Early Achilles

Georg Pencz
Thetis entrusting the young Achilles to Chiron
(Chiron here depicted as Satyr)
1543
engraving
Museum für Angewandte Kunst, Vienna

Hans von Marées
Chiron with young Achilles
ca. 1883
drawing
Graphische Sammlung Albertina, Vienna

Tommaso Piroli
Centaur Chiron teaching Music to Achilles
(series, Antiquities of Herculaneum)
1789
etching
Hamburger Kunsthalle

Louis-Jean-François Lagrenée
Chiron with young Achilles
ca. 1750-60
drawing
Graphische Sammlung Albertina, Vienna

Bertel Thorvaldsen (figures) and Joseph Anton Koch (landscape)
Chiron and Achilles
ca. 1810
drawing
Städel Museum, Frankfurt

Ernst Ludwig Riepenhausen after Bertel Thorvaldsen
Chiron and Achilles
ca. 1820
etching
Herzog August Bibliothek, Wulfenbüttel

Frans Francken the Younger
Achilles discovered among the Daughters of Lycomedes
ca. 1625
oil on panel
Národní Galerie, Prague

Sébastien Le Clerc the Younger
Achilles discovered among the Daughters of Lycomedes
ca. 1710
oil on canvas
Musée des Beaux-Arts de Brest

Noël Hallé
Achilles discovered among the Daughters of Lycomedes
1763
oil on canvas
Staatliche Kunsthalle, Karlsruhe

Jan de Bray
Achilles discovered among the Daughters of Lycomedes
1664
oil on canvas
National Museum, Warsaw

Jan Boeckhorst
Achilles discovered among the Daughters of Lycomedes
ca. 1660
oil on canvas
National Museum, Warsaw

Giovanni Battista Dell'Era
Classical Frieze with Achilles discovered among the Daughters of Lycomedes
ca. 1790
drawing
Museo Poldi Pezzoli, Milan

Vincenzo Camuccini
Achilles discovered among the Daughters of Lycomedes
ca. 1795-1805
drawing
Graphische Sammlung Albertina, Vienna

Giovanni Battista Castello (il Bergamasco)
Achilles discovered among the Daughters of Lycomedes
before 1569
drawing
Graphische Sammlung Albertina, Vienna

Ancient Greek Culture at Pergamon
Torso of Achilles
170-160 BC
(fragment from colossal group)
Musées d'Art et d'Histoire, Genève

Johann Gottfried Haid after Rembrandt
Achilles
1764
mezzotint
Herzog Anton Ulrich Museum, Braunschweig

For us, who have lived with the heritage of Greek and post-Greek art throughout our lives, it may need a good deal of historical imagination to recapture the thrill and the shock which the first illusionistic images must have caused when shown on the stage or on the walls of Greek houses.  There is reason to believe that this did not happen before Plato's lifetime and that his outburst against the trickeries of painting was an outburst against "modern art." For it was only in Plato's period, toward the middle of the fourth century, that the Greek revolution was moving toward its climax, only then that the tricks of foreshortening were joined to those of modeling in light and shade to produce the possibility of a real trompe-l'oeil.  If we place the beginning of the revolution somewhere in the middle of the sixth century, when archaic art begins to stir to life, it took the Greeks some two hundred years, scarcely more than six generations, to arrive at that point.  How did they achieve, in this brief moment of time, what had been denied the Egyptians, the Mesopotamians, and even the Minoans?  Surely only a change in the whole function of art can explain such a revolution.  It is well to remember here that Plato's attack is not directed against the visual arts only.  As a matter of fact the painter's tricks are used by him only as an illustration of a more decisive issue: the banishment of Homer from the ideal Republic.  The arts must go, we learn, because they blur the only distinction that mattered to Plato, that between truth and falsehood.  Not that Plato failed to enjoy them – there is no evidence of that.  But it is hard enough, he would have pleaded, to sort out scientific knowledge from myth, reality from appearance, without interposing a twilight realm which is neither the one nor the other.  

Now it is precisely the acknowledgement of such a twilight realm, of "dreams for those who are awake," which may constitute the decisive discovery of the Greek mind.  To the unsophisticated mind – which may well be a mind as yet uninfluenced by the ideas of the Sophists – a story is either true or false.  The recitals of mythical events and the chronicles of battles are received as accounts of actual happenings.  Even today the idea of "fiction" is not immediately accessible to everyone.  John Forsdyke has shown how reluctantly the Greeks admitted this newcomer into their midst, how even they feared the loss of face that goes with being duped by a liar.  

– E.H. Gombrich, Art and Illusion: a Study in the Psychology of Pictorial Representation (Princeton University Press, 1960).