No Day Without A Line "The contest was told by Pliny in his history of the painters of the ancient world, and in particular in his biography of the favorite painter of Alexander the Great: Apelles of Cos. The story that everyone in the seventeenth century would have remembered about Apelles was of his painting Alexander's mistress Campaspe so well that the King gave her as a present to the artist. Painters, especially, treated the memory of Apelles as the patriarch of their craft, the perfect role model. He was, after all, the artist who became the familiar of the greatest prince of the world. The story of his life was a scripture of genius. On one occasion, according to Pliny, Apelles had heard of a serious rival, Protegenes, and journeyed to Rhodes to see what he was made of. 'He went at once to the studio. But the painter was not there. There was, however, a panel of considerable size, on the easel, prepared for painting.' Apelles left a visiting card in the form of 'an extremely fine line' freely drawn across the panel in color, a knowing signature since the almost unbearably virtuous and prolific Apelles was also known for obeying his own stricture of 'No day without a line' (Nulle dies sine linea), the motto which had become the Renaissance summons to self-discipline. Protogenes returns, sees the challenging line, and rises to the bait: 'He himself using another color drew an even finer line exactly on top of the first.' With the uncanny timing usual in these apocryphas, Apelles comes back once more, finds the competition out, naturally, and applies the killer, a third, even finer line, cutting the other two. Protogenes throws in the towel and dashes to the harbor to find his rival, having decided that the panel 'should be handed on to posterity as it was to be admired as a marvel by everyone, but especially by artists. I am informed,' Pliny adds, rather lugubriously, 'that it was burnt in the first fire that occurred in Caesar's palace on the Palatine; it had previously been much admired by us, its vast surface containing nothing else than the almost invisible lines so that among the outstanding works of many artists it looked like a blank space, and by that very fact attracted attention and was more esteemed than any masterpiece.'" from Simon Schama's Rembrandt's Eyes, p. 23