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Though the names of well over a thousand Greek sculptors have survived, very few emerge as concrete personalities through either securely attributed works, or extended treatment in ancient texts, or (very occasionally) both. Here I select only the most prominent of them, offering an up-dated version of Part III of my Greek Sculpture: An Exploration (New Haven 1990). The rest remain mere shadows: for them, the reader is referred to the primary sources collected by Overbeck 1868/1959; Löwy 1885/1976; Marcadé 1953; Marcadé 1957; Hebert 1989; the selections from these translated into English by Pollitt 1990; and the thorough discussions by Lippold 1950 and the various contributors to Pauly-Wissowa's Realencyclopedie (1894-present; here abbreviated to RE)(Pauly-Wissowa 1920, Thieme-Becker's Kunstlerlexicon (1907-1950; here abbreviated to ThB)(Thieme & Becker 1929) and the Enciclopedia dell'Arte Antica (1958-1970; here abbreviated to EAA).

As in Greek Sculpture Part III, here I include only the "hard" evidence for the lives and works of the men I have selected: texts, inscriptions, extant works, and attributions. For fuller descriptions of their styles (where the evidence permits) and for critical assessments of their aims and achievements, the reader is referred to the scholarship collected in the bibliographies appended to each entry, and to the relevant pages of Parts I and II of Greek Sculpture.

Ancient writing about Greek sculpture was rich and extensive. The first attempt to gather all of it in one place, Franciscus Junius's De Pictura Veterum of 1637, included well over a thousand entries, and in 1868, Johannes Overbeck was able to increase this number to almost 2500; since then, the appearance of new texts (chiefly papyri) and further investigation of hitherto-overlooked ones have added quite a few more. Furthermore, archaeologists are continually unearthing new inscriptions either cut by or for sculptors (signatures) or mentioning them (dedications and decrees), quadrupling the number known to Emmanuel Löwy when he compiled his pioneering catalogue of them in 1885. Here, only the most important or revealing of these sources are translated. These testimonia are numbered sequentially, T 1-T 171. Names of people and places have not been standardized but simply transcribed from the original Greek and Latin. This both avoids the awkwardness of "Hellenizing" Latin versions of Greek names in the middle of a text by a Roman writer and does not gloss over the not infrequent cases where medieval scribes have garbled the name sufficiently to make the original Greek a matter of debate.

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  • Cross-references to this page (1):
    • Lisa M. Cerrato, Robert F. Chavez, Perseus Classics Collection: An Overview, 1
  • Cross-references in notes to this page (1):
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