Scopas or Skopas (Ancient Greek: Σκόπας; c. 395 BC-350 BC) was an Ancient Greek sculptor and architect, born on the island of Paros. Scopas worked with Praxiteles, he sculpted parts of the Mausoleum of Halicarnassus, especially the reliefs. He led the building of the new temple of Athena Alea at Tegea. Similar to Lysippus, Scopas is in his art a successor of the Classical Greek sculptor Polyclitus. The faces of the heads almost in quadrat with deeply sunken eyes and a slightly opened mouth are specific characters in the figures of Scopas.
Works after Scopas are preserved in the British Museum (reliefs) in London; fragments from the temple of Athena Alea at Tegea in the National Archaeological Museum of Athens; the celebrated Ludovisi Ares in the Palazzo Altemps, Rome; a statue of Pothos restored as Apollo Citharoedus in the Capitoline Museum, Rome; and a statue of Meleager, unmentioned in ancient literature but surviving in numerous replicas, perhaps best represented by a torso in the Fogg Art Museum, Cambridge, Massachusetts.
Pothos
Pothos, or Desire, was a celebrated and much imitated statue by Scopas. Roman copies featured the human figure with a variety of props, such as musical instruments and fabrics as depicted here,[1] in an example that was in the collection of Cardinal Alessandro Albani
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A distinguished sculptor, a native of Paros, who appears to have belonged to a family of artists in that island. He flourished from B.C. 395 to 350. He was probably somewhat older than Praxiteles, with whom he stands at the head of that second period of perfected art which is called the Later Attic School (in contradistinction to the Earlier Attic School of Phidias), and which arose at Athens after the Peloponnesian War. Scopas was an architect and a statuary as well as a sculptor. He was the architect of the Temple of Athené Alea at Tegea, in Arcadia, which was commenced soon after B.C. 394. He was one of the artists employed in executing the bas-reliefs that decorated the frieze of the Mausoleum at Halicarnassus in Caria. A portion of these bas-reliefs are now deposited in the British Museum. Among the single statues and groups of Scopas, the best known in modern times is his group of figures representing the destruction of the sons and daughters of Niobé. In Pliny's time the statues stood in the Temple of Apollo Sosianus (Pliny, xxxvi. 28). The remaining statues of this group, or copies of them, are all in the Florence Gallery, with the exception of the so-called Ilioneus at Munich, which some suppose to have belonged to the group. There is a head of Niobé in the collection of Lord Yarborough, which has some claim to be considered as the original. But the most esteemed of all the works of Scopas, in antiquity, was his group which stood in the shrine of Cn. Domitius in the Flaminian Circus, representing Achilles conducted to the island of Leucé by the divinities of the sea. It consisted of figures of Poseidon, Thetis, and Achilles, surrounded by Nereids, and attended by Tritons, and by an assemblage of sea monsters. See the monograph by Urlichs (1863); Perry, Greek and Roman Sculpture, pp. 378 foll. (1882); and the article Statuaria Ars.
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