The present is the second instalment of a description of the Classical Topography of the Roman Campagna, which I hope to complete in the course of time. The scale upon which it is written demands, perhaps, some explanation—and for English readers some apology. I can understand that, for those who are not well acquainted with the localities of which I am treating, it may seem that there is a quite unnecessary fulness of detail, which may tend to obscure the points at issue. But my ambition is, so far as possible, to produce a description which shall be complete up to date (more I cannot claim) and which I shall then supplement as occasion arises —as indeed I am now doing for Part i, the Viae Collatina, Praenestina, and Labicana, which appeared in Papers, i. 125 sqq.

§ I.—That the three historical reliefs, of which two are immured in the north and south walls of the portico of the Villa Borghese, while the third rests on the ground to the left of the entrance, once belonged to a triumphal arch erected by Claudius in commemoration of his conquest of Britain, seems to be the accepted belief at the present time. The reliefs are published under this title in Brunn-Bruckmann's Denkmäler; their provenance from the Arch of Claudius is affirmed without question by Helbig in his guide to the Roman collections, and has been assumed in all recent discussions of the history of Roman art. Nevertheless it has no foundation, save in a conjecture of Nibby, contained in his Monumenti scelti della Villa Borghese, a work published in 1832. The Villa had been stripped of its principal treasures during the Napoleonic period—when some scores of statues and reliefs found their way to Paris, and now form no inconsiderable portion of the sculptures of the Louvre—and their places were partly filled by less important works gathered from the gardens of the Villa and from the other properties of the Borghese. It was thus that the reliefs in question came to be employed in the decoration of the portico; up till that time they had, as it would appear, lain neglected and scarcely noticed in the gardens of the Villa.

The views expressed by Wickhoff upon Roman Art have been widely accepted, as far as concerns monuments whose Roman origin was undoubted. Riegl has approved the ‘shadow theory’ and explained it in his own peculiar art dialect. Petersen alone has combated it; and with such effect as practically to destroy all belief in this theory, which is Wickhoff's main principle in the appreciation of Roman reliefs, especially those of the Flavian period. Since the relief fragments to be discussed in this paper are attributed to the Flavian period, it is necessary to state Wickhoff's views, and their refutation.

Wickhoff remarks that the artist of the Ara Pacis who, he considers, broke with Greek tradition and made a new departure in relief style, ‘allowed the figures in high relief of the front row [of the procession] to cast their shadows on a back row of figures, which were worked so flat on the ground that they could no longer cast any shadows, but stood like silhouettes against the sky.’ …‘When the shadows of the front row of figures fell on them and they themselves cast no shadow, the illusion was created that their shadow fell on the earth behind them, and thus the background vanished behind them.’

A certain number of the drawings ascribed to Pisanello, both in the Recueil Vallardi in the Louvre and elsewhere, are copies, more or less free, of antique originals. The doubts which have been expressed, by Courajod among others, as to the authenticity of some of these drawings are fully justified in the case of those which reproduce ancient coins. Thus we have, on fol. 12. no. 2266 v° of the Recueil Vallardi, a coin with the head of Augustus wearing a radiate crown, inscribed DIVVS AVGVSTVS PATER, and a head of young Heracles in a lion's skin, doubtless taken from a tetradrachm of Alexander the Great. Similar in style and on paper with the same watermark (a triple mount) are four coins: a laureate head of Augustus (?); a radiate head of Augustus; a head of young Heracles in a lion's skin; and a bearded head of Heracles.

The fairly numerous ideal portraits of Homer and the Sages which have come down to us, and the yet more numerous headless herms whose inscriptions bear witness to the frequency of such works in antiquity, naturally suggest that others may exist in our museums representing the more famous rulers and philosophers of the sixtli century, among whom the most interesting and important is Pythagoras. From the Renaissance onwards, archæologists have been on the alert to discover a portrait with some claim to represent him, and no less than seven identifications have been at various times proposed. None, however, has found anything like universal acceptance, in spite of the fact that the numismatic evidence is fuller and more trustworthy than usual. A series of Samian coins show the philosopher either seated or standing before a celestial globe set on a pillar. He is richly draped and is bearded, while a band, whose exact nature is difficult to determine, usually runs round his head. The figures are, however, merely generalized and conventional like those of other poets and sages on the coin types figured by Bernoulli. The Paris contorniate must be reserved for fuller treatment, as a discussion of the literary evidence is important for its right understanding.