But in a tantalizing twist at the end, Pliny recounts how Apelles and Protogenes thought it appropriate to treat this exercise as a finished work of art, and how it was displayed to an admiring and appreciative public, even only recently at the Imperial palace on the Palatine:Īmong the most elaborate works it had all the appearance of a blank space and yet by that very fact it attracted the notice of everyone, and was held in higher estimation than any other painting there. This would still be nothing surprising in a mere display of artistic skill, and so far the story has not suggested that the painters perceived their competition as anything more. Apelles’ Pollock-like technique of throwing a wet sponge at his canvas to create the effect of foam sounds more unorthodox, yet ultimately results in a meticulously realistic reproduction of the recognizable world as well.Īpelles’ and Protogenes’ painting makes no such attempt at mimesis. Pliny, marvelling at the extraordinary verisimilitude in the finest examples of realist painting, relates how horses would neigh when confronted with Apelles’ painting of a horse, and how birds would peck at Zeuxis’ likeness of grapes.
The Natural History is full of such more or less believable anecdotes of artistic dexterity. So far, there is nothing exceptional in this story. Some believe that we can catch a glimpse of Apelles’ work in the Pompeian Venus Rising from the Sea, speculating that it is a copy of the artist’s renowned version of the motif. Sharing the fate of the vast majority of classical art, not a single painting by either Apelles or Protogenes has survived until the present day.
Left behind in the studio was a piece of abstract art. At this point, Protogenes conceded defeat and went out in search of Apelles to finally make his acquaintance. He took up another color and drew an even finer, barely discernible line upon the previous two, leaving no space for anything more delicate to be executed, and left. Soon, Apelles returned and found himself surpassed in Protogenes’ reply. In reply, Protogenes drew an even finer line in different color upon the previous one and went out again. When Protogenes returned and examined the line, he instantly knew that Apelles had been there, as only he could have drawn something that perfect. Instead of telling the slave to inform Protogenes of his arrival, Apelles simply drew an exquisitely fine line on the empty canvas and left.
He found nobody there except an old slave and an empty canvas ready for painting. Apelles, the most accomplished painter of all time according to Pliny, once visited the studio of the likewise respected Protogenes, curious to see the works he had so far only heard rumors of. In a fascinating anecdote, surprisingly little-known given the extraordinary evidence it presents, Pliny introduces us to the world’s first abstract painting, composed by the celebrated painters Apelles and Protogenes in the fourth century BC. This straightforward narrative of linear development is challenged in a striking story told by Pliny in his Natural History. The likes of Wassily Kandinsky and Kazimir Malevich, it is commonly thought, deal the final blow to the formerly unchallenged tradition of representational art as they start to paint pure abstractions, art bearing no trace of reference to anything recognizable. Turner begin to display an ever-lesser interest in the minute reproduction of the visually perceptible world. Most of us think of classical art as uniformly figurative, and we perceive this mimetic tradition as unbroken until the nineteenth century, when experimental figures like J. The canon of Graeco-Roman art, populated with statues of athletes, friezes of battles, a Pompeian fresco or two of dancing fauns, seems to leave no space for abstraction. The title of this post will most likely strike the reader as nonsensical.