The Romans did not create a school of sculpture.  They borrowed wholly from the Greeks, yet made, especially in the time of Hadrian, many beautiful statues.  They were fond of this art, and all eminent men had statues erected to their memory.  The busts of emperors were found in every great city, and Rome was filled with statues.  The monuments of the Romans were even more numerous than those of the Greeks, and among them some admirable portraits are found.  These sculptures did not express that consummation of beauty and grace, of refinement and sentiment, which marked the Greeks; but the imitations were good.  Art had reached its perfection under Lysippus; there was nothing more to learn.  Genius in that department could soar no higher.  It will never rise to loftier heights.

It is noteworthy that the purest forms of Grecian art arose in its earlier stages.  From a moral point of view, sculpture declined from the time of Phidias.  It was prostituted at Rome under the emperors.  The specimens which have often been found among the ruins of ancient baths make us blush for human nature.  The skill of execution did not decline for several centuries; but the lofty ideal was lost sight of, and gross appeals to human passions were made by those who sought to please corrupt leaders of society in an effeminate age.  The turgidity and luxuriance of art gradually passed into tameness and poverty.  The reliefs on the Arch of Constantine are rude and clumsy compared with those on the column of Marcus Aurelius.

It is not my purpose to describe the decline of art, or enumerate the names of the celebrated masters who exalted sculpture in the palmy days of Pericles or even Alexander.  I simply speak of sculpture as an art which reached a great perfection among the Greeks and Romans, as we have a right to infer from the specimens that have been preserved.  How many more must have perished, we may infer from the criticisms of the ancient authors.  The finest productions of our own age are in a measure reproductions; they cannot be called creations, like the statue of the Olympian Jove.  Even the Moses of Michael Angelo is a Grecian god, and Powers’s Greek Slave is a copy of an ancient Venus.  The very tints which have been admired in some of the works of modern sculptors are borrowed from Praxiteles, who succeeded in giving to his statues an appearance of living flesh.  The Museum of the Vatican alone contains several thousand specimens of ancient sculpture which have been found among the debris of former magnificence, many of which are the productions of Greek artists transported to Rome.  Among them are antique copies of the Cupid and the Faun of Praxiteles, the statue of Demosthenes, the Minerva Medica, the Athlete of Lysippus, the Torso Belvedere sculptured by Apollonius, the Belvidere Antinous, of faultless anatomy and a study for Domenichino, the Laocooen, so panegyrized by Pliny, the Apollo Belvedere, the work of Agasias of Ephesus, the Sleeping Ariadne,