Parrhasios (painter)

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Parrhasios ( Greek  Παρράσιος ) was a Greek painter from Ephesus . He was the son and pupil of Euenor and worked in the second half of the 5th century until the first decades of the 4th century BC. In Athens .

Life

Parrhasios named his Ephesian origin and the name of his father himself on an epigram that he had attached to one of his pictures, and is also mostly addressed as Ephesians. The elder Seneca calls him Athenian, which is probably due to the fact that Parrhasios spent most of his life in Athens.

Parrhasios' Akme is mentioned by Pliny with the 95th Olympiad , i.e. 400 BC. That his father stated with the 90th Olympiad. Quintilian gives the time of the Peloponnesian War as a prime. However, Parrhasios must have already had an important position as a painter at this time, since, according to the consistent testimony of Pausanias and Athenagoras, he designed the shield for the around 450/440 BC. Chr. Athena Promachos created. The last work mentioned is a portrait of Philiskus , a student of Diogenes , which he wrote not much earlier than around 385/380 BC because of the dates of his life. May have painted. His life dates more towards the end of the 5th century BC. One can only start if one assumes that the Promachos shield was made much later than the statue itself.

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In literary terms, Parrhasios has received a rich complete work of more than thirty pictures, and the portrayal of his personality is also extensive.

Is the oldest secure work of Parrhasios the draft shield of Athena Promachos with its described by Pausanias Centauromachy that from Mys v to 450/440. Was executed in bronze. For Mys, he also created the template for a chased Heracleotide Skyphos depicting an iliupersis .

Probably around 410 BC His painting of the demos of Athens is to be set. In the picture he depicted the most diverse characters represented by the demos: the Athenian people were at the same time fickle, choleric, unjust and agile, they were relentless and mild, compassionate and proud, lofty and devoted, grim and fearful. It is difficult to get an exact idea of ​​the painting, as the question of whether everything was expressed in a single person, for example by means of the possibilities of depicting opposing emotions known from theater masks, or whether a whole group of twelve people represented the demos and its characters , cannot be clarified. According to Pliny, he solved the problem in a witty way ( pinxit demon Atheniensium argumento quoque ingenioso ). The conversation between Parrhasios and Socrates about the representation of the state of the soul in art in the context of the history of the origins of the demos may have taken place in Xenophon .

Before the Rhodian synoicism of the year 408/407 BC He painted a Heracles and several small pictures for Lindos . Herakles would have "appeared to him in a dream, exactly as one sees him." Probably after 408/407 BC. He created the panel painting for Rhodes with Meleager , Heracles and Perseus , which miraculously survived three lightning strikes and still existed at the time of Pliny. Around 385/380 BC The last of his works that can be dated was the portrait of Philiskos, flanked by Dionysus and Arete .

A series of paintings with an erotic content, so-called libidines , are - as a genre for the first time in Euripides in his 428 BC. . Listed AD Hippolytus mentioned - after 425 v. BC originated. Among them is a depiction of fellatio , in qua Meleagro Atalanta ore morigeratur and which hung in Tiberius' bedchamber , acquired for 600,000 sesterces. The painting of an Archigallos , a high priest of the Cybele , possibly also belongs in this context , which is possibly identical to the image of Megabyzos , also of a Cybele priest, mentioned in Tzetzes .

From the rest of the work the following are mentioned in the written tradition: A self-portrait with the features of Hermes , which he signed with a pseudonym for fear of being charged with blasphemy, the asebie ; a Prometheus , in order to be able to depict his suffering faithfully, he allegedly bought and tortured a slave from the war against Olynthus ; a Theseus , who was originally in Athens and, from Sulla in 86 BC. Brought to Rome and placed in the Capitoline Temple , which was lost in the fire of AD 70; a Philoctetes on Lemnos ; the healing of Telephus in the presence of Achilles , Agamemnon and Odysseus , an image that Pliny praised as much as his image of Aeneas , Castor and Polydeukes ; in the artistic competition allegedly with Euphranor , he is said to have painted an insane Odysseus in Ephesus.

In the competition on Samos with Timanthes he created a painting that showed Ajax and Odysseus fighting over Achilles' weapons . Timanthes won with a large majority of the vote. Parrhasios is said to have responded on behalf of his painted hero Ajax by saying that it was "a shame to have been overcome for the second time by an unworthy opponent."

Finally, he painted a series of genre pictures, for example an old nurse with a child, a priest, two ephebes , a nauarch , two very vaunted hoplites , one walking so that you thought you could see him sweating, the other - and you could hear literally a sigh of relief - freeing yourself from your weapons. Numerous of his smaller paintings on parchment and tablets were used by subsequent artists as templates and study objects.

He created one of his most famous works in competition with Zeuxis , whose painted grapes the birds pecked at, while Zeuxis himself was deceived by a curtain painted by Parrhasios, so that he wanted to push the veil aside to better view the painting underneath.

Position and person

After Zeuxis and Apelles , no painter and his work are mentioned as often in ancient tradition as Parrhasios. According to Pliny, referring to authors from the 3rd century BC. BC as called by Xenocrates of Athens , he was the first to transfer the rules of symmetria into painting. That before the 5th century BC In the ancient understanding of the word, Symmetria means the proportion in which different aspects of one and the same thing are related to one another, and can mean “moist” - “dry”, “warm” - “cold”, but also to parts of buildings and structural members be related to the limbs of a body. In contrast to asymmetria, symmetria is always the “good and correct” proportion.

Parrhasios gave delicacy to the expression, elegance to the hair and beauty to the mouth. With his outline drawings of the body, he achieved first place among all artists. “That is the highest level of delicacy in painting” ( haec est picturae summa subtilitas ). He knew how to draw the contours and their curves so perfectly that a spatial effect of depth was created with a clear allocation of the spatial levels, the in front of and behind - a practical occupation with the problems of stereometry , as later the philosophy of the Pythagoreans also discussed theoretically with Plato in particular . At the same time, his skills in the area of ​​internal drawing were less developed, although still perfect. His painting seems to have contained elements of the trompe-l'œil or at least initiated its development, an illusionistic painting which, according to anecdotal tradition, knew how to deceive even its competitor Zeuxis.

Parrhasios' character is portrayed as complex. On the one hand, he was apparently a happy person who sang to himself while painting. On the other hand, it was biting and insulting as soon as it was defeated or, as in the case of the competition with Timanthes, criticized its work. He walked around in purple robes, wore a golden wreath or a white scarf as head covering and called himself the "luxury lover " ( ἁβροδίαιτος ). He was arrogant and extremely impressed with himself, and saw himself as the first, princeps , among the painters who had led art to its limits, which could no longer be exceeded.

Remarks

  1. ↑ Valerius Harpokration sv Παρράσιος ; Suda sv Παράσιος ; Pliny , Naturalis historia 35, 60 and 67; Athenaios , Deipnosophistai 12, 543; Strabo 14, 1, 25.
  2. ↑ Seneca, controversiae 10, 5, 34; also a scholion to Horace , carmina 4.
  3. ↑ Pliny, Naturalis historia 35, 64.
  4. ↑ Pliny, Naturalis historia 35, 60.
  5. ↑ Quintilian, institutio oratoria 12, 10, 4.
  6. ↑ Pausanias 1, 28, 2; Athenagoras, Apologia pro Christiana 11, 782 B.
  7. ↑ Pliny, Naturalis historia 35, 70.
  8. ↑ Athenaios, Deipnosophistai 11, 782 B.
  9. ↑ Pliny, Naturalis historia 35, 69.
  10. ↑ Xenophon, Memorabilia 3, 10, 1.
  11. ↑ Pliny, Naturalis historia 35, 71; Athenaios, Deipnosophistai 12, 543.
  12. ↑ Athenaios, Deipnosophistai 15, 687.
  13. ↑ Pliny, Naturalis historia 35, 69.
  14. ↑ Pliny, Naturalis historia 35, 70.
  15. ↑ Pliny, Naturalis historia 35, 72.
  16. ↑ Euripides, Hippolytus with a wreath 1005.
  17. ↑ Suetonius , Tiberius 44, 2.
  18. ↑ Pliny, Naturalis historia 35, 70.
  19. ^ Tzetzes 8, 398.
  20. ↑ Themistios , orationes 2, 29 c.
  21. ↑ Seneca, controversiae 10, 5, 34.
  22. ↑ Pliny, Naturalis historia 35, 72; Plutarch, Theseus 4 and moralia 346 B.
  23. ↑ Anthologia Palatina 16, 3, 112 and 113.
  24. ↑ Pliny, Naturalis historia 35, 71
  25. ^ Plutarch, moralia 4 B.
  26. ↑ Pliny, Naturalis historia 35, 72; Claudius Aelianus , varia historia 18, 2.
  27. ↑ Pliny, Naturalis historia 35, 72; without naming the Timanthes also Athenaios , Deipnosophistai 12, 543.
  28. ^ All in Pliny, Naturalis historia 35, 70.
  29. ↑ Pliny, Naturalis historia 35, 71.
  30. ↑ Pliny, Naturalis historia 35, 65.
  31. ↑ Pliny, Naturalis historia 35, 64.
  32. ↑ Pliny, Naturalis historia 35, 67.
  33. ↑ Hildebrecht Hommel : Symmetry in the mirror image of antiquity. Meeting reports of the Heidelberg Academy of Sciences, Philosophical-Historical Class, 5th report, 1986, p. 21 f. Note 32.
  34. ↑ Pliny, Naturalis historia 35, 67.
  35. ↑ Pliny, Naturalis historia 35, 67 f.
  36. ↑ See e.g. Plato, Politeia 528.
  37. ↑ Pliny, Naturalis historia 35, 67 f.
  38. ^ Theophrast in Athenaios, Deipnosophistai 12, 543; Claudius Aelianus, Varia historia 11, 11.
  39. ↑ Pliny, Naturalis historia 35, 71; Athenaios, Deipnosophistai 12, 543.

literature

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personal data
SURNAME Parrhasios
BRIEF DESCRIPTION Greek painter
DATE OF BIRTH 5th century BC Chr.
PLACE OF BIRTH Ephesus , Greece
DATE OF DEATH around 380 BC Chr.