Classical Antiquity
Phidias (490 BCE–430 BCE)
Greek Classical sculptor.
Phidias was the sculptor Pericles trusted with the visual program of classical Athens. Ancient writers name him as overseer of the Parthenon sculptures and as the maker of the gold-and-ivory Athena Parthenos inside the temple and the colossal Zeus at Olympia. The dates here are a conventional life-span; his securely attested activity falls in the mid-fifth century BCE.
What survives of the Parthenon program — pediment figures, metopes, and the frieze — is workshop sculpture under his direction, not a set of pieces we can assign to his own chisel. The marble now in the British Museum, including the reclining east-pediment male usually called Dionysos and the cavalcade of the frieze, is that program as it left the Acropolis. The Athena Parthenos herself is lost; Roman copies exist, but they are not needed to see the High Classical style he supervised.
Plutarch, in the Life of Pericles, makes Phidias both the artist of the great statues and a political target, accused over the gold of the Athena. Later writers treat the Olympian Zeus as a wonder of the world. The surviving marbles remain the honest corpus: a temple's sculpture, directed by one named master.
The words the record keeps using: ideal, processional, calm, monumental, civic, luminous.
At a glance
- Lived 490 BCE–430 BCE
- Origin Greek (Athenian)
- Worked in Athens
- Era Classical Antiquity
- Movements Greek Classical Sculpture
- Mediums Marble sculpture
- Techniques Marble carving, Stone relief carving
Works in the archive
- Parthenon Frieze: Cavalcade, 440 BCE (British Museum, London (Elgin Marbles; Parthenon frieze))
Horsemen of the Panathenaic cavalcade overlap in a shallow relief that once ran around the Parthenon's cella. The frieze is civic religion in motion: Athenian riders, not a single myth, under the sculptural direction… - Reclining Figure from the Parthenon East Pediment (Dionysos), 438 BCE (British Museum, London (Elgin Marbles; Parthenon east pediment, figure D))
The reclining male from the left of the east pediment, usually identified as Dionysos (sometimes as Herakles). He belongs to the workshop program Phidias directed for the Parthenon's gable of the birth of Athena — a god… - Parthenon East Pediment (surviving figures), 438 BCE (British Museum, London (Elgin Marbles; Parthenon east pediment))
The surviving east-pediment figures in London — the rising horses of Helios, reclining and seated gods — are what remains of the birth of Athena as Phidias's workshop set it in the gable. The central epiphany is lost;…
What was said
In the Life of Pericles, Plutarch names Phidias as the artist of the great statues and as overseer of all the works, and records the political attack on him over the gold of the Athena Parthenos — ancient testimony that the sculptor stood at the center of the Periclean program.
Palagia's study of the pediments treats the surviving east and west figures as a coordinated gable design — gods arranged to the triangle — executed by a workshop, not as isolated autograph statues.
Boardman's account of the Parthenon sculptures presents the frieze, metopes, and pediments as one High Classical program under Phidias's direction, the marble that survives being workshop work in that style rather than a set of signed pieces.
Lineage
Passed on to Praxiteles
What would Phidias make of your idea?
The Artiquity Studio makes a new picture in this hand's manner from a few words or a photograph — grounded in the technique, palette and subjects recorded above, and always credited "after Phidias", never passed off as a found work. Open the Studio with Phidias · Keep a life moment the way Phidias would · Pictures made after Phidias