Scopas

Who was Scopas?

Scopas or Skopas was an Ancient Greek sculptor and architect, born on the island of Paros. Scopas worked with Praxiteles, and he sculpted parts of the Mausoleum of Halicarnassus, especially the reliefs. He led the building of the new temple of Athena Alea at Tegea. Similar to Lysippus, Scopas is in his art a successor of the Classical Greek sculptor Polykleitos. The faces of the heads almost in quadrat with deeply sunken eyes and a slightly opened mouth are specific characters in the figures of Scopas.

Works after Scopas are preserved in the British Museum in London; fragments from the temple of Athena Alea at Tegea in the National Archaeological Museum of Athens; the celebrated Ludovisi Ares in the Palazzo Altemps, Rome; a statue of Pothos restored as Apollo Citharoedus in the Capitoline Museum, Rome; and a statue of Meleager, unmentioned in ancient literature but surviving in numerous replicas, perhaps best represented by a torso in the Fogg Art Museum, Cambridge, Massachusetts.