CHAPTER XI. AN ACCOUNT OF THE MOST CELEBRATED WORKS IN BRONZE, AND OF THE ARTISTS WHO EXECUTED THEM.
An almost innumerable multitude of artists have been rendered famous by their statues and figures of smaller size. Before all others is Phidias, the Athenian,[218] who executed the Jupiter at Olympia, in ivory and gold, but who also made figures in bronze as well. He flourished in the eighty-third Olympiad, about the year of our City, 300. In the ninetieth Olympiad there were Polycletus, Phradmon, Myron, Pythagoras, Scopas, and Perellus. In the hundred and fourth Olympiad, flourished Praxiteles[219] and Euphranor; in the hundred and thirteenth, Lysippus of Sicyon, who was the contemporary of Alexander the Great, his brother Lysistratus, and Silanion, who was remarkable for having acquired great celebrity without any instructor: Zeuxis was his pupil.
The most celebrated of these artists, though born at different epochs, have joined in a trial of skill in the Amazons which they have respectively made. When these statues were dedicated in the Temple of Diana at Ephesus, it was agreed, in order to ascertain which was the best, that it should be left to the judgment of the artists themselves who were then present: upon which, it was evident that that was the best, which all the artists agreed in considering as the next best to his own. Accordingly, the first rank was assigned to Polycletus, the second to Phidias, the third to Cresilas, the fourth to Cydon, and the fifth to Phradmon.
Besides the Olympian Jupiter, which no one has ever equalled, Phidias also executed in ivory the erect statue of Minerva, which is in the Parthenon at Athens. He also made in bronze, beside the Amazon above mentioned, a Minerva, of such exquisite beauty, that it received its name from its fine proportions. He also made the Cliduchus, and another Minerva, which Paulus Æmilius dedicated at Rome in the Temple of Fortune of the present day. Also the two statues, draped with the pallium, which Catulus erected in the same temple; and a nude colossal statue.
Polycletus of Sicyon,[220] the pupil of Agelades, executed the Diadumenos, the statue of an effeminate youth, and remarkable for having cost one hundred talents; also the statue of a youth full of manly vigor, and called the spear-bearer. In this he made what the artists have called the Model statue, from which, as from a sort of standard, they study the lineaments: so that he, of all men, is thought in one work of art to have exhausted all the resources of art. He also made statues of a man using the body-scraper, and of a naked man challenging to play at dice; as also of two naked boys playing at dice, and known as the Astragalizontes; they are now in the atrium of the Emperor Titus, and it is generally considered, that there can be no work more perfect than this. He also executed a Mercury, which was formerly at Lysimachia; a Hercules seizing his arms, which is now at Rome. Polycletus is generally considered as having attained the highest excellence in statuary, and as having perfected the art, which Phidias invented. A discovery which was entirely his own, was the art of placing statues on one leg. It is remarked, however, by Varro, that his statues are all square-built, and made very much after the same model.