Zeuxis

Zeuxis or Zeuxippos is a Greek painter of Héraclée which lived of -464 with -398. Contemporary of Apollodore, the “painter of the shades”, who said of him, that “ it kept for him art that it had charmed with the others ”.

Its work, completely disappeared, is however abundantly quoted by the Old ones which regarded it as one of the great painters of Antiquity. Its art, characterized by the play of the colors and contrasts of shade and light, gave the illusion of space.

Among its most quoted works, it painted:

a Eros crowned of pink and a Side , for Archélaos, king de Macédoine.
a Helene with her toilet , for the inhabitants of Crotona.
a Héraclès child which chokes the snakes in the presence of Amphitryon and of his Alcmène mother very frightened.
the Family of the Centaur .
a Enfant with the grapes , whose bunch of grapes was painted, in a so veracious way, so realistic that, according to the legend, the birds came the picorer. However he declared: “ I painted the grapes better than the child; because if I had as well succeeded for this one, the bird should have been afraid ”.
a Pénélope in which chastity breathes.
a athlete with which it was so content, that it wrote with bottom it towards become famous: “ One will slander some more easily than it will be imitated ”.
splendid a Jupiter on the throne, surrounded of the gods .
a table intended for the Temple of Junon Lacinienne to Agrigente, for which it examined the young girls of the city, naked, and chooses five of them, to paint according to them what each one had of more beautiful.

Starting from its work, the esthetics of trompe-l'oeil prevails in Greek painting, inspiring inter alia masterpieces the mosaic known as asarotos oïkos of Sosos de Pergame, known thanks to a copy, and was undoubtedly at the origin of the effects of prospect which one then finds in painting pompéienne, being reproduced of the loggias open on gardens, entrebâillées doors where are profiled fine silhouettes, elements of architecture (columns, cornices, pediments) represented projecting in the room and “outgoing” of the wall.

It had for contemporaries and followers Timanthès, Androcyde, Eupompe and Parrhasius. At the time of a combat of artist with Parrhasius, it paints grapes with as well truth, as from the birds the becqueter came, however the other brought a curtain so naturally represented, than Zeuxis, all to trust of the sentence of the birds, required that one draw finally the curtain to show the table. Recognizing its illusion, he acknowledged himself overcome with a frank modesty, since had misled to him only in the birds, and that Parrhasius had misled the man who he was.

Sources

, Delivers XXXV, IV

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