Praxiteles (active ca. 370-330 BC) was one of the leading Greek sculptors of the 4th century BC. His style, refined and graceful, greatly influenced the art of his own time and the succeeding epochs.

Praxiteles was probably the son of Kephisodotos, an Athenian sculptor, since he named one of his own sons Kephisodotos, and the same name ran in families in alternate generations. Pliny the Elder, in his Naturalis historia, places Praxiteles in the 104th Olympiad, or 364-361 B.C., and the base of a portrait statue from Leuktra bearing an inscription stating that Praxiteles the Athenian made it dates from about 330 B.C. These are the only definite dates we have regarding him.

At the beginning of the 4th century B.C. Athenian civilization had undergone profound changes. The disillusionment with civic values caused by the Peloponnesian War had turned artistic taste away from the idealism of...