On Scene-Painting or Skenographia

Some Primary and Secondary Sources

(c) 2019; 2024 Bart A. Mazzetti

1
1. SCENE-PAINTING OR SKENOGRAPHIA BEGINNING FROM ARISTOTLE,
POETICS, CH. 4.

Aristotle, Poetics ch. 4 (1449a 19) (ed. R. Kassel; tr. B.A.M.):

…trei=j de\ kai\ skhnografi/an Sofoklh=j. …but three [actors] and painted scenery1 [were
introduced] by Sophocles.2

Carrick, James. “II. Drama. Greek Tragedy. By Professor Charles Burton Gulick. 1909-14.
Lectures on the Harvard Classics. The Harvard Classics.” II. Drama. Greek Tragedy. By
Professor Charles Burton Gulick. 1909-14. Lectures on the Harvard Classics. The Harvard
Classics:3

13. Sophocles

Sophocles…was the first to use the new Greek art in the theater. For he introduced scene painting.
Heretofore even Æschylus had been content with only the altar in the orchestra and a few statues of
gods on the outer edge away from the audience. Sophocles now erected a scene building, the front
of which showed to the audience the façade of a temple or palace, pierced by a single door. The two
side entrances were retained. Æschylus adopted the innovation readily, and thus we find the scenery
of the “Agamemnon,” simple as it is, far advanced from the earlier conditions.

Barbara F. McManus, “Actors, Staging, Masks”:4

Aristotle tells us that Sophocles introduced the art of skenographia, “painting on the skene,” which
probably meant the use of large painted panels hung on the front to the stage building to indicate the
setting for a particular play. Since the stage building would sometimes represent a palace, sometimes
a temple, and sometimes even a cave or a farmer’s hut, such painted panels would have helped
imaginatively evoke the dramatic setting (for more information, see Roger Dunkle’s discussion of
skenographia).

Roger Dunkle, “Greek Tragedy”:5

The use of painted scenery is still being debated. There may have been movable placards to show
changes in scene (as in the Eumenides). According to Aristotle Sophocles invented scene-painting
(skenographia). This may mean the representation of architectural elements in perspective (cf.
Simon, p. 22).6

1
Or scenography [skenographia].
2
Cf. Stephan Halliwell (LCL [1994]), note ad loc.: “…Scene painting: decoration of the stage building (skênê), to
give it an active dramatic status”. Cf. his earlier work, The Poetics of Aristotle: Translation and Commentary (London:
Duckworth, 1987), Glossary, p. 195: “Scene-painting (skênographia): the term probably refers in ch. 4 to the
decoration of the stage building (skênê) in the Athenian theatre so as to give visual embodiment to the special setting
of a play; but its detailed implications are controversial”.
3
http://www.bartleby.com/60/202.html [09/21/19].
4
Taken from a Web Site no longer on the Internet.
5
http://cgim.dbq.edu/cgim/greece05/greek_tragedy.htm [09/20/19] I originally cut and pasted Dunkle’s texts from a
no-longer-available website called The Greek Theatre, but did not preserve the URL or the access date.
6
N.B. At the end of his article Dunkle furnishes the following reference: Simon, E. (trans. by Vafopoulou-Richardson,
C.E.), The Ancient Theatre (London and New York 1982). A web search reveals that this excerpt comes from
Euripides' Electra: A Commentary by H. M. Roisman, C. A. E. Luschnig (Oklahoma Series in Classical Culture), in
The Journal of Hellenic Studies 132:186-187 · January 2012, p. 19.
2
Idem:

In the fifth and first three quarters of the fourth century BC, the various elements of the architectural
façade you see here

were just images painted on a flat panel called skenographia (‘scene-painting’). Aristotle credits
Sophocles with the introduction of scene painting. In the fifth and most of the fourth century scene
painting was never a depiction of natural landscape but represented with perspective the façade of a
palace with columns and side porches with doors…. These paintings were mounted on wooden
frames, which were placed in front of the stage-building.

Roger Dunkle, “Conventions of the Greek Tragic Theatre”:1

It is possible that there was also a slightly raised stage in front of the building separating the actors
from the chorus, but not raised so much as to prevent interaction between the two. It is not certain
but likely that there was also moveable painted scenery. In the Poetics, Aristotle says that Sophocles
‘invented’ scene painting. This sounds clear enough, but the word for scene-painting (skenographia)
is also the word for painting in perspective. In any case a moveable painted scene could have been
placed in front of the stage-building.

Michael Hintz, Fifth Century Drama in Athens:2

One of the most controversial aspects of the fifth century theater is whether or not scenery, in the
modern sense of the word, was used.29 Aristotle tells us that Sophocles introduced skenographia into
the theater. While this term is usually translated as “scene painting”, Baldry suggests that it should
instead be taken to mean “painting of the skene”.30 While the distinction may seem trivial, its
consequences are indeed quite substantial. “Scene painting” could be taken to mean that either the
skene itself or movable backdrops were painted to represent the scene in which the action of the play
takes place. Several problems immediately become clear. During the Dionysian festival in Athens,
three tragedies were presented as a trilogy, followed by a satyr play; and during the Peloponnesian
War, a comedy would also be presented on the same day.31 Each of these plays that were presented
in a single day would usually involve a different scene, especially with a tragedy which might take
place before a palace, and a satyr play which would usually take place in a country or pastoral setting.
In addition, several of the known plays involved major changes of scenes within the plays
themselves. Thus, it is impossible that elaborate scenery was painted on the skene since it could not
be changed as quickly as would have been required.

1
See my note to the first excerpt from Dunkle above.
2
Taken from a Web Site no longer on the Internet.
3
 It is also doubtful that skenographia referred to the painting of scenes on backdrops to be moved
on and off as the scene of the play changed. In addition to the awkward nature of changing such
backdrops in the middle of a play, there has been no convincing explanation given as to how these
backdrops would have been incorporated into the skene itself. If they were very large backdrops
which covered the skene in order to create the appearance of an entirely different scene, the required
size would make them too awkward to be practical or even possible. If they were smaller painted
backdrops which provided only a symbolic representation of the scene of the play, they seem to have
been unnecessary. A symbolic representation would have required the audience to use its imagination
in order to picture the scene of the play. It would not have required a great deal more imagination to
create the scene based on the dialogue and the audience’s familiarity with the stories being presented.
Since there is no concrete evidence that scene painting (in the modern sense) existed in the fifth
century, and what we know about dramatic presentations at this time clearly does not require that
any such use of scenery existed, there is no reason to accept the speculations of those who try to fit
modern theatrical practices into the fifth century B.C. The best interpretation of skenographia, as
Baldry suggests, is “the painting of the skene”. This painting was not an elaborate depiction of a
particular scene. Instead it was most likely the painting of a general architectural design in per-
spective on the two-dimensional skene wall.32 Lacking any evidence to the contrary, the reasonable
conclusion is that the use of scenery in fifth century dramatic performances probably involved only
the most general, non-specific, background, leaving the particulars to the imagination of the
audience.

[29] There have been too many theories presented to attempt to discuss each one, and dismiss those
that lack any support. Instead I will try to give an account of what I feel to be the most probable
explanation and compare it to the most common theories which are in opposition to it.
[30] p. 46
[31] Baldry, p. 45
[32] Baldry, p. 47

Bibliography.

Margarete Bieber, The History of the Greek and Roman Theater, (Princeton, 1961)
H. C. Baldry, The Greek Tragic Theater, (New York, 1971)

H. C. Baldry, The Greek Tragic Theatre (New York: W.W. Norton Company, 1971), Chap.
5, The Theatre, pp. 45-50:

On one level or another the actor performed his part near the skene, which was now a place involved
in the play. But how far did this or anything else in the acting area provide scenery in the modern
sense, a distinctive setting suited to a particular plot? About two-thirds of the extant tragedies take
place in front of a place or a temple; in others the action is on the sea-shore or among mountains or
in a camp. In the present group of tragedies and satyr-play which Euripides presented in 431. B.C.
the scene altered from outside Medea’s house to a desert [45-46] island, then to a palace, and from
there to country; if a comedy was performed in the afternoon, it brought still another move, to a street
with two or three houses. Aeschylus’ Eumenides, from Apollo’s temple at Delphi to the Areopagus
in Athens; in Sophocles’ Ajax, from a military camp to the sea-shore. How (if at all) were these
various settings represented? The question is one of basic importance for our understanding of Greek
tragedy. We are familiar with the use of more or less realistic scenery in the theatre and it is easy to
assume that the Greeks must have used it too; but it will be better to put the assumption aside and
look at the evidence.
Aristotle says in the Poetics (4) that Sophocles introduced skenographia into the theatre. The word
is usually translated as ‘scene-painting’, and taken to mean that ‘sets’ or ‘backcloths’ were made
picturing the scene of each landscape. To be visible to the vast audience, such back-cloths would
have to be large and bold. In a daylight performance without curtain or ‘flies’, scene-shifters would

4
have to carry them on and off openly in front of the audience. (There is no suggestion, ancient or
modern, that the crane was used to move them.) Sometimes, as we have seen, they would have to be
changed in the middle of the play.
There is nothing here that can be paralleled in the modern theatre; but we have no need to postulate
such practices in the theatre of Sophocles, for the most likely interpretation of skenographia is not
‘scene-painting’, but ‘painting of the skene’—which could be a very different thing. An explanation
of Aristotle’s statement comes centuries later from Vitruvius (VII, praef. 11), who tells us that
it was Agatharcus who first ‘made a scaena’ at Athens, and goes on to imply that this
innovation was the portrayal of architectural perspective. Vitruvius connects it with a
performance of Aeschylus—probably a revival, since there are good reasons for dating it well after
Aeschylus’ death. From Aristotle and Vitruvius together one inference emerges; that some- [46-
47] time in the second half of the fifth century Agatharcus devised the art of painting an
architectural design in perspective on the skene in front of which the actors moved. Nothing
suggests that the design was intended to make the skene represent a particular kind of building:
presumably it remained the same for all plays, at any rate through one festival.
There is no ‘scenery’ here in our normal sense of the word; nor is it to be found anywhere else in
evidence relevant to the fifth century B.C. It is not in the Poetics: Aristotle makes several mentions
of the visual aspect of drama (opsis), but what he has in mind is the appearance of the actors or
chorus; ‘spectacle’, with its suggestions of scenic marvels, is a misleading translation of the Greek.1
More remarkable still, scenery prompts no jokes in comedy: in Aristophanes, who has fun with the
crane and other devices used in the performance of tragedy, there is no trace of satire on outrageous
backcloths or hurrying scene-shifters, nor does any later commentator refer to anything of the kind
in comedies now lost.
If we turn to art, we find nothing at this time to suggest the existence of any practice of scene-
painting. The vase-painter concentrates on human beings and the human environment, and indicates
natural surroundings by the simplest of symbols—a dolphin for the sea, blades of grass or a pair of
bay trees for the land. Vase decoration is of course far removed from the work of an Agatharcus; but
it is difficult to believe that in a period when a first-rate face-painter pictured a Muse in her mountain
haunt by seating her on a rock labeled ‘Helikon’, great landscape backcloths were in use in the
theatre. Such evidence as we have for fifth-century wall-painting points to the same slight and
symbolic treatment of nature as on vases. More than two centuries passed before large-scale
landscape-painting came into its own.
If this line of thought is right, the fifth-century theatre [47-48] knew nothing of ‘scenery’ as we
understand it. What, then, of the plays and their variety of setting? We are driven to the conclusion
that whether the characters were supposed to be outside a temple or palace or encampment or in the
country or on the shore, all action took place in front of the same façade with its door or doors,
decorated perhaps with painting in perspective. It may well be that a simple wooden shape
representing an altar or a tomb was sometimes placed at a little distance from the façade. Wooden
statues of the gods, probably brightly coloured, are other likely theatre properties. Possibly light
screens representing rocks could be brought on, if only to hide one character from another, but it is
simpler to believe that Greek tragedy and its audience too for granted the same convention as Roman
comedy—that a character can stay unseen and unheard by others as long as it suits the dramatist to
keep him so. These are minor, though much debated, issues. The essential point is that where the
modern theatre-goer looks for a ‘set’ designed to fit a particular play, his Athenian counterpart
expected and found little or nothing more than a familiar structure used in the plays. For the rest the
imagination stimulated and guided by words, was enough. When the chorus of Euripides’ Ion (206-
7) admire a series of scenes from mythology on the temple-front—

See carved on the marble walls,

The rout of the Giants by the Gods in battle!

—it is their words that enable the audience to share the sight, not a backcloth carried on at the
beginning of the play. When Troy is set ablaze at the end of the Trojan Women, there was no spectacle

5
 such as modern stage mechanism and lighting can produce—nothing more than the cries of the
chorus or Hecuba (1295-7):

O horror, horror!
Troy is aflame, the houses on the hill are burning,
The city and the ramparts! [48-49]

It was left to the Romans in Nero’s time to burn a real house down on the stage.
In all this the Greek theatre may be at variance with our own; but it is in agreement with the practice
of other times and cultures, including those in which drama has reached its greatest heights—
Shakespeare’s theatre, for example, with its unchanging background of doors, alcove and balcony;
the Japanese Noh theatre, with its unvarying picture of a pine tree on the rear wall of the acting area;
or Sanskrit drama, picturesque and exotic in the setting which its words convey, yet performed on a
completely bare stage. In the history of world theatre as a whole freedom of imagination has been
the rule: it is our own age, in so far as it is tied to visual realism, that is out of step.
To this free roving of the imagination there was on limit in the Greek fifth century theatre, which
differentiates it from the potentialities of a completely bare stage or the kaleidoscopic succession of
different scenes in Elizabethan drama. The skene itself, whether it did duty for palace or temple or
tent or cave, could and usually did provide a point of reference to which all the action of the play
could be related.
Unity of place was no absolute rule, and it is not surprising that it is not mentioned by Aristotle in
the Poetics, although Renaissance editors thought they found it there: in the course of a single play,
as we have seen, the area in front of the façade could shift in imagination from Delphi to Athens,
from camp to beach. Such freedom was greater in Aeschylus than his successors, especially
Euripides. But the presence of the chorus gave all Greek drama a continuity which Shakespeare lacks,
and in the majority of tragedies the imagined function of the skene and the space before it remained
the same. Here all the visible action of the play took place—outside, in the open; a setting which may
seem strange in colder climates, but was not unnatural for Greeks who spent much of their daily life
listening to speakers under the open sky, of Socrates talking in the streets or the market-place, or of
the theatre itself. [49-50]
1
An apparent exception is 1456a2, but opsis here is a doubtful emendation of the text; and its
originator, Bywater, took the word even here as referring to the appearance of ‘the strange
personages introduced’.

Rush Rehm, The Play of Space (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2002):

Another visual aspect of Greek tragedy that benefits from Gibson’s analysis involves the purposes
and means of scene painting (skenographia) in the ancient theater. A (possibly interpolated) passage
in Aristotle’s Poetics (49a18-19) credits Sophocles with the invention of scene painting, and scholars
have speculated on its perspectival nature, assuming that painted Renaissance perspective marks an
advance over the indexical signaling of place that characterizes most Greek art. In Attic vase painting,
for example, a palm tree signals Delos, an altar means a sanctuary, a door stands for a house. This
visual economy, based on a conventionalized metonymy, proved far more important to Greek
painting than the development of linear perspective.
Moreover, the problem with a single focused perspective for ancient scene painting is precisely
that—given its size and shape, the theater of Dionysus offers anything but a single, frontal point-of-
view. As a result, Ruth Padel’s claim that fifth-century scene painting reflected perspectival
architectural drawing seems forced. The natural background of the city and landscape makes painted
perspective irrelevant; moreover, the bodily motion of characters entering and leaving by the central
entrance and the parodoi, would rupture any trompe l’oeil effects painted on the façade. Gibson
views the artificial fixed-point perspective of the Renaissance as a second-order phenomenon, where
the framed optic array comes from a fixed, flat picture to the (properly placed) eye; however, the

6
 “natural perspective” of ancient optics (present in the Greek theater and unaffected by scene painting,
if I am right) represents the first-order phenomenon, where the ambient optic array comes directly
from the world to the eye.

See also:

Csapo, Eric and Slater, William, The Context of Ancient Drama, University of Michigan Press,
1995, Sec. IV. Actors and Audience, esp. pp. 273-74 (Stage Decoration, and State Machinery):

80B. = Vitruvius, On Architecture 7, Preface 11.

80C. = idem 5.6.

81. = idem 5.6.8.

82. = Servius, Commentary on Vergil’s Georgics 3.24.

Also relevant are pp. 264-65 (Aristotle on the Scholarly Tradition on Visual Effects).

7
2. SKENOGRAPHIA AS A DIVISION OF OPTICS.

Kim H Veltman, The Sources and Literature of Perspective: Appendix 1 – Ancient Literature
Concerning [Pseudo-] Perspective.)

Proclus (c. 410-485) A commentary on the first book of Elements., ed. Glenn R. Morrow
Prologue: Part one. in Euclidem ed. G. Friedlein, Leipzig, 1873, p. 40:

Again optics and canonics are offshoots of geometry and arithmetic. The former science uses visual
lines and the angles made by them. It is divided into a part specifically called optics, which explains
illusory appearances presented by objects seen at a distance, such as converging of parallel lines or
the rounded appearance of square towers, and general catoptrics, which is concerned with the various
ways in which light is reflected. The latter is closely bound up with the art of representation and
studies what is called “scene painting”, showing how objects can be represented by images that
will not seem disproportionate or shapeless when seen at a distance or on an elevation.

Idem, p. 33:

Hero of Alexandria (fl. 62 A.D.)

Definitiones

Of optics one could also name a number of parts according to various materials. However, the
important ones are the following three. One, which is named with the same name as the whole, is
optics, another is catoptrics and a third is scenography….

What is scenography?

The scenographic part of optics studies how one should paint images of buildings; since things
do not appear as they are, one considers, not how to draw the existing relations but rather to
represent them in the manner that they will appear. And the goal of the architect is to make a
work harmonic with respect to appearance and insomuch as possible to find antidotes to the illusions
of the eye, since he does not aim at true equality and harmony, but as they appear to the eye. Hence
he constructs cylindrical columns, which according to the eye shrink in the middle and would
therefore appear broken, and accordingly builds them thicker there. Similarly, he sometimes draws
the circle not as a circle, but as an ellipse, the square as stretched out and a number of large columns
in various sizes in accordance with their number and their size. This is the same calculation which
leads the constructor of a colossal work to adopt the apparent ratio of his production and is not
carried out in vain in accordance with its true proportions, since works which are carried out on a
large scale do not appear as they are.

Skenographikon according to Hero of Alexandria, Definitiones (Horoi ton geometrias

onomaton), 135, 14 (ed. TLG; tr. Ralph Hancock):

te/loj de\ tw=| a)rxite/ktoni to\ pro\j Finally, [skenographikon is the art which teaches
fantasi/an eu)/ruqmon poih=sai to\ e)/rgon how] an architect ought to make his work seem
well proportioned,
kai/, o(po/son e)gxwrei=, pro\j ta\j th=j and, where possible, to invent remedies against
o)/yewj a)pa/taj a)lech/mata a)neuri/skein, optical illusion, seeking not real evenness or
ou) th=j kata\ a)lh/qeian i)so/thtoj h)\ proportion, but that of vision.
eu)ruqmi/aj, a)lla\ th=j pro\j o)/yin
stoxazome/nw|.
8
 ou(/tw gou=n to\n me\n ku/lindron ki/ona, e)pei\ Thus, since a cylindrical column would, when
kateago/ta e)/melle qewrh/sein kata\ looked at, seem irregularly narrower in the
middle,
me/sa pro\j o)y
/ in stenou/menon,
he makes this part of it wider, and it happens
eu)ru/teron kata\ tau=ta poiei=, kai\ to\n me\n when he draws a circle not as a circle but as a
ku/klon e)/stin o(/te ou) ku/klon gra/fei, a)ll' section of a sharp cone,
o)cugwni/ou kw/nou tomh/n,

to\ de\ tetra/gwnon promhke/steron kai\ tou\j and a square, oblong, and a number of columns
pollou\j kai\ mege/qei diafe/rontaj ki/onaj e)n differing in height, according to different
a)/llaij a)nalogi/aij kata\ plh=qo/j te kai\ measures as to width and height.
me/geqoj.

toiou=toj d' e)sti\ lo/goj kai\ o( tw=|
kolossopoiw=| didou\j th\n fanhsome/nhn tou=
a)potele/smatoj summetri/an, i(/na pro\j th\n
o)/yin eu)/ruqmoj ei)/h, a)lla\ mh\ ma/thn
e)rgasqei/h kata\ ou)si/an su/mmetroj:
The same method also applies to a colossus
maker, producing the seeming symmetry of his
work, so that it may seem well proportioned
when examined, without vainly toiling to achieve
real symmetry;

ou) ga/r, oi(=a/ e)sti ta\ e)/rga, toiau=ta fai/netai for things do not seem as they really are, when
e)n pollw=| a)nasth/mati tiqe/mena. set at a distance.

Parallel Translations of Hero of Alexandria, Definitiones (Horoi ton geometrias onomaton),

135, 14:

(tr. Kim H. Veltman) (tr. Ralph Hancock, slightly rev. B.A.M.)

The scenographic part of optics studies how one

should paint images of buildings; since things do
not appear as they are, one considers, not how to
draw the existing relations but rather to represent
them in the manner that they will appear.

And the goal of the architect is to make a work
harmonic with respect to appearance and
insomuch as possible to find antidotes to the
illusions of the eye, since he does not aim at true
equality and harmony, but as they appear to the
eye.
[Skenographikon is the art which teaches how] an
architect ought to make his work seem well
proportioned, and, where possible, to invent
remedies [alexemata] against optical illusion,
seeking not real evenness or proportion, but that
of vision.

Hence he constructs cylindrical columns, which Thus, since a cylindrical column would, when
according to the eye shrink in the middle and looked at, seem irregularly narrower in the
would therefore appear broken, and accordingly middle, he makes this part of it wider,
builds them thicker there.

Similarly, he sometimes draws the circle not as a and it happens when he draws a circle not as a
circle, but as an ellipse, the square as stretched circle but as a section of a sharp cone, and a
out and a number of large columns in various square, oblong, and a number of columns

9
 sizes in accordance with their number and their differing in height, according to different
size. measures as to width and height.

This is the same calculation which leads the
constructor of a colossal work to adopt the
apparent ratio of his production and is not carried
out in vain in accordance with its true
proportions, since works which are carried out on
a large scale do not appear as they are.
The same method also applies to a colossus
maker, producing the seeming symmetry of his
work, so that it may seem well proportioned
when examined, without vainly toiling to achieve
real symmetry; for things do not seem as they
really are, when set at a distance.

N.B. Compare Plato on fantastic vs. icastic art: the former applying to the phantasia in the sense
of the appearance of things:

From an Internet Article: Notebooks:

Plato and Aristotle contrasted:

For Aristotle, accuracy is not central to whether some work of art is good or not. What Aristotle and
Plato mean by imitation differ from one another. Plato: icastic (imitation of what really exists) or
fantastic (imitation of things that do not really exist): but what is accuracy when speaking of
imaginary things? Imaginary things may speak through the allegory of broader truths. Plato: the
world of ideas brought forth in images. The neo-classicist version of this: the poet offers a generalized
view of reality. Platonic view: art as idealized, completed nature, versus neo-classic view: truth is
drawn from generalizations drawn from senses.

Baxter Hathaway, The Age of Criticism: The Late Renaissance in Italy (Ithaca, New
York: Cornell University Press, 1962), p. 14, fn. 6:
6
For Plato’s treatment of the distinction between icastic and fantastic imitation (which is very brief
in view of what Renaissance critics made of it), see Sophist 236. Icastic imitation presents a true
likeness of an object or person. Fantastic imitation presents an “appearance” of what does not actually
exist. But from the context in Plato it is apparent that he would have classed as fantastic a portrait
that used perspective since the actual canvas is a flat surface.

Andrew Stewart, One Hundred Greek Sculptors: Their Careers and Extant Works. The
Sculptors: The Fourth-century Virtuosi. IV. Lysippos and Lysistratos, Sons of Lys[ippos?]
of Sikyon

Lysippos

Lysistratos

T124.
Pliny, N.H. 34.61-5

(61) Duris says that Lysippus of Sicyon was nobody’s pupil; originally a bronze-smith, he joined the
discipline after hearing a response from the painter Eupompus. When asked which of his
predecessors he followed, Eupompus pointed to a crowd of people and said that it was Nature herself,
not another artist, whom one should imitate.

(62) He was a most prolific artist, and made more statues than any other sculptor, among them a Man
Scraping Himself with a Strigil, which M. Agrippa dedicated in front of his baths, and which the
10
emperor Tiberius was astonishingly fond of. Although at the beginning of his principate he kept
control of himself, he was unable to do so in this case, and had the statue removed to his bedroom,
substituting another in its place. But the Roman people became so indignant at this that they raised
an outcry at the theater, shouting, “Give us back our Apoxyomenos!” So despite his admiration for
it, the emperor returned it.

(63) Lysippus is famed for his drunken flute-girl, his hounds and huntsmen, and particularly for his
chariot of the Sun at Rhodes. He also made many studies of Alexander the Great, beginning with one
in his boyhood which so entranced the emperor Nero that he ordered it to be gilded, but this addition
to its monetary value so diminished its artistic appeal that the gold was later removed, and in that
condition it was considered more valuable even though it retained the scars from the work done on
it and the incisions for fastening the gold.

(64) He also made an Hephaestion, Alexander’s friend, which some ascribe to Polyclitus, though he
lived a century earlier, an Alexander’s Hunt dedicated at Delphi, a satyr now at Athens, and
Alexander’s Squadron, in which he rendered the portraits of his friends with the highest degree of
likeness possible in every case; Metellus removed this to Rome after the conquest of Macedonia
[148]. He also made chariot groups of various kinds.

(65) Lysippus is said to have contributed much to the art of sculpture, by rendering the hair in more
detail, by making the heads of his figures smaller than the old sculptors used to do, and the bodies
slenderer and leaner, to give his statues the appearance of greater height. Latin has no word for the
symmetria which he most scrupulously preserved by a new and hitherto untried system that
modified the foursquare figures of the ancients; and he used to say publicly that while they had
made men as they were, he made them as they appeared to be. A distinguishing characteristic of
his is seen to be the scrupulous attention to detail maintained in even the smallest particulars.

Eupompos was a contemporary of Zeuxis (N.H. 35.64, 75), who floruit ca. 400 (N.H. 35.61), but
though the dates fit, the anecdote may be a fiction to cover Douris‘ ignorance of Lysippos‘ true
teacher, engineered to fit the supposed realism of his style (T 3, and further below).

By-passing the attributions for the moment, the manifold problems of the final, Xenokratic section
have provoked considerable discussion. Here the art that allegedly began with Pheidias in N.H. 34.54
and continued through Polykleitos, Myron, and Pythagoras (T 62, 43, 40), now climaxes with
Lysippos himself. Xenokrates clearly included the remark that “he made men as they appeared
to be” to distance his master from this supposedly increasing trend towards realism,
culminating in Pythagoras (T 40). In fact, Lysippos may have meant it more generally:
compare T 3 and the strikingly similar passage from Plato’s Sophist of ca. 460:

T125.
Plato, Sophist 235E

Stranger
Those who model or paint certain large-scale works of art do not [attempt exact mimesis]. For if they
rendered the actual commensurable proportioning [symmetria] of beautiful forms, you would think
that the upper parts were smaller than necessary and the lower were larger, because the former are
seen far away, the latter at close-hand.

Theaetetus
Correct.

Stranger
So artists simply wave good-bye to Truth, and now render not real commensurate proportions but
only those which appear to be beautiful.
11
 From this point of view, Polykleitos‘ severely objective attempt to uncover the true median
proportions of the human body (T 68) would indeed bring his “foursquare” canon (T 62, cf. T 124),
no matter how ideal it appears to us, within the scope of Lysippos‘ criticism.

Plato, Sophist 235c-236c (tr. Fowler) via Perseus (http://www.perseus.tufts.edu):

Stranger
To return, then, to our previous method of division, [235d] I think I see this time also two classes of
imitation, but I do not yet seem to be able to make out in which of them the form we are seeking is
to be found.

Theaetetus
Please first make the division and tell us what two classes you mean.

Stranger
I see the likeness-making art as one part of imitation. This is met with, as a rule, whenever anyone
produces the imitation by following the proportions of the original in length, breadth, and depth, and
giving, besides, [235e] the appropriate colors to each part.

Theaetetus
Yes, but do not all imitators try to do this?

Stranger
Not those who produce some large work of sculpture or painting. For if they reproduced the true
proportions of beautiful forms, the upper parts, you know, would seem smaller [236a] and the lower
parts larger than they ought, because we see the former from a distance, the latter from near at hand.

Theaetetus
Certainly.

Stranger
So the artists abandon the truth and give their figures not the actual proportions but those which seem
to be beautiful, do they not?

Theaetetus
Certainly.

Stranger
That, then, which is other, but like, we may fairly call a likeness, may we not?

Theaetetus
Yes. [236b]

Stranger
And the part of imitation which is concerned with such things, is to be called, as we called it before,
likeness-making?

Theaetetus
It is to be so called.

Stranger
Now then, what shall we call that which appears, because it is seen from an unfavorable position, to

12
be like the beautiful, but which would not even be likely to resemble that which it claims to be like,
if a person were able to see such large works adequately? Shall we not call it, since it appears, but is
not like, an appearance?

Theaetetus
Certainly.

Stranger
And this is very common in painting [236c] and in all imitation?

Theaetetus
Of course.

Stranger
And to the art which produces appearance, but not likeness, the most correct name we could give
would be “fantastic art,” would it not?

Theaetetus
By all means.

Stranger
These, then, are the two forms of the image-making art that I meant, the likeness-making and the
fantastic.

Theaetetus
You are right.

Stranger
But I was uncertain before in which of the two the sophist should be placed, and even now I cannot
see clearly.

[Plato. Plato in Twelve Volumes, Vol. 12 translated by Harold N. Fowler. Cambridge, MA, Harvard
University Press; London, William Heinemann Ltd. 1921. The Annenberg CPB/Project provided
support for entering this text.]

13
3. SKENOGRAPHIA AS A DIVISION OF ‘DISPOSITION’ AS COMING UNDER
ARCHITECTURE.

Vitruvius’ De Architectura Book I. 2 (ed. The Latin Library; tr. Joseph Gwilt 1826, rev.
B.A.M.):

Species dispositionis, quae graece dicuntur The species of disposition, which are called
ideae, sunt hae: i)de/ai in Greek, are these:

ichnographia, orthographia, scaenographia. ichnography, orthography, and scenography.

Ichnographia est circini regulaeque modice Ichnography is the representation on a plane of

continens usus, e qua capiuntur formarum in the ground-plan of the work, drawn by rule and
solis arearum descriptiones. compasses.

Orthographia autem est erecta frontis imago But orthography is the elevation of the front,
modiceque picta rationibus operis futuri figura. slightly shadowed, and showing the forms of the
intended building.

Item scaenographia est frontis et laterum Again scenography exhibits the front and a
abscedentium adumbratio ad circinique centrum receding side properly shadowed, the lines
omnium linearum responsus. being drawn to their proper vanishing points.

Ichnography according to Webster’s Dictionary:

Ichnography. a horizontal section, as of a building, showing its true dimensions according to a

geometric scale; ground plan, map, also, the art of making such plans.

Ichnography, Orthography, and Scenography according to the ArtSeminar Lexicon (©

1999 Donald Kunze):

ichnography n. [G.] 1. [arch.] The process of laying out the future building by pacing across the site
and placing markers to indicate walls, etc. 2. In general, any strategy that demonstrates the
relationship among parts and between parts and wholes in a work. See also orthography and
scenography.

orthography [from G. ortho, right angle, and graphein, to draw or write] 1. [Arch.] The vertical
presentation of a building, demonstrated through scaffolding and the erection of walls. 2. An
orthographic relationship is a tie made without over-restraint, as in statistics a right angle denotes an
independent relationship. 3. In art, orthography refers to the work as performed or otherwise made
present, its actuality. 4. The relationship between the physical parts of an artwork and the plan which
arranges the parts according to the whole beforehand.

scenography n. [G. stagecraft] 1. [Arch.] That aspect of drawing or writing that depicts the thickness
of things in their relation to vision, shadows, and perspective. 2. [Metaph.] Meaning produced by
intersection; artistically, scenography is the chiastic intersection of the main plot or theme with a
sub-plot or sub-theme. 3. [Anthrop.] Connections of the science of casting shadows with the use of
shadow as soul in witchcraft are evident in the practice of burying shadows within buildings as a
substitute for live sacrifices. 4. S. is both a type of vision and an anti-vision.

For an additional witness in Polybius, cf. The Histories, Book XII. vi: The Faults of Timaeus.
Fragments of Book XII (LCL, tr. W. R. Paton).
14
 Actually in order to glorify history he [the historian Timaeus] says that the difference between it
and declamatory writing is as great as that between real buildings or furniture and the compositions
we see in scene-paintings…. In my opinion the difference between real buildings and scene-paintings
or between history and declamatory speech-making is not so great as is, in the case of all works, the
difference between an account founded on participation, active or passive, in the occurrences one
composed from report and the narratives of others.

Polybius, Histories, XIII. 28 (Macmillan and Company, 1889, tr. Evelyn S. Shuckburgh),
Mere Inquiry is Insufficient:

For my part I do not think that real buildings differ so much from those in stage-scenery, nor history
from rhetorical compositions, as a narrative drawn from actual and personal experience differs from
one derived from hearsay and the report of others.

15
4. ON AGATHARCUS.

According to an Internet article, Greek Painting:

Agatharchos of Samos (440s-420s): cited by Vitruvius as the inventor of skenographia (‘scene

painting’), having painted stage designs for the Athenians, the originator of perspectival renderings.
(text slightly rev. B.A.M.)

Kim H. Veltman, The Sources and Literature of Perspective, Vol. I, The Sources of
Perspective, Introduction:

2. Pseudo-Perspectival Methods

Vitruvius, in the introduction to book seven of his De architectura reports that Agatharcus, a
contemporary of Aeschylus, painted a scene and left a commentary about it. This led Democritus and
Anaxagoras to write on the same subject, showing how, given a centre in a definite place, the lines
should naturally correspond with due regard to the point of sight and the divergence of the visual
rays, so that by this deception a faithful representation of the appearance of buildings might be given
in painted scenery, and so that, though all is drawn on a vertical flat façade, some parts may seem to
be withdrawing into the background, and others to be standing out in front.
Those who have interpreted these lines as proof of perspective in Antiquity have ignored the wider
context of the discussion. In the same book (VII, Chapter V), Vitruvius laments the decadence of
contemporary fresco paintings noting that whereas the ancients required realistic pictures of real
things, subsequent artists represented “the forms of buildings and of columns and overhanging
pediments” as well as the façades of scenes in tragic, comic or satyric style. Vitruvius adds that

Those subjects which were copied from actual realities were scorned in those days of bad taste. We now
have fresco paintings of monstrosities rather than of truthful representations of definite things. Such things
do not exist and cannot exist and never have existed.

If linear perspective had been involved Vitruvius, as a pragmatic architect, should have emphasized
the practical applications of these methods for architecture and their significance in recording the
natural world quantitatively. His deliberate opposition between truthful representation of the natural
world and the unreal objects produced in these scene paintings and frescoes confirms that something
else was involved. The evidence of the extant frescoes at Pompeii (pl. 1.4), Herculaneum and
Oplontis supports this conclusion. Most of the buildings represent imaginary inventions which are
architectural impossibilities. In most cases the depth represented involves only a few feet. The scenes
serve to close spaces rather than to open them. Nor do all the lines converge to a single point. In the
rare cases where most lines observe this rule, the rest still converge to other points along an axis.
This suggests that Vitruvius’ description of scene painting probably involved a pseudo-perspectival
method variously known as axial, vanishing vertical axis or fish-bone perspective (fig. 2b, pl. 1.3-4).
In which case, the centre which Vitruvius mentions, refers to an axis running through the central
point of a Greek theatre, an axis being involved in order to accommodate the different heights of the
viewers.

Ken Pringle, “The History of Horn Angles” (d) A possible background to early stereometric
consideration of the conic curves:

Speculatively it is possible to provide a plausible background to supposed involvement of Demo-

critus in the genesis of study of the conic sections. The conic sections as sections of the right circular
cone might have been noticed first in connection with the shapes of shadows of a spherical globe as
cast onto a flat surface by a light source in various relative positions. The shapes or appearances of
shadows likely would be studied in connection with scene painting. We know from a passage in
16
Vitruvius’s treatise De Architectura (VII. praefatio 11) that Democritus of Abdera discussed
problems arising in connection with scene painting. There was developed in the second half of the
fifth century B.C. a technique called skiagraphia, literally “shadow painting”. It seems to have
combined shadow effects and perspective (Keuls 1978, pp.72-5).
Anciently there was a legend that painting began with the drawing of outlines around cast shadows
(ibid., pp.75-6). Certainly, satisfactory depiction depends on understanding the disposition of shadow
for given objects with a given disposition of light sources. The case of the illuminated sphere lends
itself readily to idealisation. The scene painter comes to recognise that a sphere as distinct from a
circular representation of it appears circular in outline from whichever vantage point viewed. This
gives by idealisation using the notion of visual rays the fundamental observation underlying the use
of focal spheres in reasoning about the conic sections. Parmenides B 8.42-9 admits at least one
interpretation (Mourelatos 1970, pp.120-30) involving the notion of perspectival invariance of the
sphere in the sphere reference of the passage. Diogenes Laertius (Lives IX. 41) asserts that
Democritus somewhere alluded to the doctrine of the One held by Parmenides and Zeno. We may
suppose on the basis of this (though anachronistic interpretation may have been involved) that
Democritus knew the writing of Parmenides. The notion of perspectival invariance of the sphere thus
may have been the more present to mind by reason of Democritus having noted the sphere reference
in the poem.

(c) 2019; 2024 Bart A. Mazzetti.

17