Moreover, we hear first in this period of mural painting as
applied to domestic interiors. Alcibiades is said to have
imprisoned a reluctant painter, Agatharchus (cf. page 278), in his
house and to have forced him to decorate the walls. The result of
this sort of private demand was what we have seen taking place a
hundred years later in the case of sculpture, viz.: that artists
became free to employ their talents on any subjects which would
gratify the taste of patrons. For example, a painting by Zeuxis of
which Lucian has left us a description illustrates what may be
called mythological genre. It represented a female Centaur giving
suck to two offspring, with the father of the family in the
background, amusing himself by swinging a lion's whelp above his
head to scare his young. This was, no doubt, admirable in its way,
and it would be narrow-minded to disparage it because it did not
stand on the ethical level of Polygnotus's work. But painters did
not always keep within the limits of what is innocent. No longer
restrained by the conditions of monumental and religious art, they
began to pander not merely to what is frivolous, but to what is
vile in human nature.
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