he
advance to such luxurious structures in Latium first took place
under Etruscan influence, is proved by the designation of the
oldest style of temple architecture and of the oldest style of house
architecture respectively as Tuscanic.(20) As concerns the character
of this transference, the Grecian temple probably imitated the
general outlines of the tent or dwelling-house; but it was essentially
built of hewn stone and covered with tiles, and the nature of the
stone and the baked clay suggested to the Greek the laws of necessity
and beauty. The Etruscan on the other hand remained a stranger to
the strict Greek distinction between the dwelling of man necessarily
erected of wood and the dwelling of the gods necessarily formed
of stone. The peculiar characteristics of the Tuscan temple--the
outline approaching nearer to a square, the higher gable, the
greater breadth of the intervals between the columns, above all,
the increased inclination of the roof and the singular projection
of the roof-corbels beyond the supporting columns--all arose out
of the greater approximation of the temple to the dwelling-house,
and out of the peculiarities of wooden architecture.

Plastic Art in Italy

The plastic and delineative arts are more recent than architecture;
the house must be built before any attempt is made to decorate
gable and walls. It is not probable that these arts really gained
a place in Italy during the regal period of Rome; it was only
in Etruria, where commerce and piracy early gave rise to a great
concentration of riches, that art or handicraft--if the term be
preferred--obtained a footing in the earliest times. Greek art,
when it acted on Etruria, was still, as its copy shows, at a very
primitive stage, and the Etruscans may have learned from the Greeks
the art of working in clay and metal at a period not much later than
that at which they borrowed from them the alphabet. The silver
coins of Populonia, almost the only works that can be with any
precision assigned to this period, give no very high idea of Etruscan
artistic skill as it then stood; yet the best of the Etruscan works
in bronze, to which the later critics of art assigned so high a
place, may have belonged to this primitive age; and the Etruscan
terra-cottas also cannot have been altogether despicable, for the
oldest works in baked clay placed in the Roman temples--the statue
of the Capitoline Jupiter, and the four-horse chariot on the roof
of