( fl Rhodes, late 4th century BC). Greek painter and bronze sculptor. He came from Kaunos in Caria, a city dominated by Rhodes in his day, or perhaps from Xanthos in Lycia. He had no known master, and none of his works survives. He painted ships, perhaps their ensigns, before he became a panel painter at the age of 50. Apelles appreciated his talent and promoted his pictures. He held Protogenes to be his equal in all aspects of art except one: he did not know when to stop working on a picture, and consequently his paintings lacked grace. His extreme diligence is the point of many anecdotes about him. His most famous painting was a depiction of Ialysos, the eponymous founder of that city on Rhodes. Ialysos was accompanied by a dog and so was perhaps represented as a hunter. The story is told that the foam on the dog’s mouth caused the artist so much trouble that, enraged, he threw his sponge at the picture. The sponge struck the dog’s mouth and achieved exactly the natural appearance the artist wanted. The Ialysos took seven or, in one account, eleven years to complete. Pliny (Natural History XXXV.102) added the curious detail that Protogenes applied four layers of colour, so that as one wore away or was damaged, another would take its place. Apelles stood speechless before the painting, and its reputation saved Rhodes. The Macedonian ruler Demetrios Poliorketes (reg 294–288 BC) besieged the city in 305 BC and would have destroyed it but was won over by the Rhodians’ appeal to spare not so much their city as the Ialysos. Cicero (Orator II.5) and Strabo reported seeing the painting in Rhodes; Pliny (Natural History XXXV.102) saw it in the temple of Peace in Rome, where it was subsequently destroyed in a fire. Protogenes also painted a Satyr Playing Pipes and Leaning against a Stele, which included a partridge perched on the stele. However, as the bird won greater fame for its naturalism than the satyr, he painted it out of the picture. He also painted various portraits of heroes and celebrated contemporaries and was commissioned to decorate public buildings at Athens: a picture of Law Makers in the bouleuterion and a picture of Paralos and Hammonias, personifications of state triremes, in which small warships appeared in the background, in the Pinakotheke of the Propylaia.

• Protogenes
  • works
    • Genre, §1: Ancient Greece and Rome
    • Greece, ancient, §VI, 1(ii)(b): Wall and panel painting: Classical-period subject-matter
    • Greece, ancient, §VI, 1(iii): Wall and panel painting: Painters and society
    • Greece, ancient, §VI, 2(iii): Wall and panel painting: Hellenistic
  • writings
    • Greece, ancient, §VI, 3(ii): Painting theory and criticism: 4th century BC