Timotheus (sculptor)

Roman marble of Leda and the Swan (Prado)

Leda and the Swan (Yale University Art Gallery)

Timotheos was a Greek sculptor of the fourth century BCE, one of the rivals and contemporaries of Scopas of Paros, among the sculptors who worked for their own fame on the Mausoleum of Mausolus at Halicarnassus between 353 and 350 BCE.¹ He was apparently the leading sculptor at the temple of Asklepios at Epidauros, ca. 380 BCE. To him is attributed² a sculpture of Leda and the Swan in which queen Leda of Sparta protected the swan from an eagle, on the basis of which a Roman marble copy in the Capitoline Museums³ is said to be "after Timotheos". The theme must have been popular, judging by the more than two dozen Roman marble copies that survive.⁴ The most famous version has been that in the Capitoline Museums in Rome, purchased by Pope Clement XIV from the heirs of Alessandro Cardinal Albani. A highly restored version is in the Museo del Prado, and an incomplete one is in the Yale University Art Gallery, New Haven, Connecticut.

Notes

^ Pliny the Elder, Natural History 36.30-31.
^ The connection with Timotheos was first made by Franz Winter, (Mittheil. Arch. Athen. 1894:157-62 and pl. vi), on the basis of comparison of drapery of a Nereid or a Hygeia of Timotheos, just at that time being excavated at Epidauros. (Adolf Michaelis, A Century of Archaeological Discoveries (1908:313)
^ Inv. MC0302.
^ Richard Hamann, "Original und Kopie" Marburger Jahrbuch für Kunstwissenschaft 15 (1949, pp. 135-156) p 153.

External links

(Getty Museum) Leda and the Swan Roman marble, first century CE, found in Rome, 1775 and bought by the second Earl of Shelburne, Lansdowne House, London. (Cornelius C. Vermeule, "Notes on a New Edition of Michaelis: Ancient Marbles in Great Britain," American Journal of Archaeology 1955:132f).
(Capitoline Museums) Leda and the Swan, from the Albani collection (inv. MC0302).