Aristides of Thebes

Biography

We have to begin with a painting that nobody has seen. In the descriptions it is a captured city, and among the ruins a dying mother, an infant crawling toward her breast. The mother, so the story goes, fears that the child will draw in death instead of milk. Ancient writers retold this scene more often than any other, and the painting itself, according to tradition, was carried off by Alexander the Great to Pella.

Of Aristides there are almost no other traces.

He came from Thebes and belonged to a family of painters. He is most often called the son and pupil of Nicomachus of Thebes and the grandson of Aristides the Elder; according to other accounts, Aristides the Elder may have been his grandfather or great-grandfather. His dates are unknown: the extreme dates given in reference works are conventional, and it is safer to speak of the middle or second half of the 4th century BC. He was a contemporary of Apelles. The list of his paintings goes back to Pliny the Elder and Strabo. He painted the “Battle with the Persians” for Mnason, the tyrant of Elatea, and for each of the hundred figures he is reported to have received a hundred minas. Among his other works are named “The Suppliant”, “The Sick Man”, “A Tragic Actor with a Boy”, “An Old Man Teaching a Boy to Play the Lyre” and “The Sufferings of Heracles from the Robe of Deianira”. “Theseus and Ariadne” was bought by Attalus, king of Pergamon, and later ended up in Rome. A scene from one of Alexander the Great’s battles is also attributed to him. The prices in the stories about his paintings vary: the sum of a hundred talents, given for the work bought by Attalus, is hard to square with a hundred minas per figure. I would not build conclusions on these figures, but they show that his paintings were valued highly.

From the titles one can see what drew him: pain, supplication, illness, fear for a child. Ancient writers described him in just this way, as a master of depicting human feeling and passion. Portraits are also ascribed to him, of which the likeness of a tragic actor was especially praised.

In the 19th century his paintings were given a conjectural reproduction in the Gallery of the History of Ancient Painting in the New Hermitage in Saint Petersburg: Johann Georg Hiltensperger painted its walls in encaustic on copper. This is a reconstruction from texts, not a copy.

Aristides had a son, Ariston, also a painter; the date and place of Aristides’ death are unknown.