Page:Vasari - Lives of the Most Excellent Painters, Sculptors, and Architects, volume 1.djvu/26

12 of sculpture is thus affirmed to have come from him. But according to Pliny, this art was carried into Egypt by the Lydian Gyges, who, standing near a fire, and observing his own shadow, instantly sketched himself on the wall with a piece of charcoal; and from that time, it was customary, as Pliny further says, to draw in outline only without colour, a method afterwards re-discovered, by less simple means, by Philocles, the Egyptian, as also by Cleanthes and Ardices of Corinth, and by Telephanes of Sicyon.

The Corinthian Cleophantes was the first among the Greeks who used colours, and Apollodorus was the first who handled the pencil ; they were followed by Polygnotus of Thasos, by Zeuxis and Timagoras of Chalcis, with Pythias and Aglaophon, all widely renowned. After these masters came the far-famed Apelles, so highly esteemed for his talents, as Lucian informs us, by Alexander the Great (that acute discriminator of worth and pretension), and so richly endowed by Heaven,—as almost all the best sculptors and painters ever have been. For not only have they been poets also, as we read of Pacuvius, but philosophers likewise, as in the case of Metrodorus, who, profound in philosophy as skilful in painting, and being deputed by the Athenians to Rome to adorn the triumph of Paulus Emliius, was retained by that commander to instruct his sons in philosophy.

We find, then, that the art of sculpture was zealously cultivated by the Greeks, among whom many excellent artists appeared ; those great masters, the Athenian Phidias, with Praxiteles and Polycletus, were of the number, while Lysippus and Pyrgoteles, worked successfully in intaglio, and Pygmalion produced admirable reliefs in ivory—nay, of him it was affirmed, that his prayers obtained life and soul for the statue of a virgin which he had formed. Painting was in like manner honoured, and those who practised it successfully were rewarded among the ancient Greeks and Romans ; this is proved by their according the rights of citizenship, and the most exalted dignities, to such as attained high distinction in these arts, both of which flourished so greatly in