Alcamenes

Alcamenes (Ancient Greek: Ἀλκαμένης) was an ancient Greek sculptor of Lemnos and Athens, who flourished in the 2nd half of the 5th century BC. He was a younger contemporary of Phidias and noted for the delicacy and finish of his works, among which a Hephaestus and an Aphrodite of the Gardens were conspicuous.¹

Pausanias says² that he was the author of one of the pediments of the temple of Zeus at Olympia, but this seems a chronological and stylistic impossibility.¹ Pausanias³ also refers to a statue of Ares by Alcamenes that was erected on the Athenian agora, which some have related to the Ares Borghese. However, the temple of Ares to which he refers had only been moved from Acharnes and re-sited in the Agora in Augustus's time, and statues known to derive from Alcamenes' statue show the god in a breastplate,⁴ so the identification of Alcamenes' Ares with the Ares Borghese is not secure.

At Pergamum there was discovered in 1903 a Hellenistic copy of the head of the Hermes "Propylaeus" of Alcamenes.⁵ As, however, the deity is represented in a Neo-Attic, archaistic and conventional character, this copy cannot be relied on as giving us much information as to the usual style of Alcamenes, who was almost certainly a progressive and original artist.¹

It is safer to judge him by the sculptural decoration of the Parthenon, in which he must almost certainly have taken a share under the direction of Phidias.¹ He is said to be the most eminent sculptor in Athens after the departure of Phidias for Olympia, but enigmatic in that none of the sculptures associated with his name in classical literature can be securely connected with existing copies.

References

• "Pausanias, Description of Greece". Theoi Texts Library. Translated by Jones, W. H. S. Aaron J. Atsma. 1918. Retrieved 18 January 2017.
• Julius Sillig, Dictionary of the artists of antiquity; 1837
• Andrew Stewart, One hundred Greek Sculptors : Their Careers and Extant Works
• Sir Charles Waldstein, Alcamenes and the establishment of the classical type in Greek art; 1926

Notes

Footnotes

1. One or more of the preceding sentences incorporates text from a publication now in the public domain: Chisholm, Hugh, ed. (1911). "Alcamenes". Encyclopædia Britannica. Vol. 1 (11th ed.). Cambridge University Press. pp. 517–518. ↩ ↩² ↩³ ↩⁴

2. Description of Greece V. 10. 8 ↩

3. Description of Greece I. 8. 4 ↩

4. One sculpture of Ares and Aphrodite is depicted in this relief ↩

5. Athenische Mittheilungen, 1904, p. 180 ↩