Fifth Century B.C.E.
Painter

Realism. A painter from Heraclea in Southern Italy, Zeuxis was known in Athens, and Aristophanes mentions a painting by him of the god Eros in his Acharnians (425 B.C.E.). Between 413 and 399 he decorated the palace of the Macedonian tyrant Archelaus, who also kept the company of the poet Timotheus and playwrights Agathon and Euripides. Zeuxis was famous for the heightened realism of some of his paintings, which could allegedly deceive birds, involving him in a famous contest with Parrhasius; he also developed techniques of shading pioneered by the Athenian Apollodorus, who apparently remarked that Zeuxis stole the art of his teachers and carried it off with him. His paintings included some unusual subjects, such as a centaur family in which the gradation of color from the human to animal body of the mother beast was praised in antiquity. He famously...