Scopas

Biography

The clearest statement about Scopas the architect is a single sentence from Pausanias. Looking at the temple of Athena Alea at Tegea, he noted that the builder, as he had been told, was Scopas of Paros, who also made statues in old Greece, in Ionia and in Caria. That is almost all the ancient traveller says directly. The rest has to be pieced together from indirect evidence.

Scopas was born on the island of Paros, around 395 BC (the date is approximate; the year of his death, 350 BC, is likewise conventional in reference works). His father is said to have been the Parian craftsman Aristander. By one account he left Paros early and travelled throughout the Greek world; by another he first worked as an architect on his native island, and around 380 BC found himself in the Peloponnese, where he studied at Epidaurus beside the sculptor Timotheus. I know of no documents that would settle the matter, so both stories are best treated as hypotheses.

The temple of Athena Alea at Tegea replaced an ancient sanctuary that had burned down around 395 BC. According to Pausanias, it was surrounded outside by a Doric colonnade, with a Corinthian order of columns inside, and its pediments showed the hunt of the Calydonian boar and the battle of Telephus and Achilles on the plain of the Caicus. For a long time it was believed that Scopas carved the pediments himself, and the surviving fragments in the National Archaeological Museum in Athens were attributed to his hand. More recent scholars object: Pausanias names him at Tegea specifically as the architect, and the building went on for more than twenty years, so the sculptures could have been made by pupils while the master worked elsewhere. One cannot therefore judge Scopas’s personal manner with any confidence from the Tegea fragments.

His best-known joint undertaking is connected with Halicarnassus. Pliny relates that the Mausoleum which Queen Artemisia built for her husband Mausolus, ruler of Caria, was decorated by four masters, each given one side: the east to Scopas, the north to Bryaxis, the south to Timotheus, the west to Leochares. The queen died before the work was finished, but the sculptors, Pliny writes, did not leave until everything was complete. The frieze of the battle with the Amazons, part of which is in the British Museum, is usually linked with this project.

Pliny names other works too: an Aphrodite and a Pothos, venerated in Samothrace, the Apollo of the Palatine, a seated Hestia, a colossal Ares in Rome. He also mentions one of the carved columns of the Temple of Artemis at Ephesus, which Scopas made. Even the Roman temple of Apollo Sosianus remained a matter of dispute: Pliny himself was unsure who made the dying children of Niobe there, Scopas or Praxiteles.

The one bronze piece confidently attributed to him is the Aphrodite Pandemos at Elis; Scopas is usually considered above all a worker in marble. Horace contrasted him with the painter Parrhasius: one worked in stone, the other in colours.

Genuine sculptures have scarcely survived, so a picture of his art is built from copies. The “Pothos” in Roman replicas holds now a lyre, now a piece of cloth; the statue of Meleager is known from many copies, among them a torso in the Fogg Art Museum in Cambridge, Massachusetts, with heads in the British Museum and in the Harvard university museum. The Ludovisi Ares is in the Palazzo Altemps in Rome. Scholars note in Scopas deeply sunken eyes, a slightly open mouth, an almost square outline of the head and a dynamic composition: after the calm harmony of the fifth century he introduced into sculpture the theme of mental strain and passion. It seems to me that this is his main contribution, although without originals such a judgement can only be checked cautiously.

Where and when Scopas died is unknown. A crater on Mercury is named after him.