Phidias

At Delphi he created a great group in bronze including the figures of Greek gods Apollo and Athena, several Attic heroes, and General Miltiades the Younger.

In the Hippias Major, Plato claims that Phidias seldom, if ever, executed works in marble unlike many sculptors of his time.

[citation needed] According to Pausanias (1.28.2), the original bronze Athena Lemnia was created by Phidias (c. 450–440 BC) for Athenians living on Lemnos.

Adolf Furtwängler suggested that he found a copy of the Athena Lemnia in a statue of which the head is located in Bologna and the body is at Dresden.

The torso of Athena in the École des Beaux-Arts at Paris, which has lost its head, gives some idea of what the original statue may have looked like.

[11] Phidias supposedly weighed the gold robe of the Athena Parthenos to prove his innocence, but was then accused of impiously portraying himself and Pericles on the shield of the statue, which was apparently true.

[15] According to Philochorus, as quoted by a scholiast on Aristophanes, Phidias was put to death by the Eleans after he completed the Statue of Zeus at Olympia for them.

[16][17] From the late 5th century BC, small copies of the statue of Zeus were found on coins from Elis, which give a general notion of the pose and the character of the head.

[citation needed] A significant advancement in the knowledge of Phidias's working methodology came during 1954–58 with the excavation of the workshop at Olympia where he created the Statue of Zeus.

[citation needed] By 1910, mathematician Mark Barr began using the Greek letter Phi (φ) as a symbol for the golden ratio after Phidias.