In Cleveland Apollo, how is the Praxiteles discussed?
Praxiteles was a master sculpturer with work that won for Greek sculpture great regard with modern artists and critics. In the popular estimate of his own time, he was the most famous of all Greek sculptors. His work was the most highly prized of Greco-Roman work at that time due to its personal and individual charm, the sweeping facile lines of his work, and the sensuous beauty of form. Among all of the gods, we should expect the art of Praxiteles to be focused on Apollo and Artemis. Several statues of these deities are recorded among his works, and many of them in our museums are derived from him or from his pupils. Maybe the best known of the statues of Apollo attributed to Praxiteles is of mythological interest, the Sauroctonus, or lizard-slayer. Praxiteles’s treatment of it was popular and preserved in several copies. It is probable that with the copies of similar figures of Apollo apparently copied from a Praxitelean original, the copyist exaggerated the softness of the figure almost to effeminacy.
Praxiteles