Note 69 — ESSAYS.

Tiraboschi has laboured hard to convince himself and others that Zeuxis was a native of the Italian Heraclea. But I think he fails. Even if he succeeded in establishing his birth-place in Italy, his life was passed in Greece: there he studied and there he painted. His being employed by the Sicilians at Agrigentum, and by some towns in Magna Græcia, only prove their taste for Greek art, not that Zeuxis was an Italian.

(Additional Note to Essay II.)—It may appear strange that I have not mentioned Sicily, which abounded in works of art, more particularly in this Essay. But the truth is, there was no native school of either sculpture or painting; and whoever will take the trouble to read Cicero’s fourth oration against Verres, will see in that very interesting catalogue, that with trifling exceptions, all the statues and pictures which that guilty Prætor plundered the Sicilians of, were either imported from Greece, or the works of Greek artists. It is a pity that Cicero has not named the painters of those pictures which hung in the temple of Minerva at Syracuse[70], and which he praises so highly, especially the battle piece, representing Agathocles charging at the head of his cavalry. It would also be interesting to know the authors of those twenty-seven portraits of the tyrants and other great men of Syracuse, which the orator says were so valuable, not only as likenesses of the persons, but as works of art. Cicero, however, was no connoisseur, and when he wished to adorn his library, at Tusculum, with some work of art fit for the place, he employed a friend to choose it. And well did that friend choose, if the beautiful fragment now in the monastery, at Grotta Ferrata, and which was found on the site of the Tusculan Villa, be the very ornament sent from Athens, in compliance with his request.