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Merriam-Webster Zeux is ( 'zuk - s&s) biograghical name - 5th century B.C. Greek painter; works not extant, but painted chiefly genre and mythological scenes and still lifes; by legend, birds pecked at his realistic grapes
MSN Encarta Zeuxis Greek painter, active in Athens in the early 4th century B.C. Because none of his paintings survive, his fame derives entirely from written classical sources. Zeuxis exercised an immense influence on ancient greek and Roman painting, and copies of some of his paintings, such as The Centaur Family, survived for several centuries. In his Natural History (AD 77), Roman writer Pliny the Elder claims that Zeuxis began painting in the fourth year of the 95th Olympiad (397 B.C.) Zeuxis developed the use of light and shade to suggest depth, although the details of his technique remain vague. According to Greek author, Lucian, Zeuxis appears to have regarded this light effect as his most important achievement.
APPOLODORUS (5th Century B.C) Athenian painter known as Skiagraphos (the "Shadow Painter"). By skillful use of light and shade he improved perspective and the modeling of figures in order to heighten the illusion of three-dimensional space. His innovations were further developed by Zeuxis. None of Apollodorus' works have survived.
The Artist's Model From Etty to Spencer, Merrell Holberton Publishers London, Page, 95 Models and Muses Edwin Long (1829 - 1891) The Chosen Five (Zeuxis at Crotona) Oil on canvas, 152.4 x 243.8 cm 1885 Russell-Cotes Art Gallery and Museum, Bournemouth
The Chosen Five illustrates one of the most enduring and celebrated artist-model narratives. Long depicts the denouement of the story, originally told by Cicero and the elder Pliny, of the ancient Greek painter Zeuxis, who in an attempt to portray the perfect beauty of Helen of Troy, invited the most beautiful women in the city of Croton to model for him. From these he selected five, taking from each their best physical features to make a composite ideal. Long's pendant to the present picture was a 'prequel' entitled The Search for Beauty, in which the artist takes his pick of the available women on offer.
The original narrative of Zeuxis, a pictorial explication of the Platonic ideal Form, continued to appear in medieval illuminated manuscripts, although it was not until the early sixteenth century that the story was given renewed impetus - notably through similar stories relating to the studio practice of Raphael. With the growth of academic art in the eighteenth century it again achieved a didactic prominence, for example in Francois-Andre Vincent's Zeuxis choosing his models of 1789. The story of Zeuxis underpinned current academic practice. It also provided an incontrovertible justification for the artist having access to as many different models as possible, both in the academy and in the studio. Although the theme of the painting quite deliberately exploits the erotic potential of the subject matter, Long was praised for his tasteful and restrained approach to what was a 'difficult' subject.
The World noted that "the academic atmosphere throws, as it were, a veil over those undisguised humanities which should, I think, tend to keep them pure in the mind of Mrs. Boyn from the category of 'hussies'". As Alison Smith has observed, in the context of attitudes towards the female nude model in 1880s England, "Classical myths played a strategic role in dissociating the model from any insinuation of immorality; at the same time they reinforced the idea that the female body provided a perennial source of inspiration for artist and connoisseur alike". In other words, pictures like these were ideal vehicles for legitimizing male fantasy, at the very moment when the female nude as a motif was under attach by moral reformers and the female model was being characterized as a social and moral pariah.