Page:Fineartasketchi01wyatgoog.djvu/60

2. The excellence of the materials employed in building, and the good and sound methods of converting them from their native condition into the specific forms which fit them for the builder's use.

3. The free employment of the Arch, and its cognate forms, the cylindrical vault, the conic vault or semi-dome, and the complete dome.

4. The variety of the forms of plan into which all its great structures were cast, so as to adapt them, without any slavish respect for tradition, directly for the practical uses to which the structures were to be put.

5. An elaborate magnificence of decoration tending at last to over-elaboration.

This over-elaboration ultimately occasionally converted structural elements into decorative ones; a practice subversive at once of simplicity and propriety in all Architecture.

In later imperial times, under Constantine and under Diocletian, Roman art became all but barbaric—grand in its utilitarianism, but wanting in artistic repose and dignity.

The Romans in their works, as in their theology, worshiped less pure gods than the Greeks. They found that to be magnificent was easier than to be beautiful, and they learned to heap up splendour with a boundless profusion. Still their monuments must ever command our respect from their excellent building and common sense adaptation of plan to necessity. All their edifices are eminently useful and fitted to answer the purposes for which they were intended. In this sense the Romans were masters of the economy of structure, and they set us a noble example in their practice of that true wisdom which in architecture may be said to consist in making all that is built answer the uses for which the building was intended in a thoroughly utilitarian fashion, but without any stint or degrading parsimony.