doubtless Antioch must have played their part in the commonest form of artistic decadence; but we have so much of this work certified as Alexandrian, that we are justified in regarding Egypt as its chief and most popular home. Works of this type fall into two classes: the purely grotesque and the extremely naturalistic. The former class is more or less confined to statuettes, of which a number are collected in Perdrizet’s _Bronzes grecs d’Egypte de la Collection Fouquet_, and the account of the Mahdia ship in _Monuments Piot_ for 1909 and 1910. These include gnomes, pygmies, dwarfs (Fig. 21), and little obscene figures of all kinds. Needless to say, Praxitelean qualities of _morbidezza_ and impressionism have no place in art of this kind. We may presume that the demand was primarily foreign and not Greek, though all the skill of Greek sculpture is employed in the faultless execution of many of them. Their Alexandrian origin is better attested than that of the second class of extremely naturalistic works. The latter are more important and more interesting. They include some of the most skilful works of sculpture ever achieved. The splendid negro’s head of Berlin[45] and the fisherman of the Louvre are of undoubted Alexandrian origin, but such works as the fisherman and the peasant woman of the Conservatori[46] or the old women of the Capitol and of Dresden are not so clear in their origin. When we get a statue of this type, combined with some clearly Alexandrian quality, such as the so-called Diogenes of the Villa Albani[47]--a naked beggar carried out with fine realism but also with considerable _morbidezza_ and impressionism--we may claim an Alexandrian origin; but impressionism is rare among such statues, as the artists seem to love to dwell on every detail. We may, however, regard them as a single class irrespective of their individual origin. The Louvre fisherman[48] deserves careful study for its absolutely unsparing truth to nature. The slackness of skin caused by long wading in water, the swelling of the veins through hard work, the feebleness and hollowness of chest due to old age or disease, the coarse peasant’s head, in which each wrinkle is faithfully delineated, deserve our wonder if not our admiration. The little companion pair in the Conservatori, though inferior in workmanship as Roman copies, are also full of interest for their vitality and truth. Finest of all perhaps is the splendid old woman’s head in Dresden (Fig. 22), with its marvellous mimicry of the ravages of age. Such art is decadent, because it is pessimistic, cynical, and unhappy, and because it refuses to select and idealize as it might do even in studies of decay; but of its brilliant execution there can be no doubt. Only the Chinese have made grotesques which can rank with the products of Alexandria.