of art brought from Corinth by Mummius, from Athens
by Sulla, and from Syracuse by Marcellus, introduced a taste for
paintings and statues in their public buildings, which eventually
became an absorbing passion with many distinguished Romans. Towards
the end of the republic Rome was full of painters. Julius Caesar,
Agrippa, Augustus, were among the earliest great patrons of artists.
Suetonius informs us that Caesar expended great sums in the purchase of
pictures by the old masters. Under Augustus, Marcus Ludius painted
marine subjects, landscape decorations, and historic landscape as
ornamentation for the apartments of villas and country houses. He
invented that style of decoration which we now call arabesque or
grotesque. It spread rapidly, insomuch that the baths of Titus and
Livia, the remains discovered at Cumae, Pozzuoli, Herculaneum, Stabiae,
Pompeii, in short, whatever buildings about that date have been found
in good preservation, afford numerous and beautiful examples of it. At
this time, also, a passion for portrait painting prevailed; an art
which flattered their vanity was more suited to the tastes of the
Romans than the art which could produce beautiful and refined works
similar to those of Greece. Portraits must have been exceedingly
numerous; Varro made a collection of the portraits of 700 eminent men.
Portraits, decorative and scene painting, seem to have engrossed the
art. The example, or rather the pretensions, of Nero must also have
contributed to encourage painting in Rome; but Roman artists were,
however, but few in number; the victories of the consuls, and the
rapine of the praetors, were sufficient to adorn Rome with all the
master-pieces of Greece and Italy. They introduced the fashion of
having a taste for the beautiful works of Greek art. At a later
period, such was the corrupt state of taste, that painting was almost
left to be practiced by slaves, and the painter was estimated by the
quantity of work that he could do in a day.

The remains of painting found at Pompeii, Herculaneum, and in the
baths of Titus, at Rome, are the only paintings which can give us any
idea of the coloring and painting of the ancients, which, though they
exhibit many beauties, particularly in composition, are evidently the
works of inferior artists in a period of decline. At Pompeii there is
scarcely a house the walls of which are not decorated with fresco
paintings. The smallest apartments were lined with stucco, pa