Invention Timeline: Apelles, Grecian Artist Famous as a Portrait Painter
Flourished 330 B.C.
Grecian artist, famous as a portrait painter. His most perfect picture was Venus Anadyomene. An intimate friend of Alexander the Great, all of whose portraits he painted. Alexander forbade any man but Apelles to draw his picture. He pictured Alexander holding thunder in his hand, which was sot ture to life that Pliny says the hand of the king with the thunder seemed to come out of the picture.
Around the mighty master came
The marvels which his pencil wrought,
Those miracles of power whose fame
Is wide as human thought.
—Raphael: Whittier
Deep buried in each heart I know there lies
A form divine, beneath the surface crude,
And when the master artist does bestow
His final touch, l’ perfect forms will rise.
—The Form Divine: C.W. Scarff
30—Augustus became a patron of art.
67—The Emperor Nero despoiled Corinth and its treaures in art.
