The 4th century is the brilliant period of ancient painting. It opens
with the painters of the Asiatic School, Zeuxis and Parrhasius and
Protogenes, with their contemporaries Nicias and Apollodorus of Athens,
Timanthes of Sicyon or Cythnus, and Euphranor of Corinth. It witnesses
the rise of a great school at Sicyon, under Eupompus and Pamphilus,
which was noted for its scientific character and the fineness of its
drawing, and which culminated in Apelles, the painter of Alexander the
Great, and probably the greatest master of the art in antiquity. To each
of these painters a separate article is given, fixing their place in the
history of the art. Of their paintings unfortunately we can form but a
very inadequate notion. Vase-paintings, which in the 5th century give us
some notion at least of contemporary drawing, are less careful in the
4th century. Now and then we find on them figures admirably designed, or
successfully foreshortened; but these are rare occurrences. The art of
the vase decorator has ceased to follow the methods and improvements of
contemporary fresco painters, and is pursued as a mere branch of
commerce.
But very few actual paintings of the age survive, and even these
fragmentary remains have with time lost the freshness of their
colouring; nor are they in any case the work of a noteworthy hand. We
reproduce two examples. The first is from a stone of the vault of a
Crimean grave (Plate IV. fig. 67). The date of the grave is fixed to the
4th century by ornaments found in it, among which was a gold coin of
Alexander the Great. The representation is probably of Demeter or her
priestess, her hair bound with poppies and other flowers. The original
is of large size. The other illustration (fig. 42) represents the
remains of a drawing on marble, representing a group of women playing
knucklebones. It was found at Herculaneum. Though signed by one
Alexander of Athens, who was probably a worker of the Roman age,
Professor Robert is right in maintaining that Alexander only copied a
design of the age of Zeuxis and Parrhasius. In fact the drawing and
grouping is so closely like that of reliefs of about 400 B.C. that the
drawing is of great historic value, though there be no colouring.
Several other drawings of the same class have been found at Herculaneum,
and on the walls of the Transtiberine Villa at Rome (now in the Terme
Museum).
[Illustration: _Olympia_, iii. 53.