READING HALL

THE DOORS OF WISDOM

CAH.VOL.XII

THE IMPERIAL CRISIS AND RECOVERY. A.D. 193-324

CHAPTER XVI

THE TRANSITION TO LATE-CLASSICAL ART

I.

FROM SEPTIMIUS SEVERUS TO ELAGABALUS

THE history of art between the accession of Septimius Severus and the foundation of Constantinople does not appear as a continuous chain made up of separate links, like that which ran from the classicism of the Augustan age to the revival of the Flavian style in the late Antonine era. In this later period, as in the earlier, West and East, despite all parallelism and interaction, preserved their own aspect. But the balance between the art­ techniques of the Greek East and the Roman-Celtic West disappears once more. Stylistic fashions tend towards extremes and provoke more hasty and violent reactions. Varying currents flow side by side or cross and mingle. In the gradual dying fall of classical antique art fresh themes may be heard which introduce the late-classical and are the prelude of medieval art. The confusion of political events and of economic conditions is mirrored to some extent in the art of the day, though this art in other respects follows its own natural law. In one particular the history of art shares the fate of contemporary political history: for the middle part of this period the tradition is more broken than in the earlier and later parts. It is a period arbitrarily bounded by political events, but for the historian of art its opening and closing years mark no epoch: rather they are organically linked with what was past and what was to come.

The three first decades, including the reigns of Severus, Caracalla, and Elagabalus, embrace both the zenith and the decline of that nervous, excitable style which had matured in the late Antonine age. A change of style, already foreshadowed under Antoninus Pius, had taken place in the seventies of the second century when the Roman sentiment, driven underground by Hadrianic classicism, came to the surface anew. This was a renaissance of the Flavian style in the strong expressiveness of which we recognize the first indications of the ‘late-classical.’ The column of Marcus Aurelius only reached completion during the reign of Septimius Severus.

This emperor’s portrait consciously and of deliberate purpose carries on the tradition of typical Antonine Imperial portraiture. It does not present the military usurper with African blood in his veins, but rather the son, fictitious though the adoption was, of Marcus Aurelius and brother of Commodus. We can, indeed, recognize individual traits, but they are subordinated to the traditional impression, which is apparent not only in the almost identical cut of beard and hair, but also in the air of calm, in the philosophic clearness of expression and in the character of the outlines. Private portrait busts doubtless followed the fashions of the court. Provincial variants of the Imperial portraiture appear on the Arch of Leptis, and in a head from Ephesus. Thus in Asia Minor a contemporary sculptor produced the head of a priest of the imperial cult, perhaps the Sophist Flavius Damianus of Ephesus, which has a force and expressiveness that heralds the style of a much later period, that of the fifth century.

A real break with the past in the presentation of the imperial portrait first becomes apparent with Caracalla, but this again is due to his personality. He wished to figure not as the philosopher regnant, but as the simple soldier. If, despite the complete change of style, portraits of Commodus and Severus retained some traces of Hadrianic and Hellenic elements, those of Caracalla, with their harsh and violent turn of the head and their emphasis on ugly and plebeian features, seem to stress anew a feeling that is Roman. One might regard the portrait of Caracalla either as the latest example of the Antonine style, or as the precursor of the ‘impressionist’ portraiture that the following period was to produce. Actually it stands between the two, separating them by an isolated and individual style, the peculiar character of which is not yet fully appreciated. The wealth of locks that framed the features of Marcus Aurelius and his successors was represented as a mass pictorially resolved into light and shade by deep-drilled hollows. But with the portrait of Severus Alexander there appears a totally different style, in which the smooth covering of close-fitting hair is only relieved by short chisel-marks. With Caracalla and his cousin Elagabalus came first a change of fashion. Caracalla’s crisp curls are shorter than his father’s: Elagabalus has lanky hair. But what is more important is that the shape and definition of the distinctive plastic forms of hair and beard now come to their own once more. There were two utterly different ‘pictorial’ styles: one of the late Antonine age, the other of the period between  Severus Alexander and Gallienus. These styles were separated by a short intermediate phase more plastic than either of them.

Was there also in the field of statuary a movement similar to this temporary revival of sensitiveness to plastic form? The theory has been advanced that by the beginning of the third century the production of copies of statues, other than portrait statues, had already ceased. But the wealth of sculptural decoration found, not only in the Baths of Caracalla, but also within the hall of the Palaestra attached to the eastern Thermae at Ephesus, suggest rather that interest in sculpture was still very much alive. It is improbable that this interest was merely satisfied by the re-installation of older works of art in new buildings. The colossal sculptures from the Baths of Caracalla like the Farnese Hercules and the group of the Farnese Bull, are presumably products of this latest efflorescence of plastic art. It is only in the subsequent period that we meet with clear indications of the decline of plastic sensibility.                            

Roman historical reliefs could be traced back through a long period of development to two forms differing widely the one from the other. The one was the political and symbolical relief of monumental character, the style of which, despite all variations of; details, had always been fundamentally classical. The other was the popular art of historical narrative, the real medium for which was painting but which had experienced a translation into a plastic medium on the sculptured bands of the columns of Trajan and Marcus Aurelius. On the arches of Titus in Rome and of Trajan at Beneventum such popular subjects were relegated to the narrow friezes. But it can hardly be mere accident that on the Triumphal Arch of Septimius Severus the monumental reliefs of classical type were replaced by popular descriptive carvings displayed on wide surfaces. There is little doubt that these carvings are based on the paintings which Severus after his Parthian campaign caused to be exhibited in Rome even before his return. The division into several superimposed registers, the hard but lively characterization of personages, the composition of the scene in which the imperator harangues his troops—all these are in the tradition of the reliefs on the column of Marcus Aurelius, even though it is improbable that the same hands were at work on both monuments. That Senate and People in setting up the arch should give the dominant position to these military scenes is clear evidence of the changed political conditions since the day when the Arch of Beneventum was built. On the Severan arch there was only room on the column-bases for reliefs of the high classical style. Here there are groups of prisoners whose bearing and movements, flow of draperies, and carefully observed facial characteristics show that these figures are masterpieces which have not as yet received the appreciation they deserve either in text or picture. Great art and popular art are here to be seen side by side no less than in later times reliefs of different periods on the Arch of Constantine. The popular art has something of the untamed quality but also of the strength of the barbarian. One might almost call it a provincial art within Rome itself.

Both these types of art had still a future before them: the large reliefs in the related art of third-century sarcophagi; popular art in the pagan and Christian reliefs of the fourth century. The appearance of contemporary historical reliefs of the higher style is known from an example preserved in the Court of the Palazzo Sacchetti, which depicts a seated emperor making proclamations to the people against an architectural background. It has the lively excitement of the late Antonine style at its height, and can hardly be later than the time of Septimius Severus. In contrast with the reliefs of Marcus Aurelius on the attica of the Arch of Constantine there is here not only an increased restlessness filling the whole scene, but it even seems as though some elements of the popular style had invaded the theme.

It was in 203 that the Triumphal Arch was set up in the Roman Forum; and at about the same time in Septimius’ birthplace, Leptis Magna, there was built and dedicated on the occasion of his visit to his African home the Tetrapylon, almost overloaded with reliefs, which is one of the finest discoveries of the Italian excavators. A whole series of crowded scenes have been put together, depicting battles, cavalry in procession, and, above all, detailed representations of sacrifices, proclamations, and a triumphal procession. Comparison with the contemporary reliefs in Rome produces a problem which is interesting, controversial and as yet not capable of final solution. The differences between the two are so great that if one were ignorant of the historical context one would certainly assign different dates to the two monuments. It is not merely a matter of the translation of Imperial Roman prototypes into a provincial style. Provincial styles may, in certain manifestations of the Primitive, precede the styles of the more cultured lands on the road to the ‘late-classical’ because, in the latter, development is arrested by the classical tradition. But here the whole artistic conception is something wholly different. The representative element outweighs the narrative to a far greater extent than on the column of Marcus Aurelius or on the Arch of Severus at Rome. Figures are forcibly twisted out of the plane of their action into a rigid frontality. The composition is here much closer to that of the late-classical period than it is on contemporary monuments in Rome.

There was no indigenous tradition of relief-carving in Tripoli. Are then the Leptis reliefs examples of the Italic-West Roman style freed from the constraint of classicism; or are they influenced by the East, where Parthian painting had already achieved a like solution of its problems? Formerly critics were too readily disposed to derive from the East all non-classical traits in Roman art. But in the past fifteen years we have come to see that numerous late-classical manifestations—expressionism, central composition and frontality—had roots of their own in Italian soil. Their growth was checked by the influence of classical Greek forms, but every now and again it came through. Nevertheless the reaction towards this view sometimes goes too far. In a given period parallelism of feeling also induces a readiness to welcome alien artistic stimuli. It is scarcely probable that Italic taste should have found a better scope for self-expression on the soil of Africa than in the popular art of Rome itself. On the other hand, it is very possible that the influence of Parthian painting should have passed, through the intermediary of some place like Doura, to North Africa. The fresco of the Tribune in Doura which was painted at about the same time, or possibly rather earlier, supplies the closest parallel to the composition of the reliefs at Leptis. The stimulus may well have been brought direct by the Court of Septimius Severus and Julia Domna when they arrived from the East. It is to be noted, too, that contemporary art in Asia Minor about the turn of the century bears marked traces of the influence of Parthian hunting pictures.

The series of known historical reliefs breaks off with the two great Arches of Severus, beside which must be mentioned the artistically insignificant Arch of the Silversmiths erected in 204. It only revives again at the beginning of the fourth century. Consequently we now lose the sure guidance of that thread which leads from the reliefs of the Ara Pacis through all the changes of styles up to the Arch of Septimius Severus. Did the production of historical reliefs really cease for a whole century, or are we merely misled by the lack of surviving monuments? It is, indeed, hard to believe that this proud tradition of official art should have been quite extinguished. On the other hand, it would certainly appear that third-century sarcophagi, by contrast with those of the second century, acquired a heightened importance as works of art, and that they to a certain extent took the place of historical reliefs. Once the evolution of the sarcophagus has been adequately studied, it may be that this form of art, together with portraiture, will provide the guiding clue for the history of art in the third century.

On the sarcophagi it is possible not only to observe the gradual change of style, but also the vanishing of older themes and the appearance of fresh ones. A good example of a traditional type reshaped to the sentiment of a new taste is supplied by the Taverna bridal-sarcophagus, the scenes on which are full of heightened intensity of feeling and of a lively restlessness permeating every detail. The figures are close-pressed, the gestures are more emotional. In shape the sarcophagus has grown in height.

A predominant subject on sarcophagi of the time of Septimius Severus is the battle-picture. An earlier generation had employed the Hellenistic motives of the fights between Greeks and Gauls; but now, under the influence of the reliefs that commemorated the victorious campaigns of Marcus Aurelius, a very different type of presentation depicting a contemporary battle appears, and it borrows no more than a few of the older motives. The earliest and most remarkable of these works is in the Terme Museum, a sarcophagus from the Via Appia probably made in the last years of Commodus or the first of Septimius Severus. Framed between groups of captives and underneath the trophy there is set a crowded, pictorial and stirring battle-scene, in which the bar­barians collapse under the victorious onset of the Romans. Even though isolated fugitives or foes trying to ward off attack appear in the upper rows, yet the composition as a whole is partitioned into an upper world of the victors and a lower world of the vanquished.

A series of sarcophagi similar to this were made in the following decades. At the end of the period under discussion a new theme appeared which was destined to be more or less the predominant subject in the next period, the lion-hunt. Up to this  time, the Roman passion for the hunt—Romana milities—had been shown on sarcophagi in mythological guise by the hunters Hippolytus, Meleager, or Adonis, and these older themes were continued. But now there is a new creation in the composition of the lion-hunt which is perhaps dependent on the prototype of some Imperial monument, perhaps even the sarcophagus of Caracalla, who himself, as a new Alexander, ‘contra leonem stetit.’ A noble, clear composition appears on a sarcophagus in the Palazzo Mattei in Rome with a few figures of large size which occupy the whole available space with their movements. Though the technique of the drill, common in the Severan period for working hair and mane, is still employed, yet we note in the treatment of the nude, in drapery, and in locks of hair clearly divided from one another a thorough tightening-up of plastic form. Here it is evident that the same change is in progress as that already observed in the portraits of Caracalla and of Elagabalus. The head of the effigy on the sarcophagus is still under the influence of Caracalla’s Imperial portraiture, and thus this relief may have been carved about 220. It marks the turning-point towards a fresh development.

With the opening of the third century there begins the continuous evolution of painting in the Christian catacombs of Rome. This starts, as we should expect, with a pictorial style that corresponds to that of late Antonine and Severan reliefs. The earliest paintings are in the Lucina vault, the decorative scheme of which, having a certain architectural solidity, still holds a memory of the early Antonine style. After these a gradual loosening and deteriora­tion is perceptible. The illusionistic manner seems to increase, but to be broken by reactions. As a rule the artistic quality of these paintings is rather low. Those in the vault of the Aurelii, probably still of the Severan style, are, however, more important. Here there are, besides landscapes and paintings with small figure sub­jects, some almost monumental figures, each over three feet high, of eleven apostles or prophets. During Caracalla’s reign there was probably a break in purely illusionistic art in painting as well as in sculpture. Perhaps we possess a mere fragment of this inter­mediate phase in a small piece of fresco in the Baths of Caracalla which preserves a delicately and cleanly modelled head.

In architecture, as in the other arts, the first decades of the third century show a belated flowering after the wealth of the Hadrianic and Antonine periods. The impoverishment of the provinces and the consequences of social upheavals only began to take effect gradually and in varying degrees in the several provinces. In Greece proper no building of importance appears to have been erected. The workshops of Athens were kept going by the manufacture of copies of statues and of sarcophagi for export. The flourishing life of Asia Minor was hit more violently by the ravages of the wars and their consequences. But in Ephesus in the reign of Severus there was still the wealthy sophist, Flavius Damianus, who could afford to build a large hall and to erect the new Palaestra of the Eastern Gymnasium and fill it with costly sculptures. Moreover, the Baths by the harbour carried on the Ephesian style of the gymnasium. After this period, however, building activity in Asia Minor almost ceased until the end of the century.

It is intelligible that in the provinces of Syria and Africa, which had suffered little from the wars, the zeal for building should continue from the second century. In Syria this period witnessed the new buildings of the temple of Juppiter Damascenus and the completion of the Propylaea at Heliopolis (Baalbek). This kind of activity was still greater in Africa, the province that was most closely bound to the dynasty. There is only need to mention the Capitolium (a.d. 208) and the Arch of Severus at Lambaesis, the temple of Minerva at Tebessa, and the triumphal arches set up for Caracalla, one at Tebessa in 214, the other at Djemila. But as in Ephesus, so in Syria and Africa, there is an absence of all architectural novelty. Old plans are completed; new buildings are erected on traditional lines.

Rome itself, however, became the stage for an architectural achievement that marked a mighty advance on the work of the preceding epoch. In the year 191a fire ravaged the city. Septimius Severus and Julia Domna did much to repair the damage. The Porticus Octavia, the temple of Vesta and the House of the Vestals were reconstructed, and the Pantheon was repaired. Severus built additions to the imperial palace on the Palatine including a new wing. And on the south-west slope of the Palatine looking towards the Via Appia he constructed the many-storeyed State building called the Septizonium, the columnar style of which may owe something to suggestions from Asia Minor. In the Forum Romanum there still stands the huge and impressive triumphal arch put up in the year 203 for the Emperor and his sons. It is not always that we can, without forcing the evidence, draw stylistic parallels between architectural compositions and the arts of sculpture and painting. But the Arch of Severus does fit perfectly into the picture of the style of the late Antonine period.

 In contrast to the classical lines and plastic simplicity of the much smaller Arch of Titus its architecture seems full of harshness and discord, and dependent on the picturesque contrasts of light and shade. A remarkable architect has here exercised his commanding power to derive new effects from old motives.

Caracalla’s temple of Sarapis and the Sun-temple built by Elagabalus are entirely, or almost entirely, destroyed. But the Baths of Caracalla, which were only completed by his successors, have survived as one of the mightiest ruins in the world. Their impressiveness has, incidentally, led to an overestimate of the achievement of the age. In actual fact they reproduce in all essentials the ground-plan and elevation of their classical prototype, the Baths of Trajan. The plan is distinguished by an almost ornamental scheme. The extent to which the wall-decorations may have supplied novelty, when contrasted with those of the older Baths, can no longer be known. There seem to have been some new and notable additions in the construction of ceilings and of the dome of the calidarium.

If we survey the portraiture, relief-sculpture, painting and architecture of this period, we get, in spite of certain contradictions and ups and downs, a consistent picture of a style, already moulded in previous decades, pursuing its course and moving to its conclusion. There is, then, a late Antonine-Severan style occupying roughly the half-century from a.d. 170 to 220.

II.

FROM SEVERUS ALEXANDER TO THE ACCESSION OF DIOCLETIAN

Throughout the period of the crisis and disintegration of the Empire, there can be traced, if only in general outlines, a continuity of stylistic development. The City of Rome has a more central significance in the history of art in this period than in political history. In art the Roman national character had achieved a strength and activity which enabled it to assimilate to itself the foreign element that entered it, and to carry on a specifically Roman tradition into late-classical art.

Not more than six or eight years separate the portraits of Elagabalus from those of Severus Alexander. A comparison of the likenesses of these two cousins reveals a complete change in the fashion of portraiture which dominates the decades that follow. It is marked most strongly by the technical representation of the hair. The impression made by an Antonine portrait depended primarily on the contrast between the shape of the face and the luxuriant mass of waving locks. The portrait of Elagabalus still had strands of hair plastically rounded and clearly distinguished. But now the hair flattens down into a cap barely separated from the face, only distinguished from it by its smoothness and colour. The firm plastic modelling of the features gives place to a soft modulation of the surface. We can trace a development of this style of portraiture from Maximinus and Gordian III to Philip the Arabian. The slight plastic shaping of the hair that had at first been retained gradually disappears completely. The skull-cap of hair is broken by chisel-marks which at first follow the lines of the locks, though presently these too vanish. There is an attempt to recapture, in the manner of the ancient Roman traditional portrait, the momentary and personal element by holding and emphasizing characteristic forms, and there is success in expressing both the precocity in the features of the youthful Gordian and the barbarism in Maximinus and Philip. In classical art also impressionism and expressionism are but little apart. About the middle of the century the portrait of Decius shows certain stylized mannerisms which would have led straight on to the portrait of Probus and ‘late-classical’ art, but for the .fact that this tendency was thrust aside for several decades by a powerful reaction. But before we consider this we must glance at some of the surviving monuments of the first thirty years of this period.

The changes in coiffure and portraiture certainly represent a reaction against the Antonine and Severan concepts of a portrait, and in particular a reaction of the Roman spirit against the Hadrianic Hellenic traditions employed for the likenesses of the Antonine Emperors. The more homely and human character of the new style, which renounced all display of pomp, has occasionally led to the belief that this restrained art replaced the baroque art of the Severan age. But we should form an entirely false picture of our period were we to base our conclusions on portraiture alone.

Between about 225 and 230, judging from the portrait head upon it, the great Ludovisi battle-sarcophagus was made. To this work the term baroque can be applied with more justification than to any other ancient work of art, though admittedly it is a style by no means identical with the baroque of more modern art. But it is at the same time a work in which there appear the complexity and the twofold tendencies of the day. As far as its artistic significance goes, it is a work of the first rank presenting the highest achievement of the time. When it is compared with the battle­ sarcophagus from the Via Appia made a generation earlier a remarkable contrast is apparent. The composition taken over from the other has been clothed in entirely new forms. The first general impression of a baroque effect is produced by the larger size of sarcophagus and figures, by their close compression, and by the emotional expression that reaches in the faces of the mortally wounded an intensity surpassing anything previous in ancient art, for it recalls the work of the medieval and the baroque sculptor. But in contrast to the baroque this relief is kept firmly within the bounds of its frame and its front plane. The plastic sharpness of each single shape carries on the development of the art which we first met on the Mattei sarcophagus with the lion­hunt. But, though this plastic treatment is still purely classical, we seem to perceive in the pose and movement of each figure a certain lack of sure feeling for the organic growth and rhythm of the whole which attests a falling off in plastic sensibility.

The real difference between the battle-sarcophagi and their predecessors lies in composition. The number of figures is now small. Their relation to space and depth is altered. On both these sarcophagi the balance of the composition has been planned down to the smallest detail. But while on the older example groups are combined, figures recede in depth, and leave room between one another, there appears on the Ludovisi sarcophagus a whole crowd of figures filling the plane out evenly, for the figures that are behind stand out in the same relief as those in front or bend forward their heads to the front plane of the picture. Thus we get, despite the plasticity of the single figures, that carpet-like effect which A. Riegl has brought out in his analysis of a contemporary sarcophagus with Amazons. Indeed, this effect must have been intensified when the gilding on the men’s hair and horses’ manes was visible. Emotion and rigidity are here combined in peculiar guise. The composition and construction of the design mark a definite step in the direction of the late-classical, while the modelling of individual figures harks back to classical art. In the intellectual conception of victory the sarcophagus also parts company with its prototype and tends towards the late-classical. The victorious general is no longer fighting but triumphant, and turns from the turmoil of battle towards the spectator, claiming worship. The subsidiary figures are noticeably smaller in size, an anticipation of the later practice of representing personages in sizes that correspond to their relative importance.

The emotional temperament of the age showed a preference for hunting-scenes or fighting Amazons, and instilled an intense rest­lessness into other subjects like representations of the Thiasos or of sea-pieces. Quiet, simple portrait-busts are set in the midst of these reliefs on the sarcophagi to form a strange but quite inten­tional contrast with the movement, the very wildness of the reliefs. On the hunt-sarcophagi may be seen how the treatment of hair and garments became more full of movement between 230 and 250. Locks of hair wind about like snakes and end by looking like flickering flames. Just before the mid-century they again lose their plastic definition and become more pictorial. Facial expression grows even more exaggerated. The climax of this ‘baroque’ development is reached in works like the so-called sarcophagus of Balbinus in Copenhagen which must be dated to about a.d. 250.

Was this baroque-like tendency confined to Rome, or did it also permeate the rest of the ancient world? We can recognize its presence on Attic sarcophagi in the evolution of what are mis­named Graeco-Roman examples. On one remarkable piece, the Achilles-sarcophagus of the Capitoline Museum (c. 240 to 245), we encounter this baroque style with its wealth of tightly packed figures. Riegl recognized in this relief-work the true parallel to the sarcophagi made in the Capital. But neither the violence of emotional expression nor the loosening of the plastic form go nearly as far as they do in Rome. Down to the very latest of their series the Attic sarcophagi retain something of the classical Attic manner. In conformity with this we find the portraits of the dead upon the lids also follow a Greek tradition. Nearer to a baroque style are the column-sarcophagi from Asia Minor, not only in their structure but also in the movement of their figures and the rest­lessness of their composition. The large Sidamara coffin in Istambul is of this class and period. The latest stage appears on the Mattei Muses-sarcophagus in Rome which belongs to the second half of the third century. But sarcophagi from the Eastern provinces never approached the richness of those of Rome either in their wealth of subject matter or in their lively juxtaposition of varying and various styles. After the reign of Caracalla the East con­spicuously lagged behind Rome in intensity of artistic creation.

On the other hand we find at this time a highly original mani­festation in the Celtic-Germanic Marches associated with the evolution of the grave-monuments of Treves and its neighbourhood. The tombs with their multiplication of architectural motives and their excess of ornament take on fantastic shapes. The use of soft sandstone induced the employment of a pictorial treatment of the material. While in the East luminous surfaces and dark hollows were separated by ridges sharp as knives, here softly flowing transitions moved from convex high lights to deep shadows. Brilliant characterization distinguishes the types of peasants and boatmen. No provincial art of the third century is equal to this in independence and creative power. Here is evidence of artistic gifts rooted in the unspoilt folk of the countryside. But the line of development ran parallel to the Roman and reached its climax about the mid-century or shortly after. So it fitted into the wide context that extended from Asia Minor to the Rhine frontier.

The advance of this pictorial baroque element to an extreme about the middle of the century makes the marked reaction of the ‘Gallienic renaissance’ comprehensible. This was first observed in portraiture, but manifests itself with equal distinctness in reliefs at Rome itself. Plotinus and Gallienus, the friendship between emperor and philosopher, these symbolize the spirit of the age. From the chaotic turmoils of the time the soul sought refuge in the peace of mystery religions and of Neoplatonism. Art shows us that this longing finds its satisfaction not by ecstatic moods but by calm clarity.

In the portrait of Gallienus there are apparent two elements both striving to recover something of the older classical spirit. The one, a Roman element, links itself to Augustan and Claudian prototypes; the other tries to recover the Greek portrait technique of the Hadrianic and Antonine period. The neo-Augustan style is also met with in certain Roman portraits of private personages. This reversal in style extends beyond the immediate circle of Gallienus, who was himself but the representative of a spiritual movement that touched the whole Roman Empire. Yet for all their parallelism each local circle of culture went on its way. Asia Minor and Greece had each its own special style for portraiture linked on to its own local prototypes. The finest gold coins of Postumus minted at Lugdunum show us, even more decisively than the bust of Gallienus, the ideal type of the period distinguished by philosopher’s beard and Greek classic forms. And the successors of Postumus down to Tetricus retained this fashion and form. It is no mere chance that the portrait of Postumus made in Gaul is founded on Greek rather than Roman models. In Rome itself, which was always ready to take up anything fresh, we find Roman and Greek styles side by side with a continuation of the portraiture fashionable in the forties of the third century.

In the list of subjects for sarcophagi lion-hunts and fighting Amazons no longer predominate, for preference is now given to scenes that depict the deceased, male or female, in the company of philosophers, or Muses, or both. The lion-hunt, however, remains a popular theme in the second half of the century, but only on works of inferior quality, and it sometimes, significantly enough, appears on the back panels of philosopher-sarcophagi. There is a sarcophagus in the Museo Torlonia made c. 250—60 that depicts the dead man and his wife as seventh Sage and ninth Muse in a gathering of the Muses and Sages. Single motives like the centre group and the corresponding figures of seated philosophers are probably indebted to the Asia Minor style; but the composition as a whole follows the Roman tradition. In the restless ragged beards and locks there remains an after-effect of the restless style of the previous period. Otherwise, however, the tranquil shapes, the compact outlines of heads, the simplified folds fit in with the changed mood which seeks to replace the dramatic and the emotional by the solemn calm of an existence steeped in philosophy and art. This mental change of attitude corresponds to the altered situation of the whole age. And in like fashion the philosopher-sarcophagi of Rome itself, made between 250 and 270, represent in particular the impact on Rome of a flourishing philosophy—notably that of Plotinus and his disciples. In such circumstances the oldest Christian carved sarcophagi could come into existence, for they too could depict the dead man as sage and teacher amid symbolic figures. There are the Roman sarcophagus from the Via Salaria and another from La Gayole, the latter made, like the portraits of Gallic emperors, under the influence of Greek forms. It is significant that the first Christian carved sarcophagi were made in the West, where their future was also to lie.

All trace of nervous unrest has vanished on the magnificent fragment of a philosopher-sarcophagus in the Lateran. Here is a philosopher giving instruction from a scroll unrolled wide open and surrounded not only by two listening women, one of whom holds the scroll—symbol of learning—but by other philosophers who turn their heads to converse with other persons now missing. There is no proof that this was the coffin of Plotinus for it was  probably made in the sixties; but the master of Neoplatonism might well have been depicted in this atmosphere of elevated solemnity. The head of the central figure is inspired by this same lofty mood. The fashion of his hairdressing is in the style of the second quarter of the century.

Through all these contrasts subsisting between the sarcophagi of the lion-hunt period and of the philosopher period we can still trace a straight line of evolution leading in the direction of late-classical art; and we can see its negative no less than its positive sides. The feeling for the organic structure of the figure grows steadily weaker. Composition in relief, though occasionally chequered by reminiscences of the classical style, carries on the form typified by the great Ludovisi battle-sarcophagus. Centralized composition grows ever more popular. Along with this the tendency increases for a turning of figures and whole scenes toward frontality. A medallion of Severus Alexander shows a quadriga for the first time in frontal view, though the figures in the chariot still turn sideways. Coins of Postumus give the Imperial portrait almost full-face, and, what is still more important, the scene of an Imperial allocution in a centralized symmetrical composition. A turning-point of the utmost significance for the history of art is marked by the frontal view of the reading philosopher of the Lateran sarcophagus. For in the motive of the seated figure we have here a dividing line between antiquity and the medieval.

In classical reliefs, as in those of the more ancient East, the ceremonial presentation of a figure enthroned in the foreground was avoided because it was out of harmony with the whole spirit of the relief of antiquity. But in Italy after the first century of the Principate we can observe a movement towards the presentation of a frontal view. For its realization, however, the true feeling for plastic form had to be so far extinguished that men were no longer disturbed by the contradiction between a foreshortened thigh and its actual appearance in light and shade. From this point onwards relief moves away from sculpture in the round and assimilates itself to drawing.

If the new dating given to a rock-carving at Shapur, assigning it to the reign of Shapur I, is correct, then it seems that a frontal enthroned figure of a ruler in the middle of a centralized composition appears for the first time in Mesopotamian art at about the same period. It is strange that we do not find it sooner in Parthian and Sassanian art, which is after all not plastic in character but based on painting and relief work. Have we here a case of parallel development or one of mutual influence? To what extent can the existence of artistic interrelations be proved? Recent research has been successful in tracing the origins of the late-classical in Classical art and the origins of Sassanian in Parthian art. A whole series of apparent correspondences, in which we were at one time inclined to see an orientalization of classical art, appear now rather as converging manifestations. But the closer these lines of development approach one another, the stronger grows the possibility that occasional sparks of inspiration leap from one to the other. The reliefs commemorating Shapur’s victory and his capture of Valerian are influenced by Roman victory-reliefs. On the other hand the concept of the ruler in the late-classical period and its outward manifestations have a strong Oriental tinge. Shapur’s relief might have been influenced by a Valerian prototype. Yet the influence might equally have been in the opposite direction. The decisive step, so far as Rome was concerned, may well have been taken on some Imperial triumphal relief or sarcophagus.

More interesting even than the similarity in frontality between the reliefs of Shapur and the Lateran sarcophagus is the difference in their technique. In its counterpoise the form of seated figure of the Graeco-Roman philosopher is quite classical; in its symmetry of widespread legs and in the stiffness of its body the figure of the Sassanian king is thoroughly Oriental. The Roman prototype continues almost unchanged through a series of imperial and divine figures into the Middle Ages, when it comes into conflict with the Oriental motive that has likewise been carried on by later Sassanian and then by Byzantine art.

A somewhat later Roman sarcophagus, made about 270 to 275, has in the centre the old-fashioned group of men clasping hands (dextrarum iunctio) and on the right and left of this group symbolical figures referring to the office of the deceased, who was an official of the Annona. Though it is still in high relief the unplastic hardening of the figures is here more exaggerated. All the more moving is the inner suffering which appears on the man’s face and seems to portray the depth of his sensitiveness which still lives through the stiffening forms. In its general form this portrait head belongs to the end of the ‘Gallienic renaissance.’ And in heads which belong either to the end of this period or to the transition towards the next there now appears a definite tide of expressionism produced by stressing and exaggerating the characteristic features of the face. It was the current that had set in with the portrait of Decius, but had been stayed awhile by the classical reaction.

In the paintings of the Catacombs we may perhaps perceive about the middle of the century an increased use of the illusionistic manner in the production of figures and a loosening in decorative matter. Then comes a tendency to a firmer drawing of figure­subjects. But the style of the age of Gallienus is not as yet really to be grasped. Popular paintings of campaigns and hunting-scenes continued to be turned out, as we learn from a few chance references. After his German victories Maximinus not only sent a written report to the Senate and People, but had pictures painted ‘ut erat bellum ipsum gestum,’ and had them set up in front of the Curia ‘ut facta eius pictura loqueretur.’ Gordian organized a silva, a hunt for which the whole Circus was transformed into a forest, and this was depicted on a frieze on which no fewer than 1320 animals were painted. The baroque zeal for huge masses could find freer scope in painting than in carved reliefs. The painted records, to which texts refer, of the new-fashioned games given by Carus, Carinus, and Numerianus in the Circus must likewise have been large and packed with figures. From this popular painting the tradition of art in the City of Rome derives much of its power.

A peculiar contrast is provided by the aristocratic art of portraits in miniature, worked out in gold-leaf upon glass. Its earliest examples belong to the period from a.d. 230 to 250. It can hardly be an accident that the art of miniatures reaches its height at the moment in which sculpture in the grand style declines. It is the way of art on the small scale to attain its zenith at just such times. These portraits in gold on glass initiate a development which slowly advances towards the end of the fourth century and leads to the efflorescence of late-classical illumination, ivory-carving and embossed metal-work.

We know least of all of the architecture of this period. This is certainly not due to the accident of destruction, but to the fact that economic decline has a greater effect on architecture than on other arts. There were now none of those private benefactors who played so large a part in encouraging building during the second century. Where there are large buildings, they are almost always associated with some emperor. In Africa, which still prospered at this period, there was built in 229 a temple at Djemila dedicated to the Gens Septimia. An inscription records the erection by Gordian III of a palace with adjoining baths at Volubilis in Morocco. It was probably also at this time that the huge amphitheatre of El Djem (Thysdrus), where Gordian I was proclaimed emperor, was built. If the circular temple at Helio­polis is to be associated with Philip the Arabian, it would certainly fit in with the baroque mood of the day. In and near Rome rose some considerable imperial buildings, like the Villa of Gordian. In these and certain circular tomb buildings we see that the problem of vaulting was what interested the architects of the time. Only one building is comparatively well preserved, the so-called temple of Minerva Medica, now held to be a Nymphaeum or part of a block of Thermae of about 260. The dome rests on a decagonal substructure, from the lower part of which apses curve out between supporting piers, while the upper part is broken by windows. Ideas attempted in Hadrian’s Villa are here carried through. It was not only the solution of the technical problem that was bold and new, but also the widening and differentiating of the interior spaces, and the complicated jointing of the exterior. This single building proves that Roman architecture was still full of ideas.

III.

FROM DIOCLETIAN TO THE FOUNDING OF CONSTANTINOPLE

In the history of art the term late-classical has been adopted for the centuries that follow the true classical age. This term is more comprehensive, and therefore more suitable, than ‘late-Roman’ which Riegl employed in his work which laid the foundations for the study of this period. The late-classical is something more than a phase in the transition from the ancient to the medieval world. Not only on account of its long duration, but also by reason of its own artistic achievement, it must be classed as a third phase of ancient art following on the Greek and the Roman phases. Where are we to place its beginning and its end? Is an essential unity to be found amid the diversity of its manifestations?

That this phase is still a part of ancient art is clear from the fact that its conclusion is more definitely detached from medieval art than is its beginning from the preceding classical art. In Italy it does not come to an end with the fall of the Western Empire in 476, but with the great invasion of the Lombards in 568. The Ostrogothic period in Italy is the age of the last bloom of late-classical art. In the Eastern Empire the more gradual decline extends in part to the period of the Slavonic invasions during the second half of the sixth century, in part to that of the victories of the Arabs in the following century. In the Byzantine Empire a tradition was even retained up to the period of revival (ninth and tenth centuries). The flower of the art, however, came to an end in the East almost at the same time as in the West, after the death of Justinian. The part taken by national energy in the achievements of the three centuries is diverse. Up to the end of the fourth century the greater and more fruitful artistic production came from Italy, after that from Asia Minor and Byzantium. The part played by barbarian influence is not easy to estimate. We have now to reckon more than in previous periods with the activities of travelling artists and of workshops.

The beginning of late-classical art is fixed differently according to the different divisions of time favoured by the several studies that are concerned with it. Those scholars who write of ‘L’art Byzantin’—a term more appropriate to the middle and late Byzantine epochs—mark the beginning by the foundation of Constantinople, which is for the art-historian of no significance as an epoch. Those concerned with Christian archaeology choose the date which is most momentous for Church history, either that of the Edict of Milan in 313, or the victory at the Milvian Bridge in 312. Both are too late and, indeed, the second is immediately followed by the earliest of those renaissance movements which are just as characteristic of the rhythm of the late-classical period as of the classical age, and are perhaps even more impressive. If we select the accession of Diocletian to mark the beginning of the late-classical, this is because it amounts to an acknowledg­ment that the spirit of the Dominus is the spirit permeating the art, in contrast to that of the classical ages. The date is no more than a symbol. In actual fact the change and the transition cover the period from 275 to 300.

An attempt to describe in brief the essence of late-classical art must confine itself to touching on its most important features. There appear side by side a change in pure artistic feeling and a change in the spiritual relationship between spectator and work of art. What is of the most decisive significance is the cessation of sculpture in the round, which had occupied the central point in Greek art, but which had been forced on the Romans by the power of Greek tradition, foreign though it actually was to their inner sentiment. It may be that the type of the commemorative statue, and especially of the figure of the emperor, was retained till the very end of the period. But statues of gods disappear, and the manufacture of copies of Greek masterpieces comes to an end. Relief work grows ever closer to painting. In the earliest classical age the statue of the god served the beholder for prayer, the portrait statue expressed veneration, while votive sculpture, reliefs and paintings stood for the participation of a spectator in a play. But prayers cease to be made to statues of the gods. Veneration of the portrait statue rises to virtual worship. The function of painting and relief is no longer to narrate but to preach; their appeal is no longer to a spectator but to a congregation of the faithful. This alteration of spiritual and emotional values leads to a form that gives expression to this new exaltation. This has frequently been defined by the word ‘transcendentalism’; but it must be borne in mind that the uplifting reality in late-classical art is something fundamentally different from the other­worldliness of medieval art.

This transcendentalism, if we use the concept in this narrowed sense, or this expressionism, is the central factor of late-classical art, but it has to adjust itself to two other and quite different forces. One of these is a hard realism, which derives from unplumbed depths of popular feeling. In Rome itself new and vigorous sap flows from this realism into late-classical art. Another type of realism, nourished on different spiritual forces, was later on to influence Asiatic portraiture in the fifth century. The second force is the might of classical art standing, as it were, before the eyes of the late-classical in almost undiminished splendour. This was the cause of repeated renaissances which harked back to classical Greek or classicizing Roman prototypes. Out of the struggle of these three forces there grew the manifold tendencies, flowing, following, merging into one another in late-classical art.

The foundations of the late-classical manner may be recognized increasingly in the preceding centuries, and especially so in Italy on those monuments in which a Roman and unclassical feeling is expressed. Examples of this occur in Italian provincial art of the first century, and afterwards in historical reliefs of the second century, notably those of the Column of Marcus Aurelius. Then, with the period starting about 222, there begins, as we have seen, the immediate precursors of the late-classical.

Coins of the seventies of the third century show that in portraiture the expressionist tendency—temporarily submerged by the classical phase of Gallienus’ reign—has recovered. This had already appeared with the portraiture of Decius. The tendency to frontality, begun under Severus Alexander and carried on under Postumus, is continued on medallions of Probus, for it is there in the frontal composition of the adlocutio scene. And it is the portraits of Probus, together with contemporary heads of private personages, that carry along the features of late-classical art. In the representation of the hair the tradition, never quite interrupted, of the second quarter of the century prevails again. In the face there is emphasis on the harmony of those features that determine the spiritual expression, like eyes, nose, and mouth, as contrasted with the mere auxiliary features. In the time of Diocletian and the Tetrarchy there appears in the face—now stylized beyond any natural shape for the sake of expressive strength—a kind of native primitiveness derived from the coarser popular art which was developing at this time in Roman reliefs. The head of the colossal figure of Constantine from the Basilica in the Forum, with its new dynamic simplification that enhances the strength of expression, and its new exaggeration of the features, marks the creation of a new ideal of the Ruler. Despite several classicizing interludes, this head had a marked influence on subsequent Imperial portraiture.

The change of period is very clearly marked in the history of the relief. In the East, Syria and Alexandria had never shown much liking for this type of art. But Asia Minor and Greece possessed in their monumental masons’ yards a rich supply of reliefs which, through the export of sarcophagi, were regularly influencing the West. In the last decades of the third century this trade died out. A few masons wandered over to Italy. In contrast to Rome and the Western provinces, Asia Minor and Greece were poor in reliefs during the ‘late-classical’ period. The few sarcophagi with relief-decorations are isolated pieces. Economic stress and disorganization of export trade certainly contributed to this state of affairs, but were hardly its sole cause. There was here afoot a change in taste that was perhaps already a presage of the much stronger divergence to come between Eastern and Western Europe in the Middle Ages.

Rome, North Italy, and Gaul were, up to the end of the fourth century, the regions responsible for an abundant production of sarcophagi ornamented with reliefs. In Ravenna and in Aquitania this tradition carried through into the sixth century. The actual transition happens in Rome itself. The old themes and subjects—mythological scenes and lion-hunts—so far as they can be assigned with tolerable certainty to this period—show a growing hardness of style and a falling-off in artistic merit. An example is the Adonis ­sarcophagus in the Lateran, apparently made shortly before the reliefs of Constantine’s Arch. To the last decades of the third century belongs the Borghese Phaeton-sarcophagus, on which the type of composition planned for the great Ludovisi battle­sarcophagus has degenerated into stiff schematization. On Roman-made sarcophagi the Asiatic type of figure on the lid now begins to appear more frequently. Perhaps this is due to the arrival from Asia Minor of masons, whose hands also seem to betray themselves in the composition and style of certain Hippolytus-sarcophagi in Split and in Rome.

Besides this dying classical style we are aware of the beginnings of a new movement that looks to the future. It is noteworthy that it appears in association with new themes. Subjects which at first only fit spaces on the lids of relief-sarcophagi presently begin to appear on the fronts. They are derived from observation of daily life, shepherds and flocks, feasts, a money-changer’s office, or the payment of rent. At the same time the Christian sarcophagi begin to appear with their single scenes, Jonah and the whale, the Good Shepherd, and the Eucharist, motives that were to acquire tremendous importance in the following century first in Rome and then in Gaul. Shortly before the Arch of Constantine there were produced the sarcophagi with only one row of figures that depict scenes from the life of Christ and Peter. Some have ascribed this crude, popular, narrative, realistic art to an influx of provincials. But the provinces show no close antecedents. It is rather due to the fact that, as the pressure of the old classical tradition relaxes, the popular undercurrent, the provincial art of Rome itself, which has already been discerned in previous centuries, now comes to the surface. In painting its tradition had been uninterrupted since Republican days. The flower of Christian relief carving in the late-classical West is indebted for its rise to the union of the new, creative, Christian spirit with the related and still unex­hausted Roman popular art. Its origins lie in Rome.

On reliefs of this character, made between 280 and 310, the use of the drill for the hair, eyes, nose, mouth, and drapery gradually becomes an extreme mannerism. It is therefore understandable that after the end of the third century there followed a revulsion from this style, causing the almost complete abandonment of the drill. It is, moreover, possible that this was helped by the importation, about this time, from Alexandria of sculptures in porphyry, the almost peasant-like and provincial style of which was congenial to contemporary Roman sentiment. This change in technique is carried through within the popular realistic movement and almost reaches its completion with the contemporary sculptural decoration of the Arch of Constantine.

We can see both techniques side by side employed by two sculptors in the Roman Forum on the Decennalia base which is probably to be assigned to 303-4. This is simply a degenerate descendant of the politico-religious type of relief of an earlier day. The Arch of Galerius at Salonica with its wealth of ornament is of greater artistic significance. Though in the general building-up of its reliefs, as well as in some of the subject matter, there are perhaps Oriental influences derived from the repertoire of Sassanian art, the style as a whole is based on the popular historical relief, or on the historical painting of Rome. Moreover, the two opposing techniques, one employing, the other rejecting, the use of the drill, are again present side by side. But in certain details of the plastic work we can still perceive a last echo of Greek relief­work, perhaps introduced by assistant masons who still had some connection with the latest sarcophagus factories of Greece.

Popular Roman relief faced a task of historical importance in the decoration of the Arch of Constantine in 315. This arch is a mile­stone in the history of art. The use of the drill has vanished from the narrow reliefs over the side arches, and its last traces may be observed in the reliefs of the column-bases. In the scenes of the triumphal procession, and especially in those of the siege of Rome and the victory on the Milvian Bridge there is all the rough forcefulness of popular art. The Emperor over life-size, the merciless character of the scene of victory, these are Roman features the gradual growth of which can be watched from the beginning of the second century. Here are no worn-out motives deriving from a long tradition. The victorious soldiers are thrusting with convincing force, as do the hunters on some hunt-sarcophagi of a new type invented about this period. In contrast to these chronicle-like pictures are the static ceremonial scenes with their centralized and frontal compositions corresponding to the increase of similar subjects and designs on medallions of the age of Constantine. In the East rows of identical figures were employed for such cere­monial subjects to increase the impressive effect; here in the West the symmetrical composition is enlivened by many new and freshly observed touches of realism, episodes, national types, national costumes and the like. These reliefs are not masterpieces of great art, but they are instinct with a vigour that was to guarantee the Roman relief a long life when, after the foundation of Constantinople and the removal of the Court, a strong national consciousness grew up in Rome and Italy.

The architectural structure of the Arch of Constantine, in contrast to that of Septimius Severus in the Forum, is inspired by strong classical sentiment. It is the expression of a movement which may be termed ‘Constantinian classicism.’ It stands at the end of a powerful movement in architectural creation. The currents and undercurrents that reach the late-classical from the previous age can best be traced in portraits and reliefs; but high above these stands the great efflorescence of architecture, which above all marks out the true character of the period of the Tetrarchy and Constantine. In the buildings of the Tetrarchy Roman art rose once again, after the Flavian and Trajanic periods, to a great achievement which still impresses us today.

Besides Rome there now appear the new Imperial residences in Nicomedia, Thessalonica, Milan, and Treves, and in addition to these the shifting Imperial courts and headquarters. It was not merely the ‘infinita quaedam cupiditas aedificandi,’ the ‘building mania’ of Diocletian himself that was here manifested. His co-regents and their followers also had great buildings to their credit. It is not their mere numbers, but rather the size and boldness of the architectural conceptions in these structures that is remarkable. Is this architectural climax under the Tetrarchy a kind of international manifestation with parallel developments in the several Western and Eastern parts of the Empire, or is it the product of one people, whether Roman, Greek, or barbarian? In the various Imperial residences there is inevitably visible an element of local tradition, displayed especially in technique and handicraft, but also on higher planes of work. Furthermore, there seem to have been travelling workshops with their decorators and masons, and we can apparently recognize influences from Asia Minor at work in the Balkans and in Rome. But the architects certainly travelled too; and the main architectural concepts are so definitely Roman, that we can undoubtedly treat the buildings of the Tetrarchy as the latest flowering of Roman Architecture.

The military tradition in which Diocletian was reared, and his national Roman sentiment, explain why his place of retirement at Split, as well as the palace at Palmyra and perhaps also other residences, was built in the form of a Roman camp. We recall the derivation of the Forum Traianum from the Praetorium of a camp. The title castra, preserved in an inscription at Palmyra, applies, like the word stratopedon, not to a fortified defensive camp, but to the imperial court or head­quarters camp. The masterly character of the planning which distinguished architecture under the Tetrarchy is apparent in the clever use of variation. At Palmyra, for example, by reason of the general lie of the landscape, the ceremonial rooms form the central point of the whole complex. At Split, on the other hand, these rooms face the sea, turning their back on the camp. The imperial Baths at Treves have a ground-plan which combines essential unity with movement. The numerous apses in which the inner rooms project outwards lend great variety to the plastic form of the exterior. By the side of this symphony of cross-vaults, domes and half-domes there stands a building serving quite another purpose; the plain, simple, large hall of the flat-roofed basilica.

The Baths of Diocletian in Rome followed the traditional ground-plan of the other great Roman Thermae. But there are differences too. With dominating sureness and simplicity the whole central complex is drawn together and becomes a unit, while the side-courts get a new main axis. The plan of Constantine’s Baths was adapted to the configuration of the ground. It was a very bold idea, both technically and artistically, to isolate the kind of unit that had hitherto formed the cross-vaulted hall in Thermae, and to employ this design for building the detached Basilica of Maxentius, completed by Constantine. The latter altered it somewhat by adding a side-façade and a corresponding apse. The somewhat purposeless central hall, that had formerly been incorporated in the great Baths, now achieved, in the building of Maxentius, a kind of structural direction which terminated in an apse. The six large chambers, which lie between the piers that take the thrust, and which in the Thermae had served as passage ways or departments of the Baths, were now thrown open so as to form real spaces which are part of the main hall. They were not aisles flanking a nave, but they opened out like six gigantic side­chapels set at right angles to the hall. Similar structures exist in the Liwans of Sassanian palaces. Mention must be made of Diocletian’s reconstruction of the Curia in the Forum with its cross-vaults springing straight out of the walls, of the cellae of the double-temple of Venus and Roma vaulted by Maxentius, of the gigantic structures of the Circus of Maxentius, as well as of further experiments with the problem of the circular building. This finally culminated in a new production exemplified by the tomb of S. Costanza, in which the dome rests upon a ring of double­ columns which separate the central structure from a barrel , vaulted ambulatory.

The Basilica of Maxentius marks both the climax and the end of ancient Roman-classical development, which found no continuation. But early Constantinian architects created one monumental type of building which was to have a greater after-effect than any other. The Lateran Basilica was probably the first large Christian ecclesiastical building, for the tradition holds that it is mater et caput omnium ecclesiarum. A fixed type for the Christian basilica had not previously existed save on a small scale. Of course certain basic principles like the separation of clergy and congregation, and the significant relation of the whole building to the altar, would already have been established in various early meeting rooms. The Christian Basilica with its flat wooden roof has been regarded as retrograde when compared with the Basilica of Maxentius. But it is just as deliberately built on a different plan as is the Basilica of Treves on a plan differing from that of the neighbouring Thermae. The desire for the parallel movement of nave and aisles could not be realized in a cross-vaulted hall. Furthermore, a view obtained which was contrary to that prevalent since vaulting was adopted for romanesque architecture, and the vault was thought of as something secular contrasting with the sacred, horizontal, coffered ceiling of the temple. The monumental type of the Christian basilica was created by architects of genius to serve the needs of Christian worship. It is the peculiarity of the actual Roman basilica with transepts that the impressive flowing movement of nave and aisles is arrested by the transepts and turned to serenity. The creation of the Christian basilica is only properly appreciated when it is revealed as the most brilliant achievement of the last efflorescence of Roman architecture. A second climax was indeed reached by ancient architecture, but it was a unique achievement and it was final. This was Justinian’s church of the Holy Wisdom in Constantinople, grounded on a long development that was rooted in the Hellenism of Asia Minor.

The victory of the Church resulted in a classicizing of Christian art. It coincided with a reaction in portraits and relief work against the dry style of the Tetrarchy. After the year 315 there appear beside the expressionist portraits others that link on to an Augustan style. With this classicism there is associated a return to a more plastic kind of modelling. There is pure Hellenistic inspiration, short-lived though it was, in the creation of Christian sculpture in the round. One splendid work of art made in Egypt for the Emperor, the porphyry sarcophagus destined to hold the remains of Helena, shows traces of a revolt against primitive expressionism and of a return to the classical forms of an earlier style. From the time of the reliefs on the Arch of Constantine we can trace, both on the pagan and more especially on the Christian sarcophagi of Rome, a striving after more beauty of form and nobility of expression; and this attains an apex in the year 359 with the sarcophagus of Junius Bassus.

Thus in every branch of art the early years of Constantine marked the first beginnings of a tide that was to sweep beyond the year 330 in an unbroken flood.