Page:An Elementary History of Art.djvu/350

 320 Painting who lived in the latter part of the fourth century B.C. (about 450 — 400), and who was one of the first artists to paint movable pictures. His distinctive characteristics were grandeur of form and finish of execution : that he also attained to marvellous power of imitation is proved by the various tales which have been preserved of the rivalry between him and his cotemporary Parrhasius, a native of Ephesus, who flourished about 400 b.c. It is related, amongst other anecdotes, that at a trial of skill between Zeuxis and Parrhasius, when the former painted a bunch of grapes so exactly like the original that on its exhibi- tion the birds came to peck at it, and the latter a picture covered with a fine curtain, Zeuxis exclaimed, " Remove your curtain, and let us see this masterpiece." The curtain was the picture I Among Zeuxis's most celebrated paintings were his Helen, in the temple of Hera, at Croton, painted from the five most beautiful maidens he could find ; his Infant Hercules strangling Serpents, and his Zeus and Marsyas bound. In the time of Alexander, some such transition took place in Greek painting as we shall have occasion to notice in speaking of the Italian painters of the seventeenth century, when imitative dexterity and high finish was more highly thought of than inventive power. The chief painters of this period — known as the " period of refine- ment " — were Pamphilus of Amphipolis, and his pupils Apelles, Pausias of Sicyon, Protogenes of Camirus, who, however, painted at Rhodes, and who is said to have devoted seven years to the production of his Iahjsus ; Nicomachus and his pupil and brother Aristeides of Thebes, for one of whose pictures no less than £25,000 is