Roman painting will require but a brief notice. Early in the Augustan age, easel-painting was neglected, and wall-decoration came into special favor, as the handmaid of luxury. In the time of Vespasian, according to Pliny, painting was a perishing art, and with the most splendid colors nothing worth speaking of was produced. Scenography, originally derived from Asia Minor, was cultivated at Rome, by Ludius. He executed, as room decorations, villas and porticoes, artificial gardens, parks, streams, canals, and marine views, enlivened with comical figures in all sorts of rural occupations. The perspective theatrical paintings, by which the Greek drama was illustrated, gradually extended the art of landscape, since it increased the demand for a deceptive imagination of inanimate objects, such as buildings, woods, and rocks. This was imitated by the Romans, and transferred from the playhouse to their halls adorned with pillars, where the long surfaces of the wall were at first covered with pictures in small, and afterwards with wide prospects of towns, shores of the sea, and extensive pastures upon which the cattle are feeding. In the time of the later Cæsars, landscape painting became a distinct branch; but, according to the specimens preserved to us in Herculaneum, Pompeii, and Stabiæ, these pictures of nature were more allied to private villas and artificial gardens, than to broad views of the open country. In the age of Hadrian, painting flourished to a limited degree. Ætion made a composition of Alexander and Roxane, with Erotes busied about him in the king's armor, which Lucian greatly admired. But painting continued to sink into a mere daubing of colors, and was commonly an occupation of slaves to adorn walls in the most expeditious manner, according to the caprice of tasteless tyrants. Foreign artists were often employed servilely to copy the old masters; while the purity of native taste was exemplified in one of the annual ceremonies at Rome, which consisted in fresh painting the statue of Jupiter, in the capitol, with bright vermilion. The time delighted in tricks of all kinds. In the golden house of Nero, a Pallas, by Fabullus, was admired, which looked at every one who directed his eyes toward her; and the picture of the tyrant himself, one hundred and twenty feet high, on canvass, is justly reckoned by Pliny as one of the fooleries of the age.