training, and his work is like that of Cellini, more decorative than creative. It is jewellery on a large scale. He evolved no new style of his own, but set himself to copy and elaborate ancient types to meet the artificial demand for antiquities. Many of the “archaistic” works in our museums belong to this period of production, and as decoration many of them are extremely charming. We have other names of the Pasitelean school, all Greek, such as Stephanus and Menelaus, but there is very little originality or interest in them. The Venus Genetrix in the Louvre is undoubtedly a fine statue, and is probably a faithful copy of the original by Arcesilaus of the first century B.C.[34] But the face, at any rate, quite visibly goes back to the Greek sculpture of the fifth century, and perhaps, as has been suggested, to Alcamenes. It is in the treatment of the transparent drapery that the present artist shows his skill. Skill there was in abundance in those Greek chisels of the first century; even the Farnese Hercules of Glycon and the Medici Venus[35] are astonishing as efforts of chisel-craft, utterly debased and debasing as they are. We know from history that portrait statues had long been common at Rome. The forum was full of them. We saw in an earlier chapter how the old Etruscans had placed terra-cotta portraits of the deceased upon their tombs, and how the old Romans preserved wax images of their forefathers for use at funerals. Most primitive peoples have an instinctive dread of portraiture as a sort of blasphemy. Perhaps the early growth of facial portraiture at Rome was helped by the worship of a man’s _genius_, his luck, his spirit, his guardian angel. The genius naturally was depicted in the likeness of the man himself. So the _imagines_ in a Roman atrium were no mere portraits of defunct ancestors. Rather they were visible presentments of invisible presences. Unfortunately very few unquestionably genuine examples of republican portraiture have survived. Portraits of ancient celebrities were freely constructed at all times, and it is not easy to date them. We have not at Rome as we have in Greece a clear line of artistic development which enables the trained archæologist to date any casual work of art to within half a century almost at a glance. It is now a question of employing more or less skilful Greeks. It is probable that most of the portraits already illustrated in this book were executed under the Cæsars, but they may well go back to earlier if ruder likenesses, and in any case the portraits are interesting for their own sake. The portraits of Julius Cæsar, both the white marble bust in the Vatican Museum[36] and the still more striking example in black basalt in the Barracco Museum at Rome, are, however, almost certainly of contemporary or, at the latest, Augustan date, so real and vivid is the portraiture. There is another very fine black basalt head of Julius in Berlin,[37] but its authenticity has been questioned. It certainly