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Alcamenes

1911 Encyclopedia Britannica

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a Greek sculptor of Lemnos and Athens. He was a younger contemporary of Pheidias and noted for the delicacy and finish of his works, among which a Hephaestus and an Aphrodite "of the Gardens" were conspicuous. Pausanias says (v. 10.8) that he was the author of one of the pediments of the temple of Zeus at Olympia (see Greek Art), but this seems a chronological and stylistic impossibility. At Pergamum there was discovered in 1903 a copy of the head of the Hermes "Propylaeus" of Alcamenes (Athenische Mittheilungen, 1904, p. 180). As, however, the deity is represented in an archaistic and conventional character, this copy cannot be relied on as giving us much information as to the usual style of Alcamenes, who was almost certainly a progressive and original artist. It is safer to judge him by the sculptural decoration of the Parthenon, in which he must almost certainly have taken a share under the direction of Pheidias.