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'Well, I must own, said the aedile Pansa, 'that your house, though scarcely larger than a case for one's fibulae, is a gem of its kind. How beautifully painted is that parting of Achilles and Briseis! what a style! what heads! what a-hem! 'Praise from Pansa is indeed valuable on such subjects, said Clodius, gravely. 'Why, the paintings on his walls! Ah! there is, indeed, the hand of a Zeuxis!
Ineffably tender in the touch, yet Herculean in power; innocent, yet exalted in feeling; pure in color as a pearl; reserved and decisive in design, as this Lion crest, if it alone existed of such, if it were a picture by Zeuxis, the only one left in the world, and you build a shrine for it, and were allowed to see it only seven days in a year, it alone would teach you all of art that you ever needed to know.
Their simple color still finds eager admirers, who prefer such crude productions and the beginnings of an art just evolving, to the greatest masters of the following epoch as it seems to me in accordance with a point of view peculiar to themselves. Afterward Zeuxis and Parrhasius, who lived at about the same period at the time of the Peloponnesian war greatly promoted art.
In general, the impossible must be justified by reference to artistic requirements, or to the higher reality, or to received opinion. With respect to the requirements of art, a probable impossibility is to be preferred to a thing improbable and yet possible. Again, it may be impossible that there should be men such as Zeuxis painted.
It is the celebrated painting of Parrhasius." In a range with the curtain there were a number of other choice pictures by artists of ancient days. Here was the famous cluster of grapes by Zeuxis, so admirably depicted that it seemed as if the ripe juice were bursting forth.
All these edifices, each of which one would have thought, it would have taken many generations to complete, were all finished during the most brilliant period of one man's administration. We are told that Zeuxis, hearing Agatharchus, the painter, boasting how easily and rapidly he could produce a picture, said, "I paint very slowly."
Giovanni Rosa, a Fleming who flourished at Rome in the first part of the seventeenth century, was famous for his pictures of animals. "He painted hares so naturally as to deceive the dogs, which would rush at them furiously, thus renewing the wonderful story of Zeuxis and his Grapes, so much boasted of by Pliny." This artist was a close imitator of Titian.
Socrates makes precisely the same use of the statues of Polycletus and the pictures of Zeuxis, which Paley makes of the watch.”
With Apollodorus of Athens, who flourished toward the close of the fifth century before Christ, there was a new development, that of dramatic effect. His aim was to deceive the eye of the spectator by the appearance of reality. He painted men and things as they appeared. He prepared the way for Zeuxis, who surpassed him in the power to give beauty to forms.
It was perfectly wonderful, again, to see the combination of wildness and infancy, of terrible and tender, in the young ones, looking up in baby curiosity at the lion-cub, while they held on to breast and dug, and cuddled close to their dam. Zeuxis imagined that when the picture was shown the technique of it would take visitors by storm.
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