Misplaced Pages

Apollodorus (painter)

Article snapshot taken from Wikipedia with creative commons attribution-sharealike license. Give it a read and then ask your questions in the chat. We can research this topic together.

This is an old revision of this page, as edited by 64.150.5.4 (talk) at 15:12, 2 June 2016 (→Life and accomplishments). The present address (URL) is a permanent link to this revision, which may differ significantly from the current revision.

Revision as of 15:12, 2 June 2016 by 64.150.5.4 (talk) (→Life and accomplishments)(diff) ← Previous revision | Latest revision (diff) | Newer revision → (diff)
Ancient Greek painters

Apollodorus Skiagraphos (Template:Lang-el) was an influential Ancient Greek painter of the 5th century BC whose work has since been entirely lost. Apollodorus left a technique behind known as skiagraphia, a way to easily produce shadow, that affected the works not only of his contemporaries but also of later generations.

Nothing is known about this man go away.

Effect on contemporaries

Though not much about his life is known, historians have made assumptions about Apollodorus and his works and actions through his contemporaries.

Zeuxis of Heraclea was one of Apollodorus' rivals according to Pliny. Zeuxis was tutored in the arts by Demophilus of Himera and Neseus of Thasos. At one point, Apollodorus even accused Zeuxis of stealing art techniques from others which might very well have been true because Zeuxis was also attributed with the expansion and development of Apollodorus' prized skiagraphia. Zeuxis is said to have innovated skiagraphia by “adding highlights to shading and applying subtly different colours.”

Regardless of what Zeuxis did, he was not the only painter to adapt Apollodorus' creation for his own purposes. Another painter named Parrhasius of Ephesus, also a rival of Zeuxis, helped expand skiagraphia as well. He purportedly used it in a contest against Zeuxis and won because the curtain that Parrhasius had painted looked so real that Zeuxis tried to pull it back. Whereas Zeuxis examined the technique of light and shade in skiagraphia, Parrhasius looked into the contoured lines that help express depth in a spatial way; therefore taking the meaning of skiagraphia even further.

Not only was skiagraphia prominent in Athens, but also its influence extended beyond Athens' borders into the tomb paintings of Vergina, Aineia, and Lefkadia in northern Greece and even into Seuthopolis, a city in what is now modern Bulgaria. Though scarce, some of the tomb frescoes in Seuthopolis used only a limited range of colours; however others in Vergina and Aineia used six or more colours further demonstrating the extent of the transformation of Apollodorus' skiagraphia. Skiagraphia continued to mutate and develop until the age of the Italian Renaissance when it was given a new name: chiaroscuro.

Effect on the development of chiaroscuro

Apollodorus' development of skiagraphia was only the beginning of this form of art's gradual development. In Italian, chiaro means light and scuro means dark. So the two together symbolize the combination and distribution of light and dark into one to create a more lifelike image. No longer simply used for paintings on canvas of stationary objects, chiaroscuro is used in all types of art, even sculpture, frescoes, and woodcuts. Chiaroscuro is used to produce volume and relief, to unify the objects in a painting, or differentiate them from one another. The simple creation of skiagraphia led to the invention of diverse techniques that continued to be produced from the times of ancient Greece to Gothic times and then it reached its pinnacle in the Italian Renaissance in 14th century. Even today it continues to be important to artists.

In the 15th-century, chiaroscuro was described by Cennino Cennini, a famous Italian painter. He stated that the ideas of gradation between light and dark, skiagraphia, were combined with medieval techniques known as incidendo and matizando, which are a “layerings of white, brown, or black in linear patterns over a uniform colour” to indicate relief and volume. These two were previously used by monks in the illustration of religious manuscripts. The addition of these two techniques to skiagraphia was instrumental in the evolution of chiaroscuro.

Giotto, a Florentine painter, and Cimabue, Giotto's teacher, used chiaroscuro in their late Gothic painting as well, by mixing large amounts of white into the painting, therefore creating an easy transition between tones. In frescoes, mosaics, and manuscript illuminations, artists like Master Honore, a French manuscript painter, and Pietro, a painter and mosaic designer active in the Middle Ages, modelled from underneath with black and white space to create brightness in their works. In the end, Apollodorus' master creation after years of evolution transformed into something that, though it still resembled the original and served the same purpose, was new and thoroughly necessary to all great works of art.

Notes

  1. Cite error: The named reference Pliny 1857 was invoked but never defined (see the help page).
  2. ^ Arafat, Karim. "Zeuxis." The Oxford Companion to Western Art. 2008. 14 May 2006. Oxford Art Online. Lucas Library, Atherton. 26 Nov. 2008. Keyword: http://oxfordartonline.com/subscriber/article/opr.
  3. Robertson, Martin. A Shorter History of Greek Art. New York: Cambridge UP, 1981. 147.
  4. ^ Bell, Janis C. "Chiaroscuro." Grove Art Online. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2006. 25 Feb. 2007. Oxford Art Online. Lucas Library, Atherton. 26 Nov. 2008. Keyword: http://oxfordartonline.com/subscriber/article/grove/art.

References

External links

Categories: