After Apelles, the art of painting declined, although great painters occasionally appeared, especially from the school of Sicyon, which was renowned for nearly two hundred years.  The destruction of Corinth by Mummius, 146 B.C., gave a severe blow to Grecian art.  This general destroyed, or carried to Rome, more works than all his predecessors combined.  Sulla, when he spoiled Athens, inflicted a still greater injury; and from that time artists resorted to Rome and Alexandria and other flourishing cities for patronage and remuneration.  The masterpieces of famous artists brought enormous prices, and Greece and Asia were ransacked for old pictures.  The paintings which Aemilius Paulus brought from Greece required two hundred and fifty wagons to carry them in the triumphal procession.  With the spoliation of Greece, the migration of artists began; and this spoliation of Greece, Asia, and Sicily continued for two centuries.  We have already said that such was the wealth of Rhodes in works of art that three thousand statues were found there by the conquerors; nor could there have been less at Athens, Olympia, and Delphi.  Scaurus had all the public pictures of Sicyon transported to Rome.  Verres plundered every temple and public building in Sicily.

Thus Rome was possessed of the finest paintings in the world, without the slightest claim to the advancement of the art.  And if the opinion of Sir Joshua Reynolds is correct, art could advance no higher in the realm of painting, as well as of statuary, than the Greeks had already borne it.  Yet the Romans learned to place as high value on the works of Grecian genius as the English do on the paintings of the old masters of Italy and Flanders.  And if they did not add to the art, they gave such encouragement that under the emperors it may be said to have been flourishing.  Varro had a gallery of seven hundred portraits of eminent men.  The portraits as well as the statues of the great were placed in the temples, libraries, and public buildings.  The baths especially were filled with paintings.

The great masterpieces of the Greeks were either historical or mythological.  Paintings of gods and heroes, groups of men and women, in which character and passion could be delineated, were the most highly prized.  It was in the expression given to the human figure—­in beauty of form and countenance, in which all the emotions of the soul, as well as the graces of the body were portrayed—­that the Greek artists sought to reach the ideal, and to gain immortality.  And they painted for a people who had both a natural and a cultivated taste and sensibility.