Comb through any of the latest art history or humanities textbooks, and you’re likely to find little if any mention of his name. Not even once does he appear in McGraw Hill’s “The Humanities Through the Arts”—now in its 10th edition. “Picasso,” meanwhile, registers a whopping 34 entries in the index.
Yet Phidias (also spelled as Pheidias) deserves better. He was a phenomenon in his day—the Michelangelo of the ancient world, if you will. He was heralded as the greatest artist in what was arguably the greatest city (Athens), with renown that reached as wide as Greek civilization.
