Last week David Hockney was cited as an example of a great English artist who insisted on working, like ancient Greek sculptors, in a well-established tradition. But how did Greek painters work? Let Pliny the Elder remind us.
According to Pliny, Apelles (fl. c. 330 bc) from the island of Cos ‘surpassed all painters before and after him’. Court painter to Alexander the Great, he published volumes on the principles of painting – he favoured a palette of white, black, red and yellow – and was modest enough to recognise excellence in others: indeed, he thought a certain Protogenes his equal (he bought his paintings to sell as his own), except in one respect – that he (Apelles) ‘knew when to remove his hand from the picture’. He was never so busy that he did not find time every day to practise, if only by drawing a line. This became a proverb – ‘no day without a line’ (nulla dies sine linea).
One day Apelles decided to visit Protogenes’s home in Rhodes. The artist was away but there was a large panel ready for painting, guarded by an old woman. When she asked him who she should say had called, Apelles said ‘Say it was this person’, took a brush, painted in colour a very fine line on the panel and left.
When Protogenes returned, the old woman did as ordered. He inspected the line, said only Apelles could have done it, took a brush and drew a yet finer line, in a different colour, on top of the first one. Apelles returned, took a brush in another colour and added a yet finer line on top of Protogenes’s, who admitted defeat and decided the panel should be handed down to posterity for the admiration of everyone, particularly artists.
Pliny says the panel was displayed in Augustus’s palace on the Palatine in Rome and commented that, among the other works, it looked like a blank space. But it attracted huge attention and was ‘more admired than all the rest’. Anyone up to drawing a line or two for this year’s Turner art prize?
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