Pasiteles

Active 106-48 b.c.e.

Sculptor, silversmith

Sources

Special Audience. Pasiteles, who hailed from southern Italy, was given Roman citizenship. He was active as an artist at the time of Pompey the Great (106-48 B.C.E.). His works were admired by contemporaries in antiquity, including the great polymath Varro (116-27 B.C.E.). He placed much emphasis on modeling, for working sculpture in metal and for carving statues. Pliny records an ivory statue he made depicting Jupiter in the temple of Metellus at the approach of the Campus Martius. He was also noted for sketching from life, and he appears to have been interested in animal as well as human or divine subjects. He wrote five volumes on famous artworks throughout the world and seems to have been part of the tradition of the artist cum theorist/scholar known from the Hellenistic world, but probably traceable to classical Greece. A statue support is the only surviving work signed by him, but examples from younger sculptors in his workshop are known, including a neoclassical youth signed by “Stephanus, pupil of Pasiteles” and a pair known as Orestes and Electra, signed by “Menelaus, pupil of Stephanus.” Pasiteles and his influence represent an important redirection in Greek sculpture, in producing images specifically for Roman tastes, which often involved revivals and adaptations of earlier styles in an environment of connoisseurship.

Sources

Jacob Isager, Pliny on Art and Society (London: Routledge, 1991).

K. Jex-Blake and Eugenie S. Sellers, eds., The Elder Pliny’s Chapters on the History of Art (Chicago: Argonaut, 1968).

Jerome J. Pollitt, The Art of Rome c.753 B.C.-337 A.D. Sources and Documents (Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, 1966).