Apelles
-0369–-030 · Ancient Greek painter, court painter of Alexander the Great
Apelles was one of the most admired painters of ancient Greece, active in the 4th century BC. His birthplace is disputed: sources name Colophon, Cos or Ephesus, and he is traditionally linked to Cos, where he died around 308 BC. He matters chiefly because Pliny the Elder, the main source for his work, ranked him above the artists who came before and after him, and his contemporaries credited him with a quality called grace that defined his reputation.
He trained under Pamphilus of Amphipolis at Sicyon, and later writers saw in his work a blend of Dorian thoroughness and Ionic grace. He was drawn to the Macedonian court, painting Philip II and the young Alexander, and became the artist Alexander chose to shape his public image, a commission the king limited to just three artists. His picture of Alexander holding a thunderbolt ranked among his most celebrated works, though Plutarch later faulted it for making the king's complexion too dark.
None of his paintings survives, so his style is known only through literary descriptions. The most influential is Lucian's account of Calumny, an allegory of an innocent youth falsely accused, which inspired Botticelli and Dürer. Ancient writers credited him with extremely fine outline drawing, a restrained palette and a lustrous surface achieved with a black varnish called atramentum. His works included Aphrodite Anadyomene, portraits of Antigonus I Monophthalmus and Artemis surrounded by maidens.
His name became linked with pictorial grace and with constructive criticism. The anecdote of the cobbler who corrected his sandals gave rise to the Spanish saying 'Zapatero, a tus zapatos', a proverb about staying within one's competence. In the Renaissance, Calumny was the example most often cited in debates on the relationship between painting and poetry. Percy Gardner noted that, despite scarce evidence, Apelles's fame rested above all on his line and his grace.
Works (1)
This is an allegory attributed to Apelles, a painter of ancient Greece of whom almost no works survive. The record gives no date, place of origin or details of composition, so its content cannot be described with certainty. Its main interest lies in the name of the artist, one of the most celebrated figures of classical painting, though the work itself cannot be reconstructed from reliable information.
Teachers and pupils
Studied with
- Pamphilus of Amphipolis -0389–-040
Curiosities
A charcoal sketch against a jester
Pliny recounts that rivals bribed the jester of Ptolemy, king of Egypt, to deliver a false invitation to Apelles. When the painter arrived, the furious king demanded to know who had sent it. Apelles took a piece of charcoal from the fireplace and drew the jester's likeness on the wall, and the king recognized him from the first strokes of the sketch.
The horse's foam
The Pyrrhonist philosopher Sextus Empiricus used Apelles to illustrate how ataraxia, freedom from mental disturbance, can be reached. In his account, the painter could not capture the foam of a horse and, in a rage, threw the sponge he used for his brushes at the panel. The mark it left produced exactly the effect he had been seeking.
Faces rewritten
Several of his compositions featuring Alexander were taken to Rome and displayed in public. In two of them, the Emperor Claudius later had Alexander's face replaced with that of his grandfather Augustus. A work by Apelles thus came to show another figure, a reminder that images of power could be reworked.