Such was the spirit characterizing Agrippa as a lover of art.
Rome an art emporium--Every rich man is more or less a collector-- Chrysogon, Sulla’s freedman, competes with patricians--Scaurus’ extravagant display--The type of a crack collector as described by Petronius Arbiter--The Roman palaces have special rooms for art gatherings--The Pinacotheca, the Library, the Exhedra, etc., according to the rules of Vitruvius--Fashion creates new distinctions in the appreciation of art and curios--The craze for Corinthian bronze and the classification of bronze “patine” --The hobby of murrhines and citrus tables.
We do not know how many private collections there were in Rome when the collectomania finally took the city by storm. A list of Roman collectors in the fashion of the modern work (_Ritz-Pacot_) would be most interesting and enlightening. However, judging from the statues and the public buildings we know to have been replete with objects of art, we gather that as an emporium of art Rome must have attained a magnitude unequalled in past or present times. Why this great collection of art did not transform the Romans into the most artistic people the world has ever seen, is a mystery only to be solved by hypothesis. Either the Romans were innately refractory to the refinements of true art, or, like to all _nouveaux riches_, the field of art merely afforded room for faddists, hobbyists and fashion seekers, and, only as sporadic cases, a few real lovers of good art. However this may be, without discussing the causes, the effect was certainly gigantic: art from every land found its way to Rome, which by force of circumstances thus became a monumental synthesis of art. Even at the time of Constantine, Rome counted 10 basilicas, 11 forums, 11 thermes, 18 aqueducts, 8 bridges, 37 city gates, 29 military roads leading to all parts of the known world, 2 arenas, 8 theatres, 2 circuses, 37 triumphal arches, 5 obelisks, 2 colossal statues, 22 equestrian statues, 423 temples with statues of the gods--eighty of these being in solid gold and seventy-seven in ivory.
It is easy to understand that the above statistics only give a faint idea of the magnificence of Rome, for the 423 streets and 1790 private palaces noted in the same statistics as existing in Rome at the time of Constantine were in a measure respectively open-air museums and repositories of private collections of art, as no patrician mansion, according to Vitruvius, was complete without a place where paintings and objects of art could be exhibited with advantage.