  The properties of the vacuum are addressed in the two- and four-dimensional
quark models for QCD. It is demonstrated that the two-dimensional QCD ('t Hooft
model) possesses only one possible vacuum state - the solution to the mass-gap
equation, which provides spontaneous breaking of the chiral symmetry (SBCS). On
the contrary, the four-dimensional theory with confinement modeled by the
linear potential supplied by the Coulomb OGE interaction, not only has the
chirally-noninvariant ground vacuum state, but it possesses an excited vacuum
replica, which also exhibits SBCS and can realize as a metastable intermediate
state of hadronic systems. We discuss the influence of the latter on physical
observables as well as on the possibility to probe the vacuum background fields
in QCD.
