A History of Fine Art in India and Ceylon, from the Earliest Times to the Present Day c10.s2.34

c10.s2.34

One Hellenistic group, known from at least five or six specimens, is of special interest as being demonstrably adapted from a masterpiece of Leochares, a famous Attic artist of the fourth century before Christ (372–330 B. C.). His bronze work, praised by Pliny (d. A. D. 79), but long since lost, inspired many later copyists, who translated the theme into marble, with variations. One of the marble copies, or imitations, is in the British Museum, another at Thessalonica, a third at Venice, and the fourth and finest is in the Museo Pio Clementino at the Vatican. The subject is the carrying off of the beautiful boy Ganymede by an eagle, represented sometimes as the messenger of Zeus, and sometimes as the god himself transformed. In the