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| Georg Pencz Thetis entrusting the young Achilles to Chiron (Chiron here depicted as Satyr) 1543 engraving Museum für Angewandte Kunst, Vienna |
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| Hans von Marées Chiron with young Achilles ca. 1883 drawing Graphische Sammlung Albertina, Vienna |
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| Tommaso Piroli Centaur Chiron teaching Music to Achilles (series, Antiquities of Herculaneum) 1789 etching Hamburger Kunsthalle |
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| Louis-Jean-François Lagrenée Chiron with young Achilles ca. 1750-60 drawing Graphische Sammlung Albertina, Vienna |
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| Bertel Thorvaldsen (figures) and Joseph Anton Koch (landscape) Chiron and Achilles ca. 1810 drawing Städel Museum, Frankfurt |
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| Ernst Ludwig Riepenhausen after Bertel Thorvaldsen Chiron and Achilles ca. 1820 etching Herzog August Bibliothek, Wulfenbüttel |
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| Frans Francken the Younger Achilles discovered among the Daughters of Lycomedes ca. 1625 oil on panel Národní Galerie, Prague |
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| Sébastien Le Clerc the Younger Achilles discovered among the Daughters of Lycomedes ca. 1710 oil on canvas Musée des Beaux-Arts de Brest |
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| Noël Hallé Achilles discovered among the Daughters of Lycomedes 1763 oil on canvas Staatliche Kunsthalle, Karlsruhe |
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| Jan de Bray Achilles discovered among the Daughters of Lycomedes 1664 oil on canvas National Museum, Warsaw |
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| Jan Boeckhorst Achilles discovered among the Daughters of Lycomedes ca. 1660 oil on canvas National Museum, Warsaw |
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| Giovanni Battista Dell'Era Classical Frieze with Achilles discovered among the Daughters of Lycomedes ca. 1790 drawing Museo Poldi Pezzoli, Milan |
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| Vincenzo Camuccini Achilles discovered among the Daughters of Lycomedes ca. 1795-1805 drawing Graphische Sammlung Albertina, Vienna |
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| Giovanni Battista Castello (il Bergamasco) Achilles discovered among the Daughters of Lycomedes before 1569 drawing Graphische Sammlung Albertina, Vienna |
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| Ancient Greek Culture at Pergamon Torso of Achilles 170-160 BC (fragment from colossal group) Musées d'Art et d'Histoire, Genève |
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| 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).
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