Polygnotus

Born: c. 500 b. c.e.; Thasos, Thrace, Greece Died: c. 440 b. c.e.?; Thasos or Athens, Greece Also known as: Polygnotos Category: Art and architecture

Life The son, brother, and uncle of painters, Polygnotus (pahl-ihg-NOHT-uhs) moved to Athens, where his artistic innovations earned him the reputation of being the greatest painter of his age. He won praise for murals in public buildings in Athens and Delphi depicting such mythological themes as the conquering of Troy and Odysseus in the underworld. Some of his paintings were 15 feet (5 meters) high by 55 feet (16 meters) long, had as many as seventy figures, and were painted on wooden panels fixed to the walls. None of Polygnotus’s works survives, but scholars are able to reconstruct how they looked from extensive literary descriptions— especially those by second century c. e. guidebook author Pausanias the Traveler—and from vase paintings by artists influenced by Polygnotus.

Previous painters arranged their figures on a one-dimensional plane. Polygnotus provided an illusion of depth by placing characters across a rising landscape. He excelled at carefully detailing women’s headdresses and transparent garments and in portraying emotional facial expressions and gestures. Aristotle, in his De poetica (c. 335-323 b. c.e.; Poetics, 1705), praised Polygnotus on both moral and aesthetic grounds for showing the “ethos,” or inner character, of his subjects.

Influence Considered the greatest painter of the early Classical period, Polygnotus’s technical innovations in depicting space and his delineation of individual character opened the way for even more realistic painting by his successors.

Polygnotus Further Reading

Bruno, Vincent J. Form and Color in Greek Painting. New York: W. W. Norton, 1977.

Robertson, Martin. A History of Greek Art. 2 vols. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1975.

Stansbury-O’Donnell, Mark D. “Polygnotos’s Iliupersis: A New Reconstruction.” Journal of Anthropological Research 3, no. 2 (April, 1989): 203.

Milton Berman