There are many Greek artists enumerated before the age of Panxus, of whom there is little material to remark. His brother Phidias, the illustrious statuary, was likewise a painter before he devoted himself entirely to sculpture. About the same period flourished Polygnotus of Thasus, several of whose pictures were afterwards carried to Rome, and two of them are described by Pausanias, in whose time they must have been five or six hundred years old ; so that their mode of painting had at least the merit• of great durability. Polygnotus is much praised by Pliny for composition; and Aristotle gives him the reputation of painting the manners or character of the age with great accuracy. He worked chiefly for the decoration of the great portico begun by Panxus. His compositions were of great size; and when we find him praised for the indig nant flush of modesty in the countenance of his Cassandra, it argues no mean powers of pencil. Micon, his cotem porary and rival, in decorating the Pcecile, painted the battles of the Amazons, and excelled in his representation of horses, which is far from an easy part of the art. He had a rival in this particular branch, in Pauson, of whom there is an anecdote recorded by Plutarch, which, if true, says very little for the style or excellence of the painter. He had received a commission to paint the picture of a horse rolling on his back. He represented the animal, however, galloping; and when the purchaser complained that his order was not executed, Pauson desired him to turn the picture upside down, and he would find that it was so. If this was not a jest of the day upon the paint er's imperfections, it seems to indicate that pictures were then painted, as we see on Etruscan vases, like basso-re lievos, without either ground or sky, and quite detached, upon a dark back ground. Still the picture could have no light and shade, and must, in design, have been very imperfect, to admit of the energetic play of the muscles and limbs, in the action of galloping, having any resem blance, when reversed, to the loose motions of a horse roll ing. Dionysius of Colophon, who painted in miniature, excelled in the minute accuracy of his works. Pliny enumerates various other artists who preceded the fourth century before Christ; but it was not until the ninety fourth Olympiad, that the art reached its greatest epoch in Greece, under Apollodorus and Zeuxis, at which time there shone a celebrated galaxy of competitors for the palm of painting.
Apollodorus of Athens advanced the art of painting considerably in the important matter of light and shade, by remarking that the shade always partook of the colour of the object, which he endeavoured to blend in the shad ing, so as merely to obscure the colour. The want of this art in his predecessors, must have occasioned great harsh ness in their mode of colouring; and accordingly all the ancient authors agree in giving great preference to his works, some of which were still existing in Pliny's time at Pergamo.
Zeuxis formed an epoch in the art of painting by the refinement of his composition, quitting the crowded style of the more ancient school, who sought to increase the interest of their subject, and convey its full meaning, more by accumulating figures and accessaries, than trust ing to the individual perfections of their principal figures. Zeuxis studied and selected what was most beautiful in nature, which, of course, led him to the preference of the female sex. Be was very proud of his famous picture of Helen, composed of the perfections of the five most beautiful girls of Crotona, who sat to the painter for that purpose. He painted Jupiter surrounded by all the deities, and the infant Hercules strangling the serpent, with his mother in alarm beside him, and Amphitrion coming to his assistance. He became so rich from the produce of
his pictures, and so vain from the admiration they attract ed, that at last he merely exhibited his works, alleging that they were incapable of being paid for ; a resolution in which the history of the art, both in ancient and modern times, does not show that he found many imitators. The trite anecdote of the bunch of grapes which the bird came to pick, is told of Zeuxis, and argues less for his praise than is generally attributed to him from this judgment of the giddy birds, as the grapes were said to have been held up by a child, whose resemblance does not seem to have been sufficiently striking to frighten the birds away. Such attempted illusions are unworthy of the art, and have gone far to cramp the genius of some of our modern schools, which, like the older German artists, showed ta lent capable of accomplishing better things than to waste their ingenuity on tricks. The Italians call it inganni, and, among them, Bassano condescended to practise it very much. Ile painted a book as if laid upon one of his pictures, and met with what he conceived a glorious re ward, when Annibal Caracci was deceived by it, and tried to remove the book. The painter Gennari possessed and practised this trick so successfully, as to obtain the sur name of the Magician ; but in fact it argues no great stretch of art to deceive animals at least, as, without de monstrating much judgment in the fine arts, dogs have often been known to recognise their master's picture, and the more readily that the portrait was that sort of daub emphatically denominated a staring likeness. Neither can we allow much discrimination, or picture knowledge, in the feathered tribe, who are so easily scared from a new sown field by the tattered effigies erected for that purpose.
To return to Zeuxis; his vanity led him upon one oc casion to appear at the Olympic games in a purple robe, as indicative of his sovereignty in the arts, with his name embroidered upon it in gold letters, which obtained him the mortification of a very cold reception for the picture he exhibited. It was that of the female centaur suckling her young. The male centaur appears in the back ground, holding up a lion cub to frighten the baby cen taurs. The painter had succeeded in representing a very beautiful woman in the upper part of the figure, and as beautiful a mare in the under half, reclining on a green field. She was represented doubly provided as a nurse, one of the little monsters being satisfied with the animal food of the quadrupeds; while the woman half caresses and nourishes the other in her bosom. Lucian, who de scribes this picture, of which he had seen a copy, (the original having been lost at sea when sent by Sylla to Italy,) says that it was a masterly performance, full of a great many drolleries, very proper to the subject, and finely imagined, making the picture exceedingly gay. Ile particularly admires the imagination and execution of so whimsical a subject ; the rough ferocity of the male, with vast shoulders entirely covered with hair, and smiling in a wild and ghastly manner at the effect of his own jest, contrasted with the exquisite beauty of the 'female, like a very fine woman, though ornamented with horse's ears; and so dexterously was the commixtion of natures manag ed, as almost to elude observation. One of the infants seems savage and fierce, while the other, with childish simplicity and alarm, stares at the lion, while it hangs on its mother's breast.