Apelles

Apelles also had a hand in the painting, as we are told by Polemon the Topographer.

Therefore even the great Apelles, when he was already admired, came to Sicyon and gave a talent that he might be admitted into the society of its artists, desiring to share their fame rather than their art.

And now for the first time Apelles, Megaleas, and sundry other courtiers made false charges against Aratus to which the king listened, and joining in the canvass made by those of the opposite faction, he favoured the election of Eperatus as general of the Achaeans.

Thus dealt not Apelles with Megabyzus (one of the Persian nobility), who pretending once to talk I know not what about lines, shades, and other things peculiar to his art, the painter could not but take him up, telling him that his apprentices yonder, who were grinding colors, gazed strangely upon him, admiring his gold and purple ornaments, while he held his tongue, but now could not choose but t …

Such was the excellent Arcesilaus, as in his other actions, so particularly in his kindness to Apelles, native of Chios, whom finding extremely indigent in his sickness, he repeated his visit to him with twenty drachms in his pocket;

This Apelles ought to have remembered, the emendator of the disciple Marcion.

The Holy Spirit had already then foreseen that in a certain virgin Philumene there would be an angel of seduction, transfiguring himself into an angel of light, by whose signs and tricks Apelles, being led on, introduced a new heresy.

But Apelles too will assail me with this pronouncement, and Ebion and Simon, and all in order, have nothing else by which, while insinuating themselves to me, they make me over to themselves.

Part of it Marcion and Apelles and Valentinus, and any others who undermine the resurrection of the flesh, take to themselves.

Let your Pheidias come, and your Polycleitus, and Praxiteles again, and Apelles, and all who pursue the menial crafts, earthy workers of earth.

And Apelles, beholding it, rejoiced at this work of Fortune wrought in his despair of art, and completed the picture not through art but through Fortune.

A wretched painter, they say, showing Apelles a picture, told him withal that he had taken a very little time to paint it.

And Apelles says he was so smitten with amazement on beholding the work that his voice actually failed him, and that when at last he had recovered it, he cried, Great is the toil and astonishing the work, remarking, however, that it had not the graces which made the fame of his own paintings touch the heavens.

Apelles relates that the souls were solicited by earthly baits, out of their supercelestial seats, by a fiery angel, the God of Israel and ours, who thereafter molded round them a sinful flesh.

As if, by that same heretical licence, he could not himself have either admitted the flesh and denied the birth, like Apelles his disciple and afterwards his deserter, or, confessing both flesh and birth, interpreted them otherwise, like Valentinus, his fellow-disciple and fellow-deserter.

" We have come, then, as the saying is, "from the lime-kiln into the charcoal-pit," from Marcion to Apelles, who, after he had been brought low in the flesh by a woman, lapsing from Marcion's discipline, and then was overturned in spirit by the virgin Philumene, took up from her the proclamation that Christ's body was solid, but without birth.

By these chapters alone, on which Marcion and Apelles think themselves chiefly equipped, interpreted according to the truth of the entire and uncorrupted gospel, there should have been enough to prove the human flesh in Christ through the defence of the birth.

And therefore, compelled to dispose of Christ in another way lest He be reckoned the Creator's, they first went astray about His very flesh, contending either that it is no true flesh at all (as Marcion and Basilides hold) or that it is of a peculiar quality (as the heresies of Valentinus and Apelles hold).

This useless and trifling little body, which they do not even shrink from calling an evil — though it had been the work of angels (as Menander and Marcus would have it), though it were the construction of some fiery angel as well (as Apelles teaches) — would suffice, by the patronage of a second divinity, to establish the authority of the flesh.

As the gambols of the lambs are to a finished ballet, as the caterwaulings on the roof are to a sonata, as the tattooings of a cannibal are to the paintings of an Apelles, so is the “lust” condemned by the ascetics to the loves of Romeo and Juliet.