CHAPTER XXII

THE ROMAN PROFUSION OP ART

[Illustration:  FIG. 114.—­THE DYING GAUL.]

[Illustration:  FIG. 115.—­A “CANDELIERA” OR MARBLE PILASTER OF THE BASILICA AEMILIA.]

[Illustration:  FIG. 116.—­FRAGMENTS OF THE ARCHITECTURE OF THE REGIA.]

It would be a more than agreeable task to deal at some length with the art of the Roman world of this period, but the subject is vast, and demands a treatise to itself.  How general was the love of art—­or at least the recognition of its place in life—­must be obvious to those who have seen the great collections in Rome, gathered partly from the city itself and partly from the towns and country “villas” of Italy, and those in the National Museum at Naples, acquired mainly from the buried cities of Pompeii and Herculaneum.  Nor are we amazed merely at the quantity of statues, statuettes, busts, reliefs, paintings, mosaic gems and cameos, and artistically wrought objects and utensils, which have been preserved while so many thousands of such productions have disappeared in the conflagrations of Rome, the vandalisms of the ignorant, or the kilns and melting-pots of the Middle Ages.  The quality is still more a source of delight than the quantity.  This last sentence, of course, contains a truism, since art is no delight without high quality.  If we had only preserved to us such masterpieces as the Capitoline Venus, the Dying Gaul, the Laocoon, the Dancing Faun, the so-called Narcissus, and the Resting Mercury, we should realise something of the exquisite skill in plastic art which had been attained in antiquity and has never been attained since.  But we might perhaps imagine that these were altogether exceptional pieces and the choicest gems possessed by the world of the time.  Yet the preservation of these is but an accident, and there is no reason to believe them to be more than survivals out of many equally excellent.  On the contrary, our ancient authorities—­such as the elder Pliny—­prove that there was a multitude of similar creations contained in public buildings alone.  Pompeii, it has already been said more than once, was a provincial town in no way distinguished for the high culture of its inhabitants; yet there is scarcely a house of any consideration which has not afforded some example of fine art in one form or another.  We know that several of the Roman temples—­such as those of Concord in the Forum and of Apollo on the Palatine—­were veritable galleries of masterpieces; and that the rich Romans adorned both their town houses and country villas with dozens of statues, colossal, life-size, or miniature, by distinguished masters.  But still more striking is the fact that the comparatively small homes of Pompeii often possessed a work for which no price would now be too large, and of which we are content even to obtain a tolerably good copy.  At Herculaneum there evidently lived persons of greater literary and artistic I refinement than at Pompeii, and the discoveries from that only very partially excavated town make an incalculably rich show of their own.  What then would be the case with Naples, Baiae, the resorts all along the coast as far as the Tiber, the luxurious villas on the Alban Hills, and the great metropolis itself?