Praxiteles, son of the sculptor Cephisodotus, was the foremost Athenian sculptor of the fourth century BC and one of the most influential artists of all antiquity. Working primarily in marble rather than bronze, he developed a style marked by sinuous curves, delicate surface modelling, and an intimate, almost dreamy quality that departed sharply from the heroic grandeur of Phidias and his fifth-century contemporaries. His figures seem caught in moments of quiet reverie, their weight shifted onto one hip in the languid S-curve that became his signature.
His most revolutionary work was the Aphrodite of Knidos, the first monumental female nude in Greek sculpture and one of the most celebrated statues in antiquity. Purchased by the city of Knidos after Kos rejected it as too daring, the statue drew pilgrims from across the Mediterranean and established the female nude as a central subject of Western art. The Hermes and the Infant Dionysus, discovered at Olympia in 1877, may be an original from his hand — one of the only surviving works by a named Greek master.
Praxiteles transformed sculpture from a medium of civic statement into one of personal emotion and physical beauty. His influence permeated Hellenistic and Roman art and resurfaced powerfully in the Renaissance, when artists like Donatello and Raphael sought to recover his combination of grace, naturalism, and emotional warmth.