Alcamenes

Alcamenes , fl. 5th cent. BC, Athenian sculptor, said to have been a pupil and rival of Phidias. He worked in gold, ivory, and bronze. His Aphrodite of the Gardens at Athens was one of the first sculptures to display the body in detail beneath drapery. Pausanias erroneously attributed to him the sculptures of the west pediment of the temple of Zeus at Olympia. He was also well known for his Hermes Propylaios [Hermes of the gateway] at the entrance of the Acropolis of Athens. A Roman copy found at Pergamum is in the Turkish Museum of Antiquities in Istanbul.

Alcamenes. Greek sculptor of the second half of the 5th century bc, a contemporary of Phidias and according to some ancient sources his pupil. Alcamenes had a high reputation (Pliny calls him ‘an artist of the first rank’), and after the end of Phidias' career in Athens, he was probably the leading sculptor in the city, but the evidence concerning him is meagre and in places confusing. According to the normally reliable Pausanias, he made the sculptures of the west pediment of the celebrated temple of Zeus at Olympia (completed by 457 bc), but in another passage Pausanias suggests that he was active as late as 403 bc, and it seems scarcely credible that he could be prominent enough to be engaged on a commission of the highest importance in the 450s and yet still be working more than half a century later (it has been suggested that there were an elder and a younger sculptor of the same name, or alternatively that Alcamenes carved only the acroterion surmounting the pediment rather than the great pediment figures themselves, the surviving parts of which are in the Archaeological Museum at Olympia). Several other works associated with Alcamenes are known from copies, and a badly mutilated marble statue in the Acropolis Museum in Athens is perhaps an original by him representing Procne and Itys.