Apelles was the most famous of the painters of ancient Greece and of antiquity. He lived in the fourth century BC, probably at Colophon. Ephorus of Ephesus was his first teacher, but attracted by the renown of the Sicyonian school he went and studied at Sicyon. In the time of Philip he went to Macedonia, and there a close friendship between him and Alexander the Great was established. The most admired of his pictures was that of Venus rising from the sea and wringing the water from her dripping locks. His portrait of Alexander with a thunderbolt in his hand was no less celebrated. His renown was at its height about 330 BC. Among the anecdotes told of Apelles is the one which gave rise to the Latin proverb, 'Ne sutor supra crepidam' -' Let not the shoemaker go beyond his shoe.' Having heard a cobbler point out an error in the drawing of a shoe in one of his pictures he corrected it, whereupon the cobbler took upon him to criticise the leg, and received from the artist the famous reply. Research Apelles
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