Zeuxis mistakenly asked for it to be drawn aside, thinking that Parrhasius’ painting
was behind it (35, 65). The anecdote suggests absolute mastery of shading, fore-
shortening and mixing of colour in the interests of naturalistic illusion. (Whether the
Greeks composed painting with fully developed perspective, having a single vanishing
point, has been much debated.)
However, the Greek artist did not aim simply to copy nature, as Socrates
suggests in a conversation with Parrhasius recorded in Xenophon:
When you are painting beautiful figures, as it isn’t easy to come across one single
model who is beyond criticism in every detail, you combine the best feature of
each one of a number of models, and so convey the appearance of entirely
beautiful bodies.
(Memoirs of Socrates, 3, 10, 2)According to the Roman writer Cicero (106–43), this was the method of Zeuxis. When
commissioned by the people of Croton to decorate their temple of Hera, he desired
to paint a picture of Helen of Troy, which might embody the perfection of female
beauty. From the young women assembled by the citizenry he chose the five most
beautiful ‘because he did not think that all the qualities which he sought to combine
in a portrayal of beauty could be found in one person, because in no case has Nature
made anything perfect and finished in every part’ (On Invention, 2, 3). The resulting
image (which does not of course survive) could be said to be typical, meaning not
that she constituted an average norm but rather the ideal of the type, for Zeuxis added
to his painting the words of Homer uttered by the old men of Troy: ‘who on earth
could blame the Trojan and Achaean men at arms for suffering so long for such a
woman’s sake? Indeed she is the very image of an immortal goddess’ (Iliad, 3,
156–158).
The theory and practice of Parrhasius and Zeuxis suggest the context for
interpreting what Aristotle means when he says that art imitates nature, and art carries
things further than nature (Physics, 2, 8, 15). Like nature, the artist imposes form (eidos)
upon the undifferentiated matter of the world (hyle), but the artist can also transcend
nature by ironing out her imperfections. In eschewing the abnormal and the eccentric,
the classical artist concentrates upon the essence and works through the particular
and the individual to express the typical and the ideal.
Vase painting, by dint of limitations both inherent and self-imposed, does not
represent the pinnacle of Greek achievement in painting, which came later than in
other areas of art with Apelles of Cos, who was a court artist of Alexander in the late
fourth century and acknowledged to be the greatest painter of antiquity. Nevertheless,
the art of line drawing in the free Attic style of the age of Pericles in the mid-fifth
century has rarely been surpassed. A master of the art is the Achilles-painter, so called
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