Of his taste in painting and sculpture we are scarcely able to judge, partly because he is chary of his praise, generally confining himself to a simple mention or description of the work before him, partly because so few of the works described by him have survived to our time. [Sidenote: His taste in painting.] The paintings are all gone. A little blue pigment on a ruined wall at Delphi is all that remains of those frescoes of Polygnotus which excited the admiration of antiquity. That Pausanias himself admired them is clear, both from the length of his description and from the words with which he brings it to a close: “So varied and beautiful is the painting of the Thasian artist.” Elsewhere he seems to have lost no opportunity of describing extant pictures of Polygnotus, though he does not always mention his name. A painting of Drunkenness by Pausias apparently struck Pausanias especially, for he tells us that “in the picture you can see the crystal goblet and the woman’s face through it.” But the only pictures, besides those of Polygnotus at Delphi, on which he deigns to bestow a dry word of commendation are a couple of paintings on tombstones, one of them by Nicias, as to whom Pausanias tells us elsewhere that he had been the greatest painter of animals of his time. [Sidenote: His taste in sculpture.] In sculpture the taste of Pausanias was apparently austere. He decidedly preferred the earlier to the later art. Of the archaic works attributed to Daedalus he says that they “are somewhat uncouth to the eye, but there is a touch of the divine in them for all that.” He praises Bupalus, an artist of the sixth century B.C., as “a clever architect and sculptor.” But on the whole it was for the sculptors of the fifth century B.C. that he chiefly reserved his scanty praise, and amongst them he seemingly preferred the masters of the older manner who immediately preceded Phidias. [Sidenote: Predecessors of Phidias.] Thus, with regard to Pythagoras of Rhegium, who flourished about 480 B.C., he says that he was “a good sculptor, if ever there was one,” and in speaking of the boxer Euthymus he remarks that “his statue is by Pythagoras, and most well worth seeing it is.” Of Onatas, who was at work about 467 B.C., he expresses a high opinion: “I am inclined to regard Onatas, though he belongs to the Aeginetan school of sculpture, as second to none of the successors of Daedalus and the Attic school.” This criticism indicates that Pausanias preferred in general the Attic school of sculpture to the Aeginetan, though he considered one master of the latter school as the peer of the greatest Attic sculptors. At Pergamus there was a bronze image of Apollo by this same Onatas which Pausanias describes as “one of the greatest marvels both for size and workmanship.” It is a proof of the independence of Pausanias’s judgment in art that this early sculptor, whom he ranked with [Sidenote: Phidias]