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He was a native of Ephesus, but became a citizen of Athens, where he won many victories over his contemporaries. One of these is recorded by Pliny as having been achieved in a public contest with Zeuxis. The latter displayed a painting of some grapes, which were so natural as to deceive the birds, that came and pecked at them.
The Parthenon reappears in the Madeleine; the Golden House of Nero in the Tuileries and the Louvre; Jupiter of Phidias in the Moses of Michael Angelo; the Helen of Zeuxis in the Venus of Titian; the library of Alexandria in the Bibliotheque Imperiale; the Academy of Plato in the University of Oxford; the orations of Cicero in the eloquence of Burke; the Institutes of Justinian in the Code Napoleon.
He was fond of being told that he was like Hercules but, except in the paintings of Zeuxis, Hercules has always been depicted as brawnier and more mature than Commodus was then or ever became, to his last hour. To me he suggested Mercury, especially as he appears in the paintings of Polygnotus, or Apollo, as Apelles depicted him.
Zeuxis, however, had far higher qualities than those of a literal copyist. The most successful of the Greek painters was Apelles. Among his masterpieces was a painting of Venus rising from the waves, and a portrait of Alexander the Great.
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.
He was the first who conferred due honor on the pencil, primusque gloriam penicillo jure contulit. This great painter was succeeded by Zeuxis, who belonged to his school, but who surpassed him in the power to give ideal form to rich effects. He began his great career four hundred and twenty-four years before Christ, and was most remarkable for his female figures.
Such were Zeuxis, Heracleotes and Polygnotus Thasius and others.
"The character of a great man," says a French political writer, who denies the justness of this comparison, "like the celebrated picture of Zeuxis, can be formed only of a multitude of imitations, and it is as little possible for the observer to find for him a single model in history, as it was for the painter of Heraclea to discover in nature that of the ideal beauty he was desirous of representing ." "The French revolution," observes the same author, a little farther on, "has, perhaps, produced more than one CAESAR, or one CROMWELL; but they have disappeared before they have had it in their power to give full scope to their ambition ." Time will decide on the truth and impartiality of these observations of M. HAUTERIVE.
They are the mediums of common forms combined and arranged into a common standard. The ideal beauty of the Helen of Zeuxis was the combined medium of the real beauty of the virgins of Crotona.
He challenged him to show any portrait of these days that could vie with the Helen of Zeuxis, the Heraclean; or any composition equal to the Sacrifice of Iphigenia, by Timanthes, the Sicyonian; not to mention the Twelve Gods of Asclepiodorus, the Athenian, for which Mnason, tyrant of Elatea, gave him about three hundred pounds apiece; or Homer's Hell, by Nicias, who refused sixty talents, amounting to upwards of eleven thousand pounds, and generously made a present of it to his own country.
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