The Greek painter Apollodorus (active ca. 408 BC) was recognized in antiquity as the inventor of a systematic technique for shading to simulate the appearance of mass and space. He achieved this through the modulation of light and shade, a technique which in Greek was called "skiagraphia."

As with all the famous Greek mural and panel painters, no work by Apollodorus survives, but information about him is preserved in ancient literary sources. His invention of shading is most clearly recorded by Plutarch, De gloria Atheniensium (Moralia, 346A): "Apollodorus, the painter who first invented the fading out (phthora) and building up (apochrosis) of shadow, was an Athenian ... ." His surname, Skiagraphos (the Shader), is preserved by a scholiast on the Iliad and by Hesychius. Pliny the Elder also seems to be referring to the invention of shading when he remarks that Apollodorus "primus species exprimere instituit" (Naturalis historia, XXXV, 60), a phrase...