The direct copies of this age need not be considered here. Direct copying from the antique as distinguished from adaptation is a new feature very eloquent of the poverty of original ideas both in the buyer and seller of statues. But it is important to realize that the Roman market made sculpture for the first time a really paying business, and therefore saved it from the possibility of extinction. Had it not been for the new Attic school of sculptors, who sprang up in the two preceding generations, it is hard to see how Augustus could have secured the workmen for his great Roman buildings, which formed the basis of a fresh artistic development in Roman imperial sculpture. The copies of this period are the best and most faithful which we possess. They have still some vitality of their own, and are not the dead and soulless caricatures produced by a later age. But in addition to their copying work the latest generation of Attic artists busied themselves with free adaptations from the antique on lines laid down by contemporary art. These productions are to be distinguished both from purely archaistic works, which copy the style as well as the poses of ancient sculpture, and from works like the Aphrodite of Melos, which make a wide selection from ancient styles and poses. Statues such as the Farnese Herakles of Glycon,[102] the Apollo Belvedere,[103] or the Artemis of Versailles,[104] are not eclectic at all; they are older types taken over and translated into modern style. They show less originality than the Melian goddess, because there is no real change of pose or of meaning. An old statue is simply worked out with a new technique. Thus the Farnese Herakles gives a Hellenistic rendering of a statue by Lysippos, while the Apollo Belvedere is perhaps a new version of a work by Leochares. The former attempts to render the massive strength of the hero by immense exaggeration of muscular development in a style worse than anything perpetrated at Pergamon. The latter attempts to outdo the elegance of its original by an ultra-refinement of surface in every direction, and by an affected stage-pose and gesture. In both cases we see the effect of commercialism on art, for the artist no longer works on his own high standard of achievement. He is bound by the tastes of the patrons for whom he caters, and the uneducated Roman buyer liked to see strength shown by mighty muscles and refinement by daintiness of gesture. Both the Herakles of Glycon and the Apollo Belvedere are fine pieces of sculpture, but as works of art they are little short of abominable. We have no evidence about the original of the Artemis of Versailles, a statue of somewhat similar type to the Apollo. We may notice how the little fold of drapery above the left knee is turned up without any justification simply for the purpose of displaying the outline of the leg. The Medici Venus in Florence[105] is an adaptation of the later version of the Praxitelean nude Aphrodite, the Capitoline