Cephisodotus the Elder
4th-century BC Greek sculptor
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Cephisodotus or Kephisodotos (Greek: Κηφισόδοτος, flourished c. 400 – c. 360 BC[1]) was a Greek sculptor, perhaps the father or an uncle of Praxiteles, one of whose sculptor sons was Cephisodotus the Younger.[2]
The one noted work of his was Eirene (Peace) bearing the infant Ploutos (Wealth), ca 380–370 BC,[3] of which a Roman point copy exists at the Glyptothek, Munich, and fragments in various collections. The Eirene, commissioned by the city of Athens and set up on the Areopagus,[4] was attributed to Cephisodotus by Pausanias in the 2nd century AD.[5]
Cephisodotus also made, as did his son, a figure of Hermes carrying the child Dionysus, unless ancient critics have made two works of one. He sculpted certain statues for the city of Megalopolis,[6] founded by Epaminondas in 369 BC; Pausanias noted them in its principal temple in the 2nd century AD.
Two heads long thought to be feminine and inserted in female busts, one formerly in the Lansdowne collection[7] and the other in the Massarenti collection, Rome,[8] now recognized to be of Apollo, were attributed to Cephisodotus by Dorothy Kent Hill in 1974.[9]
