There can be little doubt that the school of Polygnotus exercised great
influence on contemporary sculpture. Panaenus, brother of Pheidias,
worked with Polygnotus, and many of the groupings found in the
sculptures of the Parthenon remind us of those usual with the Thasian
master. At this simple and early stage of art there was no essential
difference between fresco-painting and coloured relief, light and shade
and aerial perspective being unknown. We reproduce two vase-paintings,
one (fig. 30) a group of man and horse which closely resembles figures
in the Panathenaic frieze of the Parthenon (fig. 31); the other (fig.
32) representing Victory pouring water for a sacrificial ox to drink,
which reminds us of the balustrade of the shrine of Wingless Victory at
Athens.
[Illustration: FIG. 31.--Part of Frieze of the Parthenon.]
Most writers on Greek painting have supposed that after the middle of
the 5th century the technique of painting rapidly improved. This may
well have been the case; but we have little means of testing the
question. Such improvements would soon raise such a barrier between
fresco-painting and vase-painting,--which by its very nature must be
simple and architectonic,--that vases can no longer be used with
confidence as evidence for contemporary painting. The stories told us by
Pliny of the lives of Greek painters are mostly of a trivial and
untrustworthy character. Some of them are mentioned in this
_Encyclopaedia_ under the names of individual artists. We can only
discern a few general facts. Of Agatharchus of Athens we learn that he
painted, under compulsion, the interior of the house of Alcibiades. And
we are told that he painted a scene for the tragedies of Aeschylus or
Sophocles. This has led some writers to suppose that he attempted
illusive landscape; but this is contrary to the possibilities of the
time; and it is fairly certain that what he really did was to paint the
wooden front of the stage building in imitation of architecture; in fact
he painted a permanent architectural background, and not one suited to
any particular play. Of other painters who flourished at the end of the
century, such as Zeuxis and Aristides, it will be best to speak under
the next period.
[Illustration: From Gerhard's _Auserlesene Vasenbilder_, ii. pl. 1.