DOI Page / Citation link:
https://doi.org/10.11588/diglit.5253#0496
462 THE AGE OF SCOPAS, PRAXITELES, AND LYSIPPOS.
with his shepherd's crook, pipe, and faithful dog, is evidently conceived as
having rested on a wooded summit, indicated by a sturdy tree (Fig. 199). But
the eagle, Zeus' sure messenger, swooping down, has gently caught his prize,
and now, with strong pinions spread, carries the beautiful youth upward past
the tree, and towards the height where dwells Zeus, and towards which both
eagle and Ganymede are looking. The faithful hound, left below, seeing his
master disappearing into the ether, bays for him with upturned head. This
subject came in Roman times to be a favorite one for monuments of children
or youth early snatched away by death ; and it is most probable, that the Vati-
can Ganymede, which has the usual characteristics of that later age, was such
a funeral monument. So late a work does not indeed give us the direct hand-
writing, as it were, of Leochares, but doubtless retains much of his graceful
composition and conception of this difficult subject. The marble appears here
made free of its ponderous weight; but the artist does not offend us by violat-
ing the inherent laws of his material, although thus applied to sculpture.
Bryaxis, another of Scopas' associates in executing the sculptures of the
Mausoleum, was a native of Athens, but must have left it, when very young,
to go to Asia with his senior, Scopas, about 350 B.C. ; since, nearly forty years
after that time, we find him executing a bronze statue of King Seleucos, that
one of Alexander's generals who took the royal title in 312 B.C.9'9 Bryaxis'
life must have been spent principally in Asia, only one of his works being men-
tioned as in Greece, — a group of Asclepios and Hygieia at Megara.920 Besides
the one portrait-statue of King Seleucos, just mentioned, all Bryaxis' recorded
works are representations of the gods. Of these, five colossal statues were to
be seen in Rhodes, a marble Dionysos at Cnidos, an Apollo at Daphne near
Antioch, and a Zeus and an Apollo at Patara in Lykia.921 More celebrated
than these appears to have been Bryaxis' representation of the Greek god
Pluton as Sarapis, that Egyptian deity whose worship, soon after Alexander's
conquests, spread throughout the Greek world, and whose ideal is supposed to
have received artistic form through Bryaxis.922 His Pluton Sarapis was said
to have been composed of costly materials,—gold, silver, bronze, steel, precious
stones, and even of lead and tin, — and to have been covered with a dark color
in order to express the gloomy character of this god of the under-world. It was
presented by one of the cities in Asia (according to some Sinope, and to
others Seleukia) to Ptolemy Philadelphos of Egypt, in thanks for his assist-
ance during a famine, and was put up by him on a promontory near Alexan-
dria. No certain reproductions of this work are left to us ; although it is
possible that the moditis-cxownQd Pluto of the Vatican, with hair hanging down
his forehead, and the gloom of the under-world in his deeply set eyes, may be
its remote reflection.
Timotheos, the fourth sculptor engaged with Scopas on the Mausoleum, is
less known than his associates. An Artemis by him, set up in Rhamnus with
with his shepherd's crook, pipe, and faithful dog, is evidently conceived as
having rested on a wooded summit, indicated by a sturdy tree (Fig. 199). But
the eagle, Zeus' sure messenger, swooping down, has gently caught his prize,
and now, with strong pinions spread, carries the beautiful youth upward past
the tree, and towards the height where dwells Zeus, and towards which both
eagle and Ganymede are looking. The faithful hound, left below, seeing his
master disappearing into the ether, bays for him with upturned head. This
subject came in Roman times to be a favorite one for monuments of children
or youth early snatched away by death ; and it is most probable, that the Vati-
can Ganymede, which has the usual characteristics of that later age, was such
a funeral monument. So late a work does not indeed give us the direct hand-
writing, as it were, of Leochares, but doubtless retains much of his graceful
composition and conception of this difficult subject. The marble appears here
made free of its ponderous weight; but the artist does not offend us by violat-
ing the inherent laws of his material, although thus applied to sculpture.
Bryaxis, another of Scopas' associates in executing the sculptures of the
Mausoleum, was a native of Athens, but must have left it, when very young,
to go to Asia with his senior, Scopas, about 350 B.C. ; since, nearly forty years
after that time, we find him executing a bronze statue of King Seleucos, that
one of Alexander's generals who took the royal title in 312 B.C.9'9 Bryaxis'
life must have been spent principally in Asia, only one of his works being men-
tioned as in Greece, — a group of Asclepios and Hygieia at Megara.920 Besides
the one portrait-statue of King Seleucos, just mentioned, all Bryaxis' recorded
works are representations of the gods. Of these, five colossal statues were to
be seen in Rhodes, a marble Dionysos at Cnidos, an Apollo at Daphne near
Antioch, and a Zeus and an Apollo at Patara in Lykia.921 More celebrated
than these appears to have been Bryaxis' representation of the Greek god
Pluton as Sarapis, that Egyptian deity whose worship, soon after Alexander's
conquests, spread throughout the Greek world, and whose ideal is supposed to
have received artistic form through Bryaxis.922 His Pluton Sarapis was said
to have been composed of costly materials,—gold, silver, bronze, steel, precious
stones, and even of lead and tin, — and to have been covered with a dark color
in order to express the gloomy character of this god of the under-world. It was
presented by one of the cities in Asia (according to some Sinope, and to
others Seleukia) to Ptolemy Philadelphos of Egypt, in thanks for his assist-
ance during a famine, and was put up by him on a promontory near Alexan-
dria. No certain reproductions of this work are left to us ; although it is
possible that the moditis-cxownQd Pluto of the Vatican, with hair hanging down
his forehead, and the gloom of the under-world in his deeply set eyes, may be
its remote reflection.
Timotheos, the fourth sculptor engaged with Scopas on the Mausoleum, is
less known than his associates. An Artemis by him, set up in Rhamnus with