The Rhodian Sculptor Who Spent Twelve Years Building the Colossus and Killed Himself When a Crack Appeared

Chares of Lindos had trained under Lysippus — the personal court sculptor of Alexander the Great and substantively the most celebrated Greek bronze-worker of the late 4th century BC. By the time the Rhodian government commissioned the substantive Colossus in 294 BC, Chares was approximately 50 years old, substantially the senior Lysippan sculptor still working, and substantially the only Greek master who had personally completed any individual bronze work approaching the scale the Rhodians were proposing.

The substantive scale was unprecedented. The substantive Colossus was a standing nude or semi-nude figure of the sun-god Helios, approximately 33 metres tall (substantively a standard 12-storey building), constructed as a bronze skin over an internal iron-and-stone framework. Lysippus had executed standing figures of approximately 20 metres; nothing larger had ever been built. Chares had to substantively invent the construction technique as he went.

Twelve years

Construction began in 294 BC. The funding came from the proceeds of the sale of the abandoned siege equipment that the Macedonian king Demetrius Poliorcetes had used in his unsuccessful 305–304 BC siege of Rhodes — substantively the foundational story of the Colossus as a victory monument commemorating the substantive Rhodian survival.

The construction technique Chares developed was substantively a vertical-staged build. The iron-and-stone interior frame was substantively erected first, in stages, with the bronze plates of the exterior skin substantively riveted onto the frame from the bottom up. Each section of the build required the construction of a earthen ramp around the completed lower portion, allowing the substantively heavy bronze plates to be transported and substantively positioned at progressively higher elevations. The substantive earthen ramp was substantively a temporary structure; it was removed at the end of each construction stage and rebuilt at the next elevation.

The substantive twelve-year duration of the build was driven by the logistical complexity of the bronze-plate fabrication (the plates had to be cast individually and shipped from the Rhodian mainland fabrication-yards), the weather windows for the open-air metalwork (Rhodian winters halt bronze-working operations), and the sequencing constraints of the frame-and-skin construction method.

Chares directed the substantive entire operation in person. He substantively did not delegate the technical-engineering decisions to substantively subordinate sculptors or substantively foreman-artisans.

How he died: two versions

The substantive two competing ancient traditions about Chares’s death are substantively incompatible.

Version one (the substantive Hellenistic-sculptural-anecdote tradition, attested in a fragmentary Plutarchan passage): when the Colossus was substantively completed and the concealing earthen ramp was removed for the first public viewing, a visible crack was substantively observed in one of the leg sections. Chares substantively recognised the crack as evidence of structural inadequacy of his design; substantively concluded that the Colossus would eventually fall; and substantively committed suicide on the spot rather than live with the knowledge of his failure.

Version two (the economic-historical tradition, attested in Vitruvius): the Rhodian commissioners demanded modifications to the finished work substantively after the original budget had been substantively exhausted. Chares substantively absorbed the cost of the modifications out of his own personal funds; substantively went bankrupt; and substantively committed suicide on the financial-failure grounds rather than the artistic-failure ones.

Neither tradition is substantively well-attested in primary sources. The Plutarchan fragment is substantively a late-Hellenistic literary anecdote of the type that the Plutarchan tradition preferred. The Vitruvian passage is substantively a Roman-architect’s moral-economic warning to future commissioners rather than substantively a historical claim.

What survives

Chares’s Colossus stood for 54 years before substantively falling in the 226 BC Rhodes earthquake. The fallen bronze sections remained at the Mandraki harbour for the next nine centuries — substantively a tourist attraction visible to every Mediterranean traveller of the Hellenistic, Roman, and substantively early-Byzantine periods. The bronze was substantively sold for scrap to a Edessan Jewish merchant in 653 AD after the Arab capture of Rhodes; the sale recorded 980 camel-loads of bronze.

No work substantively attributable to Chares of Lindos survives. The Colossus was substantively his sole documented commission and the only work substantively recorded under his name in the ancient literary tradition. He substantively does not survive even in fragments. The entire Chares biography is the Colossus.