(), artists.
1. The celebrated Greek painter, contemporary with Zeuxis and Parrhasius (about Ol. 95,
ad Il. 24.163, p. 1343. 60) makes him a Sicyonian : these testimonies
may be reconciled by supposing him to have been a native of Cythnos, and to have belonged to
the Sicyonian school of painting. Our information respecting his personal history is confined
to the facts of his having contended with Parrhasius and Colotes; the works which he painted
on those occasions will be mentioned presently. Native genius, power of expression and
suggestion, and entire mastery of the resources of his art, seem to have been the chief
qualities which characterised Timanthes. (Plin. l.c. § 6.) His
pictures were distinguished, Pliny tells us, from those of all other painters by suggesting
more than they expressed; and, striking as was the art displayed in them, they showed a genius
which surpassed that art. (Atque in unius hujus operibus intelligitur plus
semper, quam pitngitur : et cum sit ars summa, ingenium tamen ultra arlem est). Only
five of his works are mentioned; but they are evidently masterpieces, and one of them involves
one of the most interesting questions in the history of art.
(1) The work referred to, and that which appears to have been regarded by the ancients as
his masterpiece, is the celebrated picture of the sacrifice of Iphigeneia, which he painted in
competition with Colotes of Teos (Quintil. The subject of Timanthes was the immolation of Iphigenia; Iphigenia was the principal
figure, and her form, her resignation, or her anguish, the painter's principal task; the
figure of Agamemnon, however important, is merely accessory, and no more necessary to make
the subject a completely tragic one, than that of Clytemnestra the mother, no more than that
of Priam, to impress us with sympathy at the death of Polyxena. It is therefore a misnomer
of the French critic, to call Agamemnon ` the hero' of the subject. Neither the French nor the English critic appears to me to have comprehended the real
motive of Timanthes, as contained in the words, ` l.c.) ; and the question
involved in it is, whether Timanthes displayed consummate skill, or was guilty of a mere
trick, in painting Agamemnon with his face hidden in his mantle. It is evident that the
ancients regarded this stroke of art with the most unbounded admiration. Pliny tells us that
it was " oratorum laudibus celebrate ; " and it is praised also by Cicero
(Orat. 22), Quintilian (l.c.), and Valerius Maximus
(8.11. ext. 6). Unfortunately, however, these writers display in this, as in other cases,
their ignorance of the true principles of art, by giving an unsound reason for their right
judgment of the work. The picture, they tell us, showed Iphigeneia, standing by the altar,
surrounded, among the assistants, by Calchas, whose prophetic voice had demanded her
sacrifice, and whose hand was about to complete it, Ulysses, who had brought her from her
home, and Menelaus, her father's brother, all manifesting different degrees of grief, so that,
when the artist had painted the sorrow of Calchas, and the deeper sorrow of Ulysses, and had
added all his powers to express the woe of Menelaus, his resources were exhausted, and, unable
to give a powerful expression to the agony of the father, he covered his head with a veil. In
the present state of aesthetic criticism, it is hardly necessary to point out the absurdity of
thus making out Timanthes to be the Epimetheus of painting. The very writers, who have given
this false judgment, let fall expressions, borrowed doubtless from their Greek authorities,
which intimate the true reason of the manner in which Timanthes painted Agamemnon : " patris
ipsius vultum velavit, quem digne non poterat ostendere," says Pliny; "
non reperiens quo digno modo patris vultutm posset exprimere," says
Quintilian. In one word, it was his knowledge of aesthetic principles, not his want of
artistic power, that dictated to Timanthes this mode of representation. His conduct has been
most admirably vindicated by Fuseli, in reply to the (in this case) mistaken judgment of
Reynolds, and the shallow flippancy of Falconet (Reynolds, Discourse
viii.; Fuseli, Lecture i. vol. ii. pp. 44-58, in Knowles's Life and Writings of Fuseli.) The whole of Fuseli's remarks should be read ;
but the following extract will perhaps convey their spirit sufficiently. decere, pro
diysnitate, and digne,' in the passages of Tally, Quintilian, and
Pliny; they ascribe to impotence what was the forbearance of judgment. Timanthes felt like a
father : he did not hide the face of Agamemnon, because it was beyond the power of his art,
not because it was beyond the possibility, but because it was beyond the dignity of
expression, because the inspiring feature of paternal affection at that moment, and the
action which of necessity must have accompanied it, would either have destroyed the grandeur
of the character, and the solemnity of the scene, or subjected the painter with the majority
of his judges to the imputation of insensibility. He must either have represented him in
tears, or convulsed at the flash of the raised dagger, forgetting the chief in the father,
or shown him absorbed by despair, and in that state of stupefaction, which levels all
features and deadens expression; he might indeed have chosen a fourth mode, he might have
exhibited him fainting and palsied in the arms of his attendants, and by this confusion of
male and female character, merited the applause of every theatre at Paris. But Timanthes had
too true a sense of nature to expose a father's feelings, or to tear a passion to rags; nor
had the Greeks yet learnt of Rome to steel the face. If he made Agamemnon bear his calamity
as a man, he made him also feel it as a man. It became the leader of Greece to sanction the
ceremony with his presence, it did not become the father to see his daughter beneath the
dagger's point : the same nature that threw a real mantle over the face of Timoleon, when he
assisted at the punishment of his brother, taught Timanthes to throw an imaginary one over
the face of Agamemnon; neither height nor depth, but propriety of expression was his
aim.
The question as to whether Timanthes invented this mode of representation, or whether he borrowed it from Euripides, is altogether beside the mark; and, in raising such a question, Falconet merely showed his ignorance of the true relation between pictorial and poetic invention. It may be worth while, however, to mention that Eustathius supposed the idea to have been suggested to Timanthes by a line of the