SCOPAS, a native of Paros, one of the Cyclades group, then subject to Athens, belonged to a family of artists in that island. With his great rival Praxiteles, he is the chief of the later Attic school of sculptors, being nearly a century later than Phidias, the master of the early Attic school. He was an architect as well as a sculptor, and the earliest certain notice of him is, that he built the great temple of Athena at Tegea, about 359 B.C. We also hear of him at work on the temple of Artemis at Ephesus, and the Mausoleum at Halicarnassus. About 377 B.C., Scopas took up his residence at Athens, where he worked for some 20 or 30 years as a sculptor in marble.

His subjects were of the most varied kind, largely occupied with the more romantic sides of the mythology, or with the subordinate deities, and were marked, almost without exception, by great animation, invention, pathos, and passion. He loved to mold Mænads, Bacchanals, combats of Amazons, Love, Desire and Passion, in their most poetic forms, Nereids and sea-monsters. No extant works can with certainty be ascribed to his hand. But some Mænads, Nereids, and Tritons are supposed to be copies from his works. There is good ground to believe the reliefs from the Mausoleum, of which some are in the British Museum, representing combats of Greeks and Amazonz, were from his designs; and the better opinion seems to be that the grand group of Niobe and her daughters, copies of which exist at Florence, was the conception of Scopas rather than of Praxiteles.

As a sculptor, Scopas is remarkable for the boldness, passion, and fertility of his creative genius. In rapidity of movement, ingenuity of composition, and intensity of feeling, he is without a rival. He is the most lyrical of all the sculptors, and the one whose range is the widest, from frenzied rapture to the most tender and dreamy grace. He is marked off from his mighty predecessor, Phidias, as wanting his sublime dignity and Olympian repose. He is marked off from his great rival Praxiteles, as having a deeper and wider inspiration than that of sensuous beauty.

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