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Updated: May 16, 2025
It is stated that when Demetrius besieged Rhodes, and could have reduced it by setting fire to a quarter of the city that contained one of the finest productions of Protogenes, he refused to do so lest he should destroy the masterpiece of art. It is to this incident that the poet THOMSON undoubtedly refers when he says,
If Apelles and Protogenes, in their lost writings on painting, affirmed and illustrated its laws by the previously established rules of poetry, we may feel sure that they did it with that moderation and accuracy with which we now see, in the works of Aristotle, Cicero, Horace, and Quintilian, the principles and experience of painting applied to eloquence and poetry.
Apelles was modest and generous: he was the first to praise Protogenes, and conferred a great benefit upon the latter by buying up his pictures, and giving out word that he was going to sell them as his own. Apelles was never afraid to correct those who were ignorant, and was equally ready to learn from any one who could teach him anything.
But if during those days you listened to your reader Protogenes, so long at least as he read anything rather than my speeches, surely you had far greater pleasure than any one of us.
His candor, too, was equal to his talent; he acknowledged the superiority of Melanthius in his grouping, and of Asclepiodorus in the niceness of his measurements, or in other words, the distances that ought to be left between the objects represented. A circumstance that happened to him in connection with Protogenes is worthy of notice.
Says Theophile Gautier: "He used to preach to us a strange literary hygiene. We ought to shut ourselves up for two or three years, drink water, eat soaked lupines like Protogenes, go to bed at six o'clock in the evening, and work till morning . . . and especially to live in the most absolute chastity.
Not I, for considering his headlong descent from the stars, he seemed to me to have lost his footing rather than to have been deliberately following a path; and, as Apelles, if he had seen his Venus, or Protogenes his Ialysus daubed with mud, would, I presume, have felt great sorrow, so neither could I behold without great sorrow a man, portrayed and embellished with all the colours of my art, suddenly disfigured.
The later discoveries at Pompeii show the same correctness of design in painting as in sculpture, and also considerable perfection in coloring. The great artists of Greece Phidias and Euphranor, Zeuxis and Protogenes, Polygnotus and Lysippus were both sculptors and painters, like Michael Angelo; and the ancient writers praise the paintings of these great artists as much as their sculpture.
Townley being much busied on that Preface, wherein Lomazzo rubs shoulders with Michelangelo and Protogenes, and where the modern mortal hears with astonishment of "the sublime part which is a real je ne sçai quoi," and which, "being the most important part to all connoisseurs, I shall call a harmonious propriety, which is a touching or moving unity, or a pathetic agreement, &c."
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