Polygnotus (c. 500–c. 440 BC)

5th-century BC Greek painter. He is famous for developing the art of large-scale narrative painting, his most famous works being the Sack of Troy (Athens) and Ulysses in the Underworld (Delphi). He is said to have excelled in the delineation of character in the human face, this quality earning his praise from Aristotle and other ancient critics.

Born on the island of Thasos, he moved to Athens in the time of Cimon. Although none of his work survives, the Greek traveller Pausanias describes in detail his Sack of Troy on the walls of the painted Stoa of Attalus in the agora (marketplace) in Athens. He also executed a mural painting of the Rape of the Leucippidae in the shrine of the Dioscuri.

He had numerous pupils and followers.

Something of his mode of composition may be gathered from the figures (placed at different levels) in the contemporary vase-painting of the Argonaut krater from Orvieto (Louvre, Paris).