Page:An Elementary History of Art.djvu/351

 In Greece. 321 said to have been given by Attalus of Pergamus ; Nicias of Athens, who generally painted in encaustic, and who was celebrated for his female figures ; Euphranor the Isthmian ; and lastly, Theon of Samos, who was one of the first to give impetus to the decline of Greek art. It was, however, in the person of Apelles, who flourished between 350 and 300 B.C., that Greek painting reached its fullest development. He was, it is supposed, a native of Colophon : he studied first at Ephesus, and afterwards at Amphipolis under Pamphilus. His chief characteristics y ■=*- Fig. 118. — Painting- of still life. Rhoj>ography. On a wall of a house at Pompeii. were his feeling for grace and beauty of form, his skill in portraiture, and the chaste simplicity of his colouring. His masterpieces were his Venus Anadyomene — in which the goddess was seen rising from the waves wringing the water from her hair, the falling drops forming a shimmer- ing veil about her figure, — Calumny, and his portrait of Alexander the Great grasping the thunderbolt of Zeus. After the death of Alexander, painting in Greece sen- sibly declined. The grand style was still cultivated for several centuries ; but a marked preference was shown for a realistic manner, and for paintings of a secondary class, known as rhopography, such as would now be called eha Y