The two greatest historians of Roman art in our century, G. Rodenwaldt and R. Bianchi Bandinelli, spoke rightly of the essentially bipolar nature of art at Rome. In decorative painting Tiberian Classicism carries on the Augustan heritage in order to achieve an air of matestas and gravitas in individual reception areas. Basically the reign of Tiberius was a pedestrian repetition of the pattern laid down by the Principate of Augustus. On the whole art in the Tiberian age followed in the path traced by Augustus, but it accentuates the traits of formal stiffness and the progressive loss of organic unity and ideological coherence of the Augustan model. To the eternal formal bipolarity between Classicism and the baroque, within which was played out the Augustan experience of official, programmatic art and its crisis in the age of Claudius and Nero, there corresponds the no less eternal bipolarity of mentalities and idioms between 'art of the centre of power' and 'plebeian art'.