This article is about the ancient sculptor. For the ancient writer whose name appears in some manuscripts as "Scopas", see Agriopas

Agriopas

Agriopas was a writer of ancient Greece mentioned by Pliny the Elder. He was the author of an account of the Olympic victors, called the Olympionicae. His exact date is unknown.Agriopas is also sometimes cited by writers on werewolf mythology...

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Scopas or Skopas (Ancient Greek: Σκόπας; c. 395 BC

395 BC

Year 395 BC was a year of the pre-Julian Roman calendar. At the time, it was known as the Year of the Tribunate of Cossus, Medullinus, Scipio, Fidenas, Ambustus and Lactucinus...

-350 BC

350 BC

Year 350 BC was a year of the pre-Julian Roman calendar. At the time it was known as the Year of the Consulship of Laenas and Scipio...

) was an Ancient Greek

Ancient Greece

Ancient Greece is a civilization belonging to a period of Greek history that lasted from the Archaic period of the 8th to 6th centuries BC to the end of antiquity. Immediately following this period was the beginning of the Early Middle Ages and the Byzantine era. Included in Ancient Greece is the...

 sculptor

Sculpture

Sculpture is three-dimensional artwork created by shaping or combining hard materials—typically stone such as marble—or metal, glass, or wood. Softer materials can also be used, such as clay, textiles, plastics, polymers and softer metals...

 and architect

Architect

An architect is a person trained in the planning, design and oversight of the construction of buildings. To practice architecture means to offer or render services in connection with the design and construction of a building, or group of buildings and the space within the site surrounding the...

, born on the island of Paros

Paros

Paros is an island of Greece in the central Aegean Sea. One of the Cyclades island group, it lies to the west of Naxos, from which it is separated by a channel about wide. It lies approximately south-east of Piraeus. The Municipality of Paros includes numerous uninhabited offshore islets...

. Scopas worked with Praxiteles

Praxiteles

Praxiteles of Athens, the son of Cephisodotus the Elder, was the most renowned of the Attic sculptors of the 4th century BC. He was the first to sculpt the nude female form in a life-size statue...

, and he sculpted parts of the Mausoleum of Halicarnassus, especially the relief

Relief

Relief is a sculptural technique. The term relief is from the Latin verb levo, to raise. To create a sculpture in relief is thus to give the impression that the sculpted material has been raised above the background plane...

s. He led the building of the new temple of Athena Alea

Athena Alea

Alea was an epithet of the Greek goddess Athena, prominent in Arcadian mythology, under which she was worshiped at Alea, Mantineia and Tegea...

 at Tegea

Tegea

Tegea was a settlement in ancient Greece, and it is also a former municipality in Arcadia, Peloponnese, Greece. Since the 2011 local government reform it is part of the municipality Tripoli, of which it is a municipal unit. Its seat was the village Stadio....

. Similar to Lysippus, Scopas is in his art a successor of the Classical Greek

Ancient Greece

Ancient Greece is a civilization belonging to a period of Greek history that lasted from the Archaic period of the 8th to 6th centuries BC to the end of antiquity. Immediately following this period was the beginning of the Early Middle Ages and the Byzantine era. Included in Ancient Greece is the...

 sculptor Polykleitos

Polykleitos

Polykleitos ; called the Elder, was a Greek sculptor in bronze of the fifth and the early 4th century BCE...

. The faces of the heads almost in quadrat

Square (geometry)

In geometry, a square is a regular quadrilateral. This means that it has four equal sides and four equal angles...

  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

British Museum

The British Museum is a museum of human history and culture in London. Its collections, which number more than seven million objects, are amongst the largest and most comprehensive in the world and originate from all continents, illustrating and documenting the story of human culture from its...

 (reliefs) in London; fragments from the temple of Athena Alea at Tegea in the National Archaeological Museum of Athens

National Archaeological Museum of Athens

The National Archaeological Museum in Athens houses some of the most important artifacts from a variety of archaeological locations around Greece from prehistory to late antiquity. It is considered one of the great museums in the world and contains the richest collection of artifacts from Greek...

; the celebrated Ludovisi Ares

Ludovisi Ares

The Ludovisi Ares is an Antonine Roman marble sculpture of Mars, a fine 2nd-century copy of a late 4th-century BCE Greek original, associated with Scopas or Lysippus: thus the Roman god of war receives his Greek name, Ares....

 in the Palazzo Altemps, Rome; a statue of Pothos restored as Apollo Citharoedus

Apollo Citharoedus

An Apollo Citharoedus, or Apollo Citharede, designates a statue or other image of Apollo with cithara . Among the best-known realizations of this aspect of Apollo is the Apollo Citharoedus of the Vatican Museums, a 2nd century AD colossal marble statue of by an unknown Roman sculptor...

 in the Capitoline Museum, Rome; and a statue of Meleager

Meleager of Skopas

The Meleager of Skopas is a lost bronze sculpture of the Greek hero Meleager – host of the Calydonian boar hunt – that is associated in modern times with the fourth century BCE architect and sculptor Skopas of Paros. The sculpture escaped mention in any classical writer...

, unmentioned in ancient literature but surviving in numerous replicas, perhaps best represented by a torso in the Fogg Art Museum

Fogg Art Museum

The Fogg Museum, opened to the public in 1896, is the oldest of Harvard University's art museums. The Fogg joins the Busch-Reisinger Museum and the Arthur M. Sackler Museum as part of the Harvard Art Museums....

, Cambridge, Massachusetts

Cambridge, Massachusetts

Cambridge is a city in Middlesex County, Massachusetts, United States, in the Greater Boston area. It was named in honor of the University of Cambridge in England, an important center of the Puritan theology embraced by the town's founders. Cambridge is home to two of the world's most prominent...

.

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, in an example that was in the collection of Cardinal Alessandro Albani

Literature

• Andreas Linfert: Von Polyklet zu Lysipp. Polyklets Schule und ihr Verhältnis zu Skopas v. Paros. Diss. Freiburg i. B. 1965.
• Andrew F. Stewart: Skopas of Paros. Noyes Pr., Park Ridge, N.Y. 1977. ISBN 0-8155-5051-0
• Andrew Stewart: Skopas in Malibu. The head of Achilles from Tegea and other sculptures by Skopas in the J. Paul Getty Museum J. Paul Getty Museum, Malibu, Calif. 1982. ISBN 0-89236-036-4