14
feeling that nothing could be done there and then
as worthy of the occasion. Explain it as you
will, it was a confession of inferiority to the past,
whether economic or artistic, as happened long
before when Rarnses 11 had statues of earlier
pharaohs rededicated to himself. I t furnishes at
the same time proof that even in Rome the
dilapidation and destruction of earlier achieve-
ments, which went on incessantly and has
scarcely stopped yet, had begun already.
We shall pass by these more dignified, more
gracious and more spirited reliefs made for
Trajan, Hadrian and Marcus Aurelius, and con-
fine ourselves to those carved expressly for the
arch.
They are of several kinds and produce each its
own effect : there are the military scenes and the
ornamental allegorical figures in medallions, on
keystones, spandrils and bases ; there are the
two cpisodcs of Constantine addressing the
senators (Oratio) and of Constantine distributing
largesses (Coxgiariurn), and there are finally the
heads in the Hadrianic hunting-scenes recut to
turn them into portraits of Constantine and
Licinius.
The military scenes represent the march of an
army, the siege of a fortified place (presumably
Verona), a battle at a bridge (Ponte hfolle on
the Tiber), and the triumphal entrance into a
town, in this instance Rome.
In the first and last scenes one is struck by a
certain impetuosity in the concerted action of thc
figures. In the first, the March (Plate 14), the
soldiers on foot stride along with a swinging gait,
taking long steps, with feet gripping the ground
and arms and shoulders free to twist and turn.
Behind them, officers (presumably) accompany a
car drawn by four horses preceded by pack
animals. Here the action is not so clear. We
do not see the legs of all the persons who
accompany the chariot or of the quadrupeds,
which fact renders it puzzling to understand thcir
spatial relations. In the last, the Entrance into
Rome (Plate 15), these difficulties are avoided.
The composition is, if anything, more crowded,
but one has no doubt as to which are riding,
which walking, which seated on the car.
Faulty as these last two friezes may be, they
yet attempt to represent actuality. The frieze
of the Siege (Plate 16) on the contrary looks as
toy-like as if it had been done after puppets
arranged as in an Italian presepio, or as rnarion-
ettcs moved backward and forward on the same
wire. The chubby faces with a look of offended
surprise, the city walls no higher than a garden
enclosure and so weak that one legionary batters
against them as if by himself he could push them
over, strengthen this impression. The river battle
(Plate 17), with horses and riders struggling in
the water, sappers and trumpeters pell-mell,
reminds one (not to the advantage of this frieze)
of sarcophagi of this period. Similar in style are
four relick of horse and foot (Plates 18, I 9) on the
corners of the same wall and the medallions of
sun and moon (Plates 20, 21)on the side fagade.
Beforc going further, let us recollect that we
are looking at something different from what
presented itself to the eye of the spectator who
saw these reliefs when they were fresh. Sixteen
centuries of wind and rain, storm and sunshine,
frost and heat have not only cracked and worn
down their surfaces, chipping off bits here and
there, but also removed every trace of the stucco,
the inlay, the paint that completed and gave them
a finish that we nowadays can not recover, not
even in imagination. What we behold here and
everywhere in the remains of later and latest
Antiquity is but the sadly damaged preparation
for an effect that has vanished. We see only the
long grooves in the draperies, the drill-holes in
the hair, the hasty and violent chisel marks, none
of them meant to be visible and used no doubt as
an expeditious way of carving sculpture, whether
in the round or in relief, for the effect the artist
had in mind.
Parenthetically, we may remark that this pro-
cedure was one of the principal reasons for the
decline of sculpture. I t could not but end in
encouraging habits opposed to the specifically
plastic modelling which characterizes the great
art of earlier centuries, even if stone, marble and
bronze were never left without a certain treatment
of their surfaces. Whatever that treatment was,
we may infer that it was not done to facilitate
and expedite pictorial impressions by abandoning
delicate and subtle effects in modelling the figures.

I said just now that not even in imagination can
we reconstruct the aspect that the reliefs we are
studying may have offered when fresh. Happily
we can get an idea of what they were like by
looking at two oblong panels of a wedding chest
(Plate 15) representing the story of" Trajan and
the Widow" at Klagenfurt (Note 3). In the
opinion of many they can be by no less a n artist
than Andrea Mantegna himself. Their peculi-
arity is that they are not pictures but polychrome
bas-reliefs, and, although so much smaller, they
are next of kin to those of late Antiquity. I t
took, let me add, an archaeologist of genius to
achieve this result, for Mantegna was no less
an archaeologist if he painted his archaeology
instead of writing it.
Strip these Klagenfurt reliefs of pigment and
of the prcparation for receiving it. Then expose
I
these wood-carvings to the air not for sixteen
centuries but for as many months. At the end
of that time they would produce the same
crumbling uncertain effect as do the bas-reliefs
on the Arch of Constantine.
If we agree that the plastic monuments of late
Antiquity were painted and gilded (Note 4), the
talk of the Riegls and Wickhoffs about deliber-
ately thought-out preference for the play of light
'9
and shade and emancipation from background
with the consequent abstraction of space, attri-
buted by the first to the artists of late Antiquity
and for the " impressionism " and " illusionism ",
ascribed to them by the other, would turn out
to be ill founded. Riegl has so much to say of
great importance and employs a mind of such
calibre in saying it that his book on the late
Roman arts and crafts remains in our field one
of the most stimulating and suggestive ever
written. Yet its success has been far from what
Wickhoff's brilfiantly shallow and misguided
Vienna Genesis has enjoyed. Translated almost
immediately into English, it became the most-
quoted book on the sculpture produced during
the earlier centuries of our era.
Strange, by the way, how averse the English-
reading public of my time has been and is to
translated art and history books of value. Of
Burckhardt's Cicerone Mrs. Clough's translation
has been out of print this half-century, and none
of his other works are known in English. Nor
are Edward Meyer's. Woefflin's masterpiece
" Die A-lassische Kunrt " has, it is true, appeared
in English, but has found few readers, certainly
less than Worringer's fantasies.
The idea that the artists of late Antiquity

makes any differenceto what we are to think of their
art to-day. If awkward and infantile, it is only
more deplorable if it was carefully thought out.
So much for Wickhoff-his followers would say
" so little " ! Now a word about Riegl's Kunst-
wollen. If he meant an unconscious tendency or
urge, as Schopenhauer employs the word Wille,
or the equivalent of zeitgeist, we can accept it as
synonymous with the word " taste" or even
" style " characterizing an epoch. Nor can I
recall that Riegl means anything different from,
or in the least more metaphysical than, the word
" style " as we commonly use it. In the volume
preparatory to this (see Note I ) I attempted to
describe how imper~etrablewas a real style, how
tyrannical and how unswerving. Any smart
tailor, dressmaker or " interior decorator " can
start a fashion. A style cannot be manufactured
by taking thought. Its origin, emergence and
formation are due to many causes, and call into
play thc mental and moral energies of a people
for previous centuries, besides the technical
activities of its artists. The factors are too many
for an equation and besides most of these factors
remain unknown. What produced the Attic
style of the vth century, what the French style
known as Gothic, what the Baroque ? Certainly
23
no one person nor any number of known indi-
viduals. The individual may create marvels and
leave scarcely a mark on the style of his period,
as was the case with a genius almost out of the
blue like Piero della Francesca ; or be like
Michelangelo whose activity as a figure artist led
to the fading out of Tuscan painting and to the
reduction of its sculpture to jewellery (even when,
as with Cellini, it was life-size or over) and who
can be regarded, particularly in architecture, as
a precursor of tlie Baroque. Yet, while at work,
he did not bothei about consequences. Only as
an old old man, on his last visit to the Sistine
Chapel, he looked a t his Judgment and cried
out : " What horrors this will lead to ! " If he
handed on so much more to his successors than
Piero, was it not because the latter appeared out
of the blue, as we said, while Michelangelo
brought to a head tendencies inherent in several
generations of technical experimenters ?
A style, then, is not a fashion and, far from
being planned, calculated and willed, is rarely
recognized until it has shaped every art product
of a period, and a long period at that. Even we,
with all our accumulated experience and piercing
self-consciousness, have no idea of what to future
ages may seem to have been the style of our own
24
day. We know our fashions only, and these in
connection chiefly with the only arts still fully
alive, the arts of personal adornment and interior
decoration. Our fashions follow one another so
swiftly that they leave no precise impress on the
mind, except of newness and ever more newness.
Yet it is probable that posterity will discover that
we had a style. So although we to-day perceive
clearly enough that the age of Constantine had
a " style "-rather a m a n n e r 4 f its own, it is
more than doubtful whether contemporaries were
aware of it, and we must not assume that its
artists deliberately thought it out. More likely
they yawncd, stretched, stumbled, tumbled into
it, finding, as is the case so clamorously to-day,
eulogists to sing their praises.
Now let us turn back to the early ~ ~ t h - c e n t u r y
reliefs on the Arch of Constantine. I n examining
them I shall avoid criticism based on elements
that I believe were not meant for the spectator's
eye, and confine myself to features that the tooth
of time could not alter so easily, features like
structure, proportion, action and composition.
The drill and its various uses, the chisel and
25
its shape, the round and oblong holes made by
these tools, might help us to ascertain dates, to
constitute groups, but we can afford to ignore
them except where they intrude as integral parts
of the artistic effect.
I am not a student of anatomy, and many
things that would shock and distress Professore
Alessandro della Seta, author of a most praise-
worthy treatise on anatomy in the Fine Arts,
leave me unaware and unaffected. T o strike me,
faults of structure or the relations of different
parts of the body 'to each other would have to be
obviously bad. I am less ashamed to make this
confession as I suspect that most enjoyers of the
figure arts are no more sensitive in these matters
than I am. SO I find little to disturb me in the
anatomy of the figures in these military reliefs.
Perhaps in the March (Plates 22, 23) the mall
seen rising over the horses like a bust in profile
to the right has an arm attached in a n odd and
ugly way to the shoulder. Of the proportions it
is hard to judge, for they are sacrificed to the
design ; but as a rule the figures are thick-set
and undersized in a way that has hardly a
parallel in the art of preceding decades. In the
March alone there are in the left part taller
men ; one, before the chariot, appears extra-tall,
26
another, carrying a lance over his shoulder,
swaggers along as if proud of his height. The
general who directs the Siege, protected by a
flying Victory (Plate 16),towers much higher
than the fortified town. O n the contrary, horses
and mules are, as is nearly universal in art,
represented as smaller than in actuality, and
likewise buildings are subjected to that sense of
man's own importance which led to the medieval
representation of everything but man himself as
little more than pictographic.
The action remains satisfactory. In the relief
representing the Entrance into a Town (Plate 24)
the soldiers march forward in a concerted way
reminiscent of better times. The compositions
are simplicity itself. They are merely illustra-
tive. The only attempt at distribution of masses
consists in trying to niakc heads face each other
in profile as if they were talking to each other
(Plates 14, 23). Depth is indicated, but not
achieved, by making the foreground soldiers
much shorter than those behind who rise shoulder
high above them. One is tempted to believe that
the sculptor, to make this helpless procedure
plausible, has given the foreground troops ex-
tremely youthful countenances, as if not yet f d l
grown. The typcs vary from these chubby lads
27
in the Entrance (Plate 24) to the rather heavy
morose officers in the March (Plate 23). No
doubt each of these reliefi was allotted to a
different individual.
As for the treatment of space in these friezes
(after having made allowance for what painting
may have done for them), in the Siege it is puerile,
and elsewhere it is only less so. Compare the
Siege with one still so remarkable a t Leptis (Plate
25), only a century earlier, or the marvellous
one of the vth century B.c., done no doubt under
Assyrian influence, with perspective well on the
way to ours, from Gjoelbashi-Trysa in Lycia near
Myra now at Vienna (Plate 26, Note 5). Even
a humble leaden medal found in the Saone and
now in the Bibliothtque Nationale coined to
commemorate Maximian's victory over the
Germans in 287-8--only twenty-five years earlier
than our frieze-with a view of the Rhine rushing
between Mayence and Castel, retains far clearer
space relations (Note 6).
It would seem as if the sculptor of the March
just referred to carved the large medallions of
Sun and Moon (Plates 20, 21) as well. Of these
medallions the superiority may be due to their
being close copies of more classical originals and
retain something of their appeal, despitc the
A.C.--C;
28
uncertain anatomy of thc principal figures. I t is
worthy of rcmark that conventional notation
replacing serious drawing scarcely appears as yet
in these reliefs, in fact is limited to a pear-shaped
figure representing the vortex of the tossing waves
in the battle scene (Plate 27j, and of points for
quieter swirls in the smoother waters under
Okea~lusin the medallion of the sun.
Coming now to the merely ornamental
carvings, we can begin with the Victories in the
spandrels over the central arch. These are about
as effective as the sun and moon of the large
medallions. The two on the south front (Plates
28, 29) are perhaps better because they are less
ambitious than the couple on thc city side, where
thc legs and draperies leave one puzzling (Plates
30, 3 1 ) . Yet neither they nor the small nudes
undcr them representing the seasons are of a
different or inferior quality to the sun and moon
just referred to. Nor are they as inferior to the
corresponding figures in the Arch of Severus, as
are the friezes of the Arch of Constantine that
we have already examined.
Great, on thc other barid, is the drop to the
spralvling, huge-faced, vast-chested, puffed out
nudes in the spandrels over the side arches (Plates
32, 33). They look gelatinous, as if poured out
and coagulated rather than modelled or carved
in solid stone. Flabby, relaxed with no possi-
bility of return to tension, nearly boneless, and
well on the way to resemble figures in post-Gupta
Hindoo sculpture. Yet these river gods are
anatomically satisfactory compared with the
victories on the bases (Plate 34). As a n integral
part in military tradition these last have been
too continually used in monumental sculpture
not to retain an almost impressive bulkiness.
Anatomically, however, they are nearly on as
low a level as eaily imperial work done in peri-
pheral Italian regions like Susa, in westernmost
Gaul, in the heart of the Balkans, in Phrygia or
in Palmyra. The reproductions of Palmyrene
sculpture of our 1st century (Note 7) reveal also
that the tendency toward unstructural, stringy
draperies that we find realized in Rome in
our ~ v t hcentury was already started some
three centuries earlier in a marginal province
of art like Palmyra. The farthest outposts of
civilization in direct and continuous contact with
the barbarians, anticipate decline by hundreds of
years. As in these peripheral works of art, so in
the Victories on the Arch of Constantine the folds
of draperies are reduced, to a mesh of fine closely
parallellines engraved or simply scratched without
30
any attempt at modelling : lines as unfunc-
tional as any that will appear in the worst
medieval painting. On the other hand, for all
the faults that may be found with the groups of
prisoners on the bases (Plate 38), they retain a
certain grandeur, a certain nobility even, which
the Roman victors were magnanimous enough to
attribute to the vanquished.
Let us briefly turn back to what we have been
seeing. Nothing new or startling, except the
strange fact that thc capital of the world, the seat
of wealth and culture, the greatest patroness of
the arts if not the surest and most refined, which
to the end of the 111rd century had been pro-
ducing, apart from public monuments, hundreds
of " pagan " sarcophagi endowed with a certain
wistful, crepuscular charm, should find, when
celebrating the victorious soldier, the restorer of
" law and order ", the mighty Emperor Con-
stantine, no abler artists than the executants of
these reliefs. None are less marginal, less peri-
3'
pheral, less ultra-provincial, and many far more
ordinary, more disintegrated, more shapeless
than any on the stone and marble coffins done
at the same time for Christians who could not,
or dared not afford better workmanship.
There would seem but one explanation. I t is
that in the troubled state of the world, and of
Rome in particular, the stonecutters who were
real sculptors (and Greeks almost to a man) ran
away for relative safety to Gaul, to Spain, or back
to the Aegean world, leaving behind them the
humble native ariisans who had little to lose and
nowhere to go to. I t is as if the fashionable dress-
makers, tailors and bootmakers deserted Paris
and London, leaving behind nothing but cobblers
and sweated sempstresses. If the absence of the
better class lasted long enough and became
definite, the unskilled labourers would have
things their own way and end by producing a
'' popular art ", an art we admire nowadays as
the expression of that mystic entity called " the
people ". Of this, more later. For Rome the
end was not yet, not for another century and
more. No inconsiderable number of artists did
return, although it may be doubted whether
the best of those that had run away were among
them. None had come back, it would seem,

when this arch of Constantine was being erected.
There was nothing for it but to employ what
artisans could be discovered, with the results that
we have noted.
O r shall we assume with the fashionable art-
historians of to-day that these friezes on the arch
we are discussing were done purposefully by the
best sculptors of the time, each vying with the
other to express more completely the Kunstwollen,
the zeitgeist which was inspiring them and their
patrons ? Which, then, had the best of it ? Was
it any of the carvers of the military friezes ? O r
was it the author of the sprawling moon-faced
river-gods in the spandrels ? O r perhaps the
sculptor of the victories on the pedestals with
their shapeless bodies covered with meshes of
thread instead of draperies ? Which of these
achievements was conceived deliberately to carry
the future in its womb ? If we should find it in
the figures farthest frorn what had hitherto been
the normal, it is these victories that reached the
goal of deliberate purposeful newness and other-
ness. Let us see whether we can catch in the
act the genius who created these shapes.
I n the Boboli gardens of Florerice there are two
pedestals or bases which probably served for an
arch erected in Kome in 294 to honour Dio-
33
cletian. Among the least bad of the victories on
the bases of the Arch of Constantine is one in
profile to our left with a palm in her right hand and
a barbarian captive cowering at her feet. Pro-
fessor Kaehler, who identified the Boboli pedestals
(Note 8), reproduces it (Plate 34) and on the
opposite page (Plate 35) a victory from the
Boboli pedestals. The one is a transcript of the
other and for most of us there can be no question
as to which is the original.
Except to the expert eye the Diocletianic
victory might go hack to Hadrian or even
Trajan, retaining much of the distinction as well
as grace that still radiated from the sculpture of
those last happy days of Antiquity. The pro-
portions are elegant, the draperies rational. The
palm branches are to be sure stiff and wooden but
may have looked better when enlivened with
stucco and paint. Then glance at the corre-
sponding figure from the Arch of Constantine.
4 I t shows a certain independence in the head,
which seems to have been more massive, and
instead of ringlets curling down daintily to the
shoulders, the hair is held with a ribbon and piled
into a bun. The chest is broader and flatter and
the draperies hetween throat, breast and girdle,
instead of being functional, are reduced to a
34
rectangle filled with close parallel lines that have
no meaning. Under the belt the anatomy ceases
to be legible, and an uninstructed person would
scarccly recognize belly, hips, and members under
these straight-lined or curving presumably crtpe-
&-Chine draperies. The whole is a desiccated,
petrified version of the one in the Boboli gardens,
a version moreover scratched on the stone by an
artisan who knew nothing of the nude, let alone
in life, not even in art, not even in debased art.
He and his partners and assistants were the best,
no doubt, that could be discovered in Rome, still
the capital of the world, to carve the pedcstals
of this triumphal arch. Very likely these were
all copicd from monuments then existing and still
as classical as those of the Boboli gardcns (see
also the two groups of soldiers and prisoners,
Plates 36, 37).
hly primary intercst, however, is not to prove
that artists had temporarily dcserted Rome,
leaving merc artisans to exccute a work of such
importancc as the Arch of Constantine. I bring
the suggestion because I can account in no other
way for the inferiority of the reliefs on that
structure--an inferiority so unexpected after such
a short interval of time had elasped between its
erection and that of the arch whence come the
35
Boboli bases or of the reliefs nearly contemporary
with them on the arch of GaHerius a t Salonica
(Note g), never the centre of the Oecumene nor
capital of the empire, as Rome still was. More-
over, as I suggested, there must have been a
reflux of artists to Rome, artists of a lower order
to be sure, yet artists and not mere artisans :
whereas these who worked on the Arch of Con-
stantine never rise above a rough artisanship that
carelessly repeats well-known classic models.
This is not the occasion for demonstrating by
what successive kopying the carvings of the base
reached their degree of abjectness. The student
may amuse himself by tracing them back through
the fragments of an arch discovered by Curnont
(Memorie della Pontificia Accadernia Ronzana di
Archeologia, 111, 1932, Plates I-III), and the
arches of Severus, at Rome and Leptis, to the
arch of Trajan a t Beneventum. What I want to
prove is that nothing could have been further
from the conceit of these humble stone-cutters
than that they were precursors, pioneers, torch-
bearers of a revolution, of an entirely new way
of feeling, visualizing and representing the world
outside themselves. No process, no momentum,
no facilis desccnsus, is more unaware of ultimate
results than successive copying.
 Except in unique moments like the vth century
B.C. in Hellas or some three thousand years earlier
in Egypt and Sumeria, conscious, deliberate, pur-
poseful, goalful art is constantly looking backward,
renaissancing-if I may be allowed this uncouth
but necessary verb-striving to recapture some
phase of its choice in the art of the past, or at least
to model itself upon or draw inspiration from it.
One may assume that ever since the vth
century B.c., European art, whenever it was self-
conscious, that is to say whenever it rose above
artisanship, whenever artists did not themselves
sink to mere fumbling (as in our day), yet talking
with bated breath of their mud-pies of clay and
their messes of paint as if they were hierophants
of some mystic rite4onscious European art has
ne\.er ceased to look backward to light its way
as it was groping forward. Thus the Dioscuri
ant1 Victories carved on the Boboli bases are
perfectly classical (Note 10) in intention and not
altogether unsuccessful in execution. Techni-
calities alone betray how far they are from their
source in relatively early Hellenistic sculpture.
As far as the ivory tablets celebrating an alliance
between the great senatorial families of Symmachi
and Nichomachi, a century later, but as self-
consciously, as deliberately Renaissance (Plate 39).
Thus far, we have seen nothing on the arch
that was unmistakably new. The reliefs were of
the kind and quality to be expected when mere
artisanship was feeding on the crumbs fallen from
the table of art. The Oratio addressed to the
Senators (Plate 40) and the distribution of money,
food and wine to the children of the people
(Congiarium, Plate 40), represented in relief on the
city side of the arch, are of another kind. They
are unexpected. They are no longer " antique ".
They seem medieval and to one's first startled
glance look like the work of the childish sculptors
who preceded Niccolb Pisano in Tuscany (Plate
41) or even like some crowded Romanesque
X11th-century reliefs in France (Plate 42) (Note
11). This impression is attenuated when one
comes closer and recognizes the same types and
tricks of trade with which we became acquainted
while studying the military reliefs on the same