PRAXITELES, probably an Athenian of a family of artists, is usually regarded, both by ancient and modern critics, as the chief name of the later Attic school, of which he and Scopas were the rival heads. He is rather younger than Scopas, who was his master, and quite a century later than Phidias. He lived and worked mainly at Athens; but his works were scattered in prodigious numbers over the whole Greek world. His principle subjects are the younger and more beautiful of the deities, especially of Apollo, Artemis, Dionysus, and Aphrodite. With one exception, the Hermes of Olympia, we have nothing that can be certainly attributed to his hand. But many of the ancients attributed to him the Niobe group. And there is little doubt that we have copies of his work in the exquisite Apollo Sauroctonos, the Apollino, the Satyr or Faun of the Capitol, the Silenus and Fauns at Rome and Florence.

The most famous work of Praxiteles, the Venus of Cnidos, was one of the great wonders of the ancient world, and created an entirely new epoch in art. Its general idea is preserved to us, partly by the Venus of the Capital, of Munich, of the Tribune, and partly by coins. It was the subject of many epigrams, anecdotes, and descriptions; it became the object of pilgrimages to the peninsula; and King Nicomedes is said to have offered the Cnidians to purchase it at the price of their whole national debt. It was allowed to be the most surpassing representation of the female form. It was said to have been studied from Phryne, the famous hetaira, whom Praxiteles passionately loved. Though some attributed the innovation to Scopas, the Aphrodite of Cnidos is the first presentation of a goddess in complete nudity of which we have certain and exact particulars. The extraordinary beauty of the statue, of the finest Parian marble, and the new scope that it afforded to art, may be said to have revolutionized art, and to have opened to way to make the later Greek sculpture largely consist of representatives of the nude form of woman.

Praxiteles is charged with having debased the art of later Greece by confining it to the sensual image of physical beauty. It is true that his ideal is always the perfection of youthful beauty, carried in the case of the Apollos and the Fauns to a somewhat unmanly sweetness and grace. But in the Hermes, discovered at Olympia, and with great confidence attributed to the very hand of Praxiteles, we have one of the noblest types of manly beauty which time has spared us from the past.

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