, particularly the Julio-Claudian heads; but the old Etruscan realism, and the ever-present example of unflattering death masks, reconciled the Romans to being represented as ugly, provided they were shown as strong. So many of them bequeathed their effigies to public places that at times Rome seemed to belong less to the quick than to the dead. Some worthies could not bide their end, but erected themselves as statues before their death, until the jealous emperors, to make room for the living, forbade such premature immortality.
The greatest of the portrait busts is the so-named Head of Caesar, of black basalt, in Berlin. We do not know whom it represents; but the sparse hair and sharp chin, the thin and bony face, the heavy lines of weary thought, the resolution yielding to disillusionment, accord well with the traditional attribution. Only second to it is the colossal head of Caesar in Naples: here the wrinkles have set almost into bitterness, as if the giant had at last discovered that no mind is broad enough to understand, much less to rule, the world. Realistic to repulsiveness is the Pompey of the Ny Carlsberg Glyptotek in Copenhagen: all the brave triumphs of his youth forgotten in the dull obesity of a beaten man. Of Augustus we have half a hundred statues, many of them masterly: Augustus the boy (in the Vatican), serious, keen, noble—the finest portrait of an actual youth in any age; Augustus at thirty (in the British Museum)—a bronze figure of burning determination, reminding us of Suetonius’ statement that the Emperor could quell a mutiny with a glance; Augustus the priest (in the Terme), a profound and pensive face emerging from a prison of drapery; and Augustus imperator, found in the ruins of Livia’s villa at Prima Porta, and now in the Vatican. The breastplate of this famous figure is covered with esoteric and distracting reliefs,VI the pose is stiff, the legs are too mighty for such an invalid; but the head has a quiet and self-confident power that reveals the hand and soul of a great artist—who could not quite forget the Doryphoros of Polycleitus.
Livia herself was fortunate in the artist who made the head now in Copenhagen. The hair is stately, the bent Roman nose smacks of character, the eyes are thoughtful and tender, the lips pretty but firm; this is the woman who stood quietly behind Augustus’ throne, overthrew all her rivals and enemies, and mastered everybody but her son. Tiberius too fared well; idealized though it is, the seated figure in the Lateran Museum is a chef-d’oeuvre worthy of the hand that carved the diorite Chephren in Cairo. Claudius was not so lucky; surely the sculptor was making fun of him, or illustrating Seneca’s Pumpkinification, when he carved him up as a worried Jupiter, fat and amiable and dumb. Nero tried hard to develop a sense of beauty, but his real passion was for fame and size; he saw no better function for Zenodotus, the Scopas of this age, than to consume his time in making a colossus of Nero as Apollo, 117 feet high.VII Hadrian had it removed to the foreground of the Flavian Amphitheater, which thence derived its name of Colosseum.22
With the honest Vespasian sculpture returned to reality. He let himself be represented frankly as a veritable plebeian, with coarse features, wrinkled brow, bald head, and enormous ears. Kinder is the bust in the Terme, showing a spirit harassed with affairs of state, or the businesslike face of the massive head in Naples. Titus comes down to us with a like cubical cranium and homely countenance; it is hard to think of this stout street vendor as the darling of mankind. Domitian had the good sense, in the realistic Flavian age, to have himself so hated in life that all his images were ordered destroyed after his death.
When the artist left the palace and roamed the streets he could give free play to the Italic imp of humorous truth. Some old man, surely less equipped with wisdom and denarii than the philosopher-premier, posed for the disheveled scarecrow once labeled Seneca. Athletes had their muscles immortalized for a moment by famous artists; and gladiators, as statues, found entry into the best homes, from patrician villas to Farnese palaces. The Roman sculptors relented when they handled the figures of women; now and then they carved an irascible shrew, but also they molded some Vestal Virgins of a graceful gravity, occasional incarnations of tenderness like the Clytie of the British Museum, and aristocratic ladies as fragilely charming as the dolls of Watteau or Fragonard.23 They were adept in the portrayal of children, as in the bronze Boy of the Metropolitan Museum, or the lnnocenza of the Capitoline. They could chisel or cast the forms of animals with startling vividness, as in the wolves’ heads found at Nemi in 1929, or the prancing horses of St. Mark’s. They seldom achieved the smooth perfection of the Periclean schools; but that was because they loved the individual more than the type, and relished the life-giving imperfections of the real. With all their limitations they stand supreme in the history of portrait art.