Classical Antiquity
Praxiteles (400 BCE–330 BCE)
Greek Classical sculptor.
Praxiteles was the most celebrated Athenian sculptor of the fourth century BCE, active roughly 375–330; no birth or death dates survive, and the years shown here are nominal brackets for his floruit. Ancient writers rank him among the greatest sculptors of Greece, and he changed the course of the art in a single, scandalous work: the Aphrodite of Knidos, the first monumental female nude in the Greek tradition, a goddess shown undressing for the bath. Where earlier sculpture had idealized the male body, Praxiteles made the naked goddess the supreme subject, and did so with a softness of surface and a languid, weight-shifted grace that later critics called simply 'Praxitelean.'
Almost nothing he made survives in the original. His reputation reaches us the way most Greek sculpture does — through Roman marble copies, through coins, and through the descriptions of ancient authors, above all Pliny the Elder. The great exception is the Hermes carrying the infant Dionysus, excavated in 1877 in the Temple of Hera at Olympia, exactly where the traveler Pausanias had recorded a Hermes by Praxiteles standing; whether the Olympia statue is his own hand or an exceptionally fine later version is still debated, but it remains the closest thing we have to the living Praxitelean surface.
His art is one of relaxation and reverie rather than heroic tension. The Aphrodite hesitates; the Apollo Sauroktonos, the 'lizard-slayer,' is a slender adolescent leaning idly against a tree to spear a lizard — a god caught in a boyish, almost trivial moment. Through Roman copies these inventions became some of the most reproduced images of the ancient world, and the ideal of sensuous, humanized divinity they established outlived antiquity itself.
The words the record keeps using: sensuous, languid, graceful, tender, serene, idealized.
At a glance
- Lived 400 BCE–330 BCE
- Origin Greek (Athenian)
- Worked in Athens
- Era Classical Antiquity
- Movements Greek Classical Sculpture
- Mediums Marble sculpture
- Techniques Marble carving
Works in the archive
- Hermes and the Infant Dionysus, 340 BCE (Archaeological Museum of Olympia — excavated 1877 in the Temple of Hera; a contested Praxitelean original or fine later version)
The closest surviving approach to Praxiteles' own hand. Hermes rests against a tree trunk, the baby Dionysus on his arm, and dangles something (now lost — probably grapes) to tease the child. Found in 1877 exactly where… - Aphrodite of Knidos (Colonna type, Roman copy), 100 (Museo Pio-Clementino, Vatican Museums (Colonna Venus) — Roman marble copy after the lost original of c. 360–340 BCE)
The most important surviving reflection of Praxiteles' revolutionary statue — the first monumental female nude in Greek art. The goddess is shown at her bath, one hand reaching for drapery over a water jar, the other… - Apollo Sauroktonos (the Lizard-Slayer, Roman copy), 100 (Musée du Louvre, Paris (Ma 441) — Roman marble copy after the Praxitelean bronze original of c. 350–340 BCE)
A slender adolescent Apollo leans against a tree, idly poised to spear a lizard climbing the trunk. Praxiteles takes the god of prophecy and light and shows him not enthroned in power but caught in a boyish, almost…
What was said
Pliny records that Praxiteles' Aphrodite of Knidos was esteemed the finest statue not only by him but in the whole world, that people sailed to Knidos only to see it, that the Knidians refused to sell it even to cancel their public debt, and that a young man once became so enamored of it that he embraced it and left a stain upon the marble.
Pliny reports that Praxiteles, though he also worked in bronze, was more successful and more famous in marble, and had his statues painted by the celebrated painter Nikias, whose finishing touch the sculptor prized.
In his tour of Olympia, Pausanias notes among the offerings in the Temple of Hera a marble Hermes carrying the infant Dionysus, made by Praxiteles — the record that guided the identification of the statue unearthed there in 1877.
Lineage
Learned from Phidias
What would Praxiteles 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 Praxiteles", never passed off as a found work. Open the Studio with Praxiteles · Keep a life moment the way Praxiteles would · Pictures made after Praxiteles