Agatharchus

Biography

The story of Agatharchus has come down to us through Plutarch and the orator Andocides: Alcibiades lured the painter to his house and kept him under guard for more than three months to make him paint it. The speech of Andocides in which this is mentioned seems to have been delivered after the destruction of Melos (416 BC) and before the expedition to Sicily (415 BC). This episode remains the most secure anchor for dating him.

Agatharchus himself left little behind.

He was a native of the island of Samos, the son of a man named Eudemos, and he worked in Athens. No dates of his life survive: the years usually given for him, about 500 and about 460 BC, are conventional, and the second sits badly with the story of Alcibiades. He was a contemporary of Alcibiades and Zeuxis. He was often singled out for the ease and speed with which he finished his works; according to some accounts he was self-taught. He is sometimes counted as belonging to the school of Polygnotus, but this is hard to confirm. It is possible that ancient writers used the name Agatharchus to cover several painters of the mid-5th century BC.

What is known of him mostly concerns the theatre. According to Vitruvius, when Aeschylus was staging a tragedy in Athens, Agatharchus built a stage and left a written account of it. Pausanias, it is generally held, speaks of him as a painter of scenery for the tragedies of Aeschylus and Sophocles. What exactly Agatharchus did is still debated. Some scholars, for example the German art historian Karl Woermann, saw in him the man who introduced perspective and illusionism into painting. Others recalled Aristotle’s statement that scene painting was introduced by Sophocles, and read Vitruvius more simply: Agatharchus constructed a stage. I find the first reading more convincing, because in Vitruvius’s context the subject is lines and a point of sight, not carpentry.

Vitruvius goes on to say that Democritus and Anaxagoras, following what Agatharchus had set out, wrote on the same subject. They discussed how, given a fixed centre, lines should converge on it in keeping with the natural view, so that images on the flat surface of a stage set would give the appearance of buildings, some seeming to recede and others to project. Agatharchus’s treatise has not survived, and everything said about it is known only at second hand.

Scene painting probably appeared towards the end of Aeschylus’s career and came into general use under Sophocles; this could account for Aristotle’s remark. Rare uses of perspective occur on vases as early as about the middle of the 6th century BC, but Agatharchus is regarded as the first known painter to have used it on a large scale. He is said to have led the way for later painters, such as Apollodorus. None of his works survives.