y ancient temple of Ceres,
appears to have been no other than Demophilus of Himera, the teacher
of Zeuxis (about 300). The most instructive illustrations are
furnished by those branches of art in which we are able to form a
comparative judgment, partly from ancient testimonies, partly from
our own observation. Of Latin works in stone scarcely anything else
survives than the stone sarcophagus of the Roman consul Lucius Scipio,
wrought at the close of this period in the Doric style; but its noble
simplicity puts to shame all similar Etruscan works. Many beautiful
bronzes of an antique chaste style of art, particularly helmets,
candelabra, and the like articles, have been taken from Etruscan
tombs; but which of these works is equal to the bronze she-wolf
erected from the proceeds of fines in 458 at the Ruminal fig-tree in
the Roman Forum, and still forming the finest ornament of the Capitol?
And that the Latin metal-founders as little shrank from great
enterprises as the Etruscans, is shown by the colossal bronze figure
of Jupiter on the Capitol erected by Spurius Carvilius (consul in 461)
from the melted equipments of the Samnites, the chisellings of which
sufficed to cast the statue of the victor that stood at the feet of
the Colossus; this statue of Jupiter was visible even from the Alban
Mount. Amongst the cast copper coins by far the finest belong to
southern Latium; the Roman and Umbrian are tolerable, the Etruscan
almost destitute of any image and often really barbarous.
The fresco-paintings, which Gaius Fabius executed in the temple of
Health on the Capitol, dedicated in 452, obtained in design and
colouring the praise even of connoisseurs trained in Greek art in
the Augustan age; and the art-enthusiasts of the empire commended
the frescoes of Caere, but with still greater emphasis those of Rome,
Lanuvium, and Ardea, as masterpieces of painting. Engraving on metal,
which in Latium decorated not the hand-mirror, as in Etruria, but the
toilet-casket with its elegant outlines, was practised to a far less
extent in Latium and almost exclusively in Praeneste. There are
excellent works of art among the copper mirrors of Etruria as among
the caskets of Praeneste; but it was a work of the latter kind, and
in fact a work which most probably originated in the workshop of a
Praenestine master at this epoch,(41) regarding which it could with
truth be affirmed that scarcely another product of the graving of
antiquity bear