The discoveries which have been made of late years in the excavations in the Acropolis of Pergamos have restored to the admiration of centuries treasures which mark an epoch in the history of plastic art, and throw a vivid light on the last phase with which Greek art completed its evolution. Works so moving as those of the sculptors of Pergamos had never been produced before. Art devoted itself entirely to the embodiment and representation of physical pain in its innumerable manifestations, as though the observation and experience of suffering, the study of the pathetic, having accumulated for centuries in the mind of artists and people, burst forth impetuously at the sight of the victories over the barbarians who threatened their country with invasion. We have in Italy some of the most celebrated masterpieces of the school of Pergamos. As all know them I shall only mention the statue of the dying Gaul in the Museo Capitolino. The head is not so beautiful as those of the Greek statues, but, on the other hand, it wears so vivid an expression of pain that we feel touched at the brave death of this barbarian, who breathes his last leaning upon his shield, while the blood gushes from the fatal wound. This statue, together with the group in the Villa Ludovisi to which it belongs, was placed on the Acropolis of Pergamos about 200 years before the vulgar era, in order to celebrate the victory of Attalus I. over the barbarians. In the second group we have again a barbarian before us, who, pursued by an enemy, kills his wife, and then with the same dagger, as he looks behind him, his eyes wild with the fear that the enemy may be near and make him a prisoner before he dies, he stabs himself. Brizio, in his 'Studies of the Laocoon,’ speaking of the school of Pergamos, says: 'After an exhaustive examination of the statues in the museums of Naples, Venice, Rome, and St. Germain-en-Laye, not only the intention of the artists becomes evident, but also the pleasure they took in representing with the greatest perspicuity the death of combatants with all the torture and agony preceding it. In none of the monuments prior to this epoch is anything similar to be found, although Greek sculpture, beginning with Phidias, boasts a conspicuous series of representations of combats. In all these scenes the artists endeavoured to find new situations, to recreate and vary the groups of combatants, to reproduce the ardour of the fight; they even represented the wounded and the dead, but simply as episodes; they never made a study of death itself, of its tragic effects, with the manifest object of moving and exciting to the highest degree the compassion of the spectator. In these groups death is rather indicated than represented.