Roman Sculpture

This school of art first appeared in Rome 148 B.C., when the victorious Romans bore off from Greece her most prized works of sculpture; but it never acquired great activity until the reigns of Caesar and Augustus.

How little the Romans were prepared to appreciate Grecian art, is illustrated in Mummius, who threatened the laborers, packing the paintings and sculpture taken from Corinth, that, if any were injured or lost, they would have to make others like them.

The taste for sculpture, cultivated by these collections at Rome, gave rise to a new Attic School in Rome.

Nearly all that is finest in the rich Italian collections of antique art is ascribed to the Augustan age. The most important statues of this period are the Medicean Venus, in the Tribune of the Uffizzi at Florence, by Cleomenes of Athens (after the Cnidian Venus of Praxiteles); the Farnese Hercules, of the Museum of Naples, by Glycon; the famous Torso of the Belvedere at Rome, by Apollonius of Athens.

To this period also belong the Caryatides with which Diogenes of Athens adorned the Pantheon.