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Updated: May 13, 2025
We can make pretty good Venuses, but we cannot look at them through the same mental and moral atmosphere as the contemporaries of Scopas, or even with the same eyes that Michel Angelo saw them. We feel the difference between a modern Venus and an ancient one.
But, as to the Golds and the Crimsons, no one ever lays a wager on them except the enormously rich nobles and senators whose ancestors organized them under Domitian a hundred years ago. But they, being so enormously rich, can buy the best horses and have the best jockeys. Now they have Palus. The Reds have Scopas and the Greens Diocles, and both have been wonderful, but Palus can beat anybody.
We are expressly told of Praxiteles that he showed the most admirable skill in infusing into his marble works the passions and emotions of the soul; and the extant remains of the statues made by Scopas and Lysippus show that they also, each in his own way, attained the same results.
The celebrated group of Ni'o-be and her children slain by Ar'temis and Apollo, a copy of which is preserved in the museum of Florence, and the statue of the victorious Venus in the Louvre at Paris, are attributed to Scopas. The most esteemed of his works, according to Pliny, was a group representing Achilles conducted to the Island of Leu'ce by sea deities.
You have but to speak the word, and the finest clay shall be ready on your modeling-table by to-morrow, either here or in Glaukias's work-room, which is indeed your own. I know where the best is to be found, and can bring it to you in any quantity. Scopas will lend me his wagon. I can see it now, and you valiantly struggling with it till your mighty arms ache.
When Simonides approached to receive the promised reward Scopas bestowed but half the expected sum, saying, "Here is payment for my portion of the performance, Castor and Pollux will doubtless compensate thee for so much as relates to them." The disconcerted poet returned to his seat amidst the laughter which followed the great man's jest.
Sadly mutilated as it is, is has become possible by its help and that of its fellow to recognize with great probability the authorship of Scopas in a whole group of allied works. Not to dwell on anatomical details, which need casts for their proper illustration, the obvious characteristic mark of Scopadean heads is a tragic intensity of expression unknown to earlier Greek art.
But the great sculptors of the fourth century, Scopas and Praxiteles and Lysippus, not to mention others of less note, devoted themselves not so much to the expression through perfect physical form of great religious ideals, but to a realisation of the character and, so to speak, the personality of the gods whom they portrayed.
O Censorinus, liberally would I present my acquaintance with goblets and beautiful vases of brass; I would present them with tripods, the rewards of the brave Grecians: nor would you bear off the meanest of my donations, if I were rich in those pieces of art, which either Parrhasius or Scopas produced; the latter in statuary, the former in liquid colors, eminent to portray at one time a man, at another a god.
The bringing of these ideals nearer to the common life of man finds its poetic inspiration rather in the tendency which has already been noticed in the Homeric hymns and the lyric poets, and which now, after the reaction of the fifth century, exerts its full force on the art of Scopas and Praxiteles.
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