The Gentle Art of Faking

e interested in art-Genesis of their art collections-The first collectors and their methods-Noted citizen's i

free institutions, like the pinacotheca of the Acropolis, the collection of carved stone at the Parthenon, the gymnasium of the Areopagus, containing a collection of busts of the most celebrated philosophers. With this public spirit in the enjoyment of art Delphi gathered a famous picture gallery in the oracular temple and, according to Pliny, possessed no fewer than three18 thousand statues, one of them being the famous golden Apollo. From this temple Nero carried off five hundred bronze statues, and l

cially in Athens, were called "wall breakers," and obtained this odd nickname from their peculiar method of entering houses, namely, by making a hole through the wall rather than troubling to unlock the door. Such flimsy dwellings can hardl

sion for knowledge, the Greeks had fine private libraries, such as those of Aristotle and Theophrastus. But even these, though containing the rarest and most precious works

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me the belief that matters of art were trifling amusements that might be left as toys to their conquered people. Thus for a long time Romans saw in the enjoyment of art the chief source of the weakening and degeneration of the enemies they had subju

abius Maximus, called the "shield of Rome," rose among others in protest, saying that after the siege of Tarentum, he, unlike Marcellus, had brought home only gold and valuable plunder. As for statues, more especially images, he had preferred to

I, 13) that in sending to Rome what might be styled the artistic booty of the destroyed city he consigned the statues and paintings to those in charge

the Roman lover of art persisted in seeing in the artist either a slave or a good-for-nothing, and never for a moment regarded the artist as worth the consideration he granted to art. Notwithstanding his belief of being a lover of art and an intelligent conno

art, calls the profession of the painter a vile occupation (sordidum studium), and wonders how Fabius, a Roman an

l arts. Petronius, the magister elegantiorum of Rome, two hundred years after the destruction of Corinth, that is to say when Rome had reac

n of art by circumstances, the Romans, though willing and fully prepared to pay extravagant prices for works of art, should still

name of painter, sculptor or architect. And they must have been legion if we consider the magnitude of the work accomplished. Vitruvius (VII, 15) informs us that21 Damophilus, Gorgas, Agesilas, Pasiteles and other artists were called t

oped in Rome a whole world of lovers of art with all its true and fictitious enthusiasms, furnishing a grou

dually progressed, taste developed and plunder became more enlightened. Fulvius Nobilior, to quote one of the many conquerors who brought artistic war booty to Rome, enriched it with 285

mphs of Roman generals as did slaves and prisoners of war. Occasionally returning officials brought home with them pillaged artistic mementoes of the place they had been ruling in the name of mighty

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visers. Fulvius Nobilior was accompanied by the poet Ennius (Strabo, B. X, 5), whose suggestion it may have been to place Hercules in the midst of the Nine Muses playing the lyre like an Apollo, a metamorphosis of the god showing that the

followed in their triumphs to enhance the importance of their conquest, in time the generals began

eece and Asia Minor, is said to have acquired a sure eye for valuable objets de virtu; Verres, who with an excellent eye had robbed and collected all that came within his reach, was perhaps Rome's

their artistic craving. Sulla placed on the proscription list the names of all possessors of artistic objects who were so unwise as to refuse to give them up to him. Mark Antony did

he Romans, not only guided by an artistic sense of discrimination, but with all

considered the richest emporium of art in Greece, had contributed-must have been magnificent and without an equal-except, perhaps, that of V