Lysippos
Greek sculptor
390 BCE to 320 BCE
Lysippos ias a Greek sculptor of the 4th century BCE.
Together with Scopas and Praxiteles, he is considered one of the three greatest sculptors of the Classical Greek era, bringing transition into the Hellenistic period.
Problems confront the study of Lysippos because of the difficulty of identifying his style amongst the copies which survive.
Not only did he have a large workshop and a large number of disciples in his immediate circle, but also there is understood to have been a market for replicas of his work which was supplied also from outside his circle already in his own lifetime and also later in the Hellenistic and Roman periods.
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According to Pliny, he produced more than fifteen hundred works, all of them in bronze.
Commentators noted his grace and elegance, and the symmetria or coherent balance of his figures, which were leaner than the ideal represented by Polykleitos and with proportionately smaller heads, giving them the impression of greater height.
He was famous for his attention to the details of eyelids and toenails.
His pupil, Chares of Lindos, will construct the Colossus of Rhodes, one of the Seven Wonders of the Ancient World.
As this statue does not exist today, debate continues as to whether its sections were cast in bronze or hammered of sheet bronze.
Sicyon is celebrated during the fourth century BCE for its school of painters and sculptors, including the master sculptor Lysippus.
Head of the school at Argos and Sicyon in the time of Philip of Macedon, he gains fame for the new and slender proportions of his figures and for their lifelike naturalism.
Originally a worker in bronze, he had taught himself the art of sculpture by studying nature and the Doryphorus (Spearbearer) of Polykleitos, whose canon of ideal male proportions he modifies by creating a smaller head and slimmer body that increases his figures' apparent height.
Lysippus' portraits of Philip's son Alexander are many; he sculpts Alexander from boyhood onward, and Alexander will have no other sculptor portray him.
Among the works attributed to him are the so-called Horses of Saint Mark, ...
Lysippus executes a magnificent bronze statue of Heracles in about 340.
The heroically scaled Hercules is one of the most famous sculptures of Antiquity, and has fixed the image of the mythic hero in the European imagination.
It quickly made its way into the collection of Cardinal Alessandro Farnese, grandson of Pope Paul III.
Alessandro Farnese was well placed to form one of the greatest collections of classical sculpture that has been assembled since Antiquity.
The Farnese Hercules is probably an enlarged copy made in the early third century CE and signed by a certain Glykon, from an original by Lysippos (or one of his circle) that would have been made in the fourth century BCE.
The copy was made for the Baths of Caracalla in Rome (dedicated in CE 216), where it was recovered in 1546.
The portraits of Alexander the Great by artists such as Lysippus and Apelles inaugurate a tradition of heroic-ruler imagery.
A finely sculpted head of Aristotle (the first certain example of true portraiture), attributed to Lysippus and executed in Greece in the 320s BCE or possibly earlier, gives the impression not only of a convincing sense of physical reality but an intangible feeling of personality as well.
This opening era of this age marks the end of the fourth-century (Late Classical) period of Greek sculpture and its succession by the Hellenistic period.
Greek sculptor Lysippus, active throughout the latter half of the fourth century BCE, had been born in Sicyon, a city with a tradition of both sculpture and painting, and reportedly lives to an old age.
Instrumental in paving the way from pure classical to naturalistic Hellenistic sculpture, Lysippus changes the system of proportions, elongating the body and reducing the size of the head to one-eighth the total height of the figure.
In an important departure from the principle of a uniform frontal plane for statuary, Lysippus allows the limbs of his statues to project in various directions, thus imparting depth and a feeling of motion to his figures.
Alexander the Great, who reportedly prefers him to all other sculptors, is one of the notable personages featured, with athletes and divinities, as the subject of around fifteen hundred bronze statues executed by Lysippus.
No known original works by Lysippus survive, although some Roman marble statues of athletes may be copies of his work.
One such, the Apoxyomenos, or The Scraper, becomes a favorite of the emperor Tiberius; another, the Agias, may be a contemporary replica.
His work, like that of his contemporary, the painter Apelles, is known from the comments of Pliny the Elder.
Apoxyomenos is one of the Greek conventions in representing an athlete, caught in the familiar act of scraping sweat and dust from his body with the small curved instrument that the Romans called a strigil.
The bronze original is lost, but it is known, in part from its description in Pliny the Elder's Natural History, which relates that the Roman general Marcus Vipsanius Agrippa installed Lysippos's masterpiece in the Baths of Agrippa that he erected in Rome, around 20 BCE.
Later, the emperor Tiberius became so enamored of the figure that he had it removed to his bedroom.
However an uproar in the theater, "Give us back our Apoxyomenos", shamed the emperor into replacing it.
The sculpture is represented by the Pentelic marble copy in the Museo Pio-Clementino in Rome, discovered in 1849 when it was excavated in Trastevere.
Plaster casts of it soon found their way into national academy collections, and it is the standard version in textbooks.
The sculpture, slightly larger than life-size, is characteristic of the new canon of proportion pioneered by Lysippus, with a slightly smaller head (1:8 of the total height, rather than the 1:7 of Polykleitos) and longer and thinner limbs.
Pliny notes a remark that Lysippus "used commonly to say"—that while other artists "made men as they really were, he made them as they appeared to be."
Lysippus poses his subject in a true contrapposto, with an arm outstretched to create a sense of movement and interest from a range of viewing angles.