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Timanthes seems to have been a younger contemporary of Zeuxis and Parrhasius. Perhaps his career fell chiefly after 400 B. C. The painting of his of which we hear the most represented the sacrifice of Iphigenia at Aulis, The one point about the picture to which all our accounts refer is the grief exhibited in varying degrees by the bystanders.
There are no doubt qualities in the painting which evade analysis by a mere amateur, and yet involve supreme craftsmanship such things as precision of line, perfect mastery of the palette, clever brush-work, management of shadow, perspective, proportion, and relation of the parts to the whole; but I leave all that to the professionals whose business it is to appreciate it; what strikes me especially about Zeuxis is the manifold scope which he has found for his extraordinary skill, in a single subject.
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 were both sculptors and painters, like Michael Angelo. Phidias and Euphranor, Zeuxis and Protogenes, Polygnotus and Lysippus, were both.
The reasoning by which Socrates, in Xenophon's hearing, confuted the little atheist Aristodemus, is exactly the reasoning of Paley's Natural Theology. Socrates makes precisely the same use of the statues of Polycletus and the pictures of Zeuxis which Paley makes of the watch.
By this knowledge of the general figure, this habitual aptitude to perceive the beauty and fitness of its parts, and of the correspondence between the emotions of the mind and the actions of the body, he will find himself in possession of all that Zeuxis sought for in the graces of the different beautiful women whom he collected together, that he might be enabled to paint a proper picture of Helen; and it is the happy result of this knowledge which we see in the Apollo Belvidere and the Venus de Medici, that renders them so valuable as objects of study.
Zeuxis the satrap of Lydia supported the ally of his master with the same lukewarmness as Philip had manifested in promoting the interests of the Syrian king, and the Greek cities gave their support only under the pressure of fear or force.
Then Parrhasius painted a hanging curtain, and when his picture was exposed to the public Zeuxis asked him to draw aside his curtain, fully believing it to be of cloth and concealing a picture behind it. Thus it was judged that Parrhasius was the best artist, for he had deceived Zeuxis, while the latter had only deceived the birds.
Perugino made no secret of being an atheist; Lionardo da Vinci was a scientific sceptic; Raphael was an amiable rake, no better and no worse than the majority of those gifted pupils to whom he was at once a model of perfection and an example of free living; and those who maintain that art is always the expression of a people's religion have but an imperfect acquaintance with the age of Praxiteles, Apelles and Zeuxis.
And all this I did from no liking for these particular people, or the nation as a whole: I was heartily sick of their fickleness and obsequiousness, of feelings that are not affected by our kindness, but by our position. But to return to Zeuxis.
Zeuxis, when he painted Helen, collected a number of beautiful women, as studies for his subject: when completed, the Agrigentines, who had ordered it, were so delighted with this performance, that they requested him to accept of five of the ladies. Thebes, and other cities, fined those that presented a bad work, and looked on them ever afterwards with derision.
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