Callistratus

Callistratus was a Greek rhetorician, probably of the third or fourth century AD. Nothing is known of his life. His surviving work, the Descriptiones (Descriptions), is a collection of fourteen ekphrases — rhetorical descriptions of works of art, including statues, paintings, and reliefs.

The Descriptiones follow in the tradition of the elder and younger Philostratus' Imagines, exercising the rhetorical skill of making the reader see through words alone. Callistratus describes a bronze Satyr by Praxiteles, a Bacchante by Scopas, a statue of Eros, and other works with a florid enthusiasm that tells us as much about late antique aesthetics as about the artworks themselves. Whether he was describing real works he had seen or composing purely literary exercises is debated, but the pieces preserve valuable information about ancient attitudes toward sculpture and the power of art to create the illusion of life.