al, and each succeeding attempt at
imitation was but a step lower in degradation of the art. When they
ceased to study nature they thought to repair the deterioration of the
beauty of form by the finish of the parts, and in a still later period
they gave, instead of a grandeur of style, an exaggeration of form.
Lastly, being utterly unable to cope with their predecessors in the
sculpture of statues, they had recourse to the manufacture of busts
and portraits, which they executed in countless numbers. The art
reached its lowest ebb, and thus the cycle of the development of Greek
sculpture terminated in its last stage--utter decay and degradation.

_Roman._--In the very early periods the Romans imitated the Etruscans,
for, generally speaking, all the works of the first periods of Rome
were executed by Etruscan artists. Their earliest statues of gods were
in clay. Etruscan art exercised the greatest influence in Rome, for
Rome was adorned with monuments of Etruscan art, in its very infancy;
it was a Tuscan called Veturius Mamurius who made the shields
(ancilia) of the temple of Numa, and who made, in bronze, the statue
of Vertumna, a Tuscan deity, in the suburb of Rome. The Romans owed
all their culture to the Etruscans, from whom they learned the arts of
architecture, terra-cotta work, and painting; calling in artists of
that more tasteful race when anything of that sort was required for
the decoration of their simple edifices. The most ancient monuments of
Rome thus corresponded with the contemporaneous style of Etruscan art;
there is thus a similarity in the figures; the attributes alone can
lead one to distinguish them, as these attributes tell if the statue
was connected with the creed or modes of belief of Etruria or Rome.
There was not, therefore, any Roman style, properly so called; the
only distinction to be remarked is that the statues of the early
periods, executed by the Romans, are characterized, like the Romans
themselves of the same period, by a beard and long hair. At a late
period all the architecture, all the sculpture of the public edifices
at Rome, were in the Tuscan style, according to the testimony of
Pliny.

After the second Punic war, Greek artists took the place of Etruscan
artists at Rome; the taking of Syracuse gave the Romans a knowledge of
the beautiful works of Greece, and the treasures of art brought from
Corinth chiefly contributed to awaken a taste among them, and they
soon turned into ri