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. Hadrian had it removed to the foreground of the Flavian Amphitheater, which thence derived its name of Colosseum. 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. They were adept in the portrayal of children, as in the bronze Boy of the Metropolitan Museum, or the Innacenza 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.
VI. PAINTING
The ancient visitor would have found painting even more popular than sculpture in Rome’s temples and dwellings, porticoes and squares. He would have come upon many works of old masters there- Polygnotus, Zeuxis, Apelles Protogenes, and others- as dear to the opulent Empire as the paintings of the Renaissance are to rich America; and he would have seen in greater abundance, through their better preservation, the products of Alexandrian and Roman schools. The art was old in Italy, where every wall craved ornament. Once even Roman nobles had practiced it; but the Hellenistic invasion had made painting Greek and servile, and at last Valerius Maximus marveled that Fabius Pictor should have stooped to paint murals in the Temple of Health. There were exceptions: toward the end of the Republic Arellius made a name for himself by hiring prostitutes to pose for his goddesses; in the time of Augustus a dumb aristocrat, Quintus Pedius, took up painting because his defect closed most professions to him; and Nero employed for the interior of his Golden House one Amulius, who painted with the greatest gravity, always in his toga.” But such men were rari nantes in the crowd of Greeks who, at Rome and Pompeii and throughout the peninsula, made copies or variations of Greek paintings on Greek or Egyptian themes. The art was practically limited to fresco and tempera. In fresco a freshly plastered wall was painted with water-moistened colors; in tempera the pigments were mixed with an adhesive sizing and laid upon a dry surface. Portrait painters sometimes employed an encaustic process in which the tints were fused in hot wax. Nero had his picture painted on a canvas 120 feet high- the first known use of this material. Painting, as we have seen, was applied to statues, temples, stage scenery, and great linen pictures intended for exhibition in triumphs or in the Forum; but its favored receptacle was the external or internal wall. The Romans seldom placed furniture against a wall or hung pictures there; they preferred to use the entire space for one painting, or for a group of related designs. In this way the mural became a part of the house, an integral item in the architectural design.
