Aristides

, an eminent painter, was a native of Thebes, and contemporary with Apelles, about the year 300 or 340 B. C. His cheftfaeuvrc was the sacking of a town. Mr. Fuseli gives a very high character of him and of it. He applied the refinements of art to the mind. The | passions which history had organized for Timanthes (an illustrious predecessor), Aristides caught as they rose from the breast, or escaped from the lips of nature herself: his volume was man, his scene society: he drew the subtle discriminations of mind in every stage of life, the whis. pers t the simple cry of passion, and its most complex accents. Such, as history informs us, was the suppliant whose voice you seemed to hear, such his sick man’s half extinguished eye and labouring breast, such the sister dying for her brother, and above all, the half-slain mother shuddering lest the eager babe should suck the blood from her palsied nipple. This picture was probably at Thebes, when Alexander sacked that town: what his feelings were when he saw it, we may guess from his sending it to Pella. Its expression, poised between the anguish of maternal affection and the pangs of death, gives to commiseration, an image, which neither the infant piteously caressing his slain mother in the groupe of Epigonus, nor the absorbed feature of the Niobe, nor the struggle of the Laocoon, excite. Euphranor the Isthmian, who excelled equally as painter and statuary, was the disciple of Aristides, and carried the refinements of expression still farther. Pliny gives an account of the principal works of Aristides, a great part of which were destroyed at the taking of Corinth by the Romans. King Attalus, having discovered among the booty a Bacchus painted by Aristides, offered 6000 sesterces for it, which Mummius the consul hearing, got possession of the picture, and brought it to Rome. When on his death-bed, Aristides began an Iris, which he left unfinished, and which no painter of the age would undertake to finish. ¹