LYSIP'PUS (Lat., from Gk. Atioarrosi A celebrated Greek sculptor. A native of Sicyon, in the Peloponnesus, he was at first a worker in bronze, and then applied himself to statuary, becoming the head of the Sicyonian school, and the founder of a new style, which was at the basis of a large part of the sculpture of the Hellenistic age. The dates of his birth and death are not known. but he was an older contemporary of Alexander the Great, whom he long survived. His artistic activity thus falls in the last part of the fourth century. He claimed to have had no master, but to have learned his art from the famous Doryphorus as Canon of I'olyclitus. In fact, he seems to have taken that work as his starting-point, and developed a new system of proportions in which he united many of the characteristics of the Attic and Peloponnesian schools. his statues were marked by a small head, long legs, slender figure, and fine natural ism in the treatment of the .hair. llis pupil Xenocrates, whose treatise on art aimed to exalt his master as the culmination of Greek art, claimed that he was the first to represent men as they really were. Such statues are numer ous in the marble copies of our museums, and many have been brought into connection with Lysippus. The most celebrated is the .Apoxyo menos of the Vatican, which represents a young athlete using the strigil, or scraper, after the bath. Another undoubted copy is the marble group of Daocbos the Thessalian and his an cestors, discovered at Delphi, which must repro duce the bronzes of Lysippus at Pharsalia. His
portraits of Alexander were celebrated, and be was said to be the only artist in bronze to whom the King would sit. It seems probable that the bust of Alexander in the Louvre and perhaps the bronze mounted Alexander from Pompeii are based on Lysippean originals.. Ile is said to have produced 1500 statues, all in bronze, and to have given special attention to the technical details of the casting. He executed the equestrian statues of twenty-five Macedonians who fell at the passage of the Granicus, which Metellus transported to Rome; a fine bronze statue of Cupid, with a bow; several statues of Jupiter, one of which, 60 feet high. was at Tarentum ; one of Hercules, which was removed to Rome; the Stun-god, drawn in a chariot by four horses; "Op portunity" (Kairos), represented as a youth with wings on his ankles on the point of flying from the earth. Of these we have no certain traces, unless, as is not improbable, a standing Hercules in the Pitti Palace is derived from this source. The same type distorted into the over-developed athlete appears in the later well-known Fsrnese Hercules by Glycol'. To him or his immediate followers may also be attributed the Silenus holding the infant Dionysus, of which there are several extant copies, and the seated Hermes in bronze from Herculaneum.