Apelles

Greek painter from Kos — court painter to Alexander the Great — regarded in antiquity as the greatest painter who ever lived, though none of his works survive. Known through Pliny's descriptions of his paintings, including Aphrodite Anadyomene and the portrait of Alexander holding a thunderbolt.

Represents the lost tradition of Greek painting — all that survives are literary descriptions of what ancient contemporaries regarded as supremely great — making Apelles the figure through which the ancient world thought about the heights of pictorial achievement.