The Judgment of Animals in Classical Greece: Animal Sculpture and ...

the invisible, perhaps by mere curiosity. Mitchell’s differentiation implicitly suggests an
underlying cognitive difference between animal and human judgment of illusion. 128
Although he does not seem to be unaware of contemporary studies on animal cognition,
prominent in his mind is the idea that the birds’ behavior is a natural error of judgment
due to their inferior cognitive status as non-human beings. 129 It is important to keep in
mind, however, that studies on animal cognition, both before and since Mitchell
published his work, have been continually underlining the sophisticated abilities of
animals, such as dolphins and pigeons, to differentiate between the real world and
representations of it, and also to recognize and remember visual differences. 130 In
128 Mitchell, “Illusion” 334, n. 4: “most accounts of aesthetic illusion…insist on the radical difference
between animal and human responses to images,” as, for instance, “Jacques Lacan’s discussion [ tr. A.
Sheridan, The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis (Hammondsworth, 1979) 107] of the mirrorstage,
[which] moves from the description of the behavior of the chimpanzee to that of a human child, but
insists on the lack of a symbolic system in the animal”; also 334, where Mitchell’s vocabulary hints at the
idea of a preconceived difference between animal and human responses to deceptive art: “there is one
writer I know of who is notoriously unembarrassed by the equation of animal and human responses to
aesthetic illusion, and that is the Roman historian Pliny, who recorded probably the single most famous
anecdote of animals looking at pictures.”
129 Mitchell, “Illusion” 337: “there are animal behaviorists engaged, no doubt, at this very moment in trying
to ascertain just what sorts of pictorial illusions will stimulate responses from various kinds of animals, and
it wouldn’t surprise me to learn that some animals respond to the objects in some pictures as if they were
really there.”; also in 342, he speaks of “decoys,” and “lures,” which suggest that what he has in mind is
perhaps the response of real ducks to painted wooden ones as part of their capture, and trained birds used to
entice fellow animals into a trap. This latter technique is mentioned by Aristotle as being used in the
capture of pigeons (HA 613a) and partridges (HA 614a), and by Strabo (15.1.40-15.1.43) for the hunting of
elephants in India.
130 Recent studies on animal cognition have shown that dolphins, for example, have the cognitive ability to
distinguish between looking at the real world and representations of it. Morell, “Minds of Their Own” 54
reports: “there are many things they [dolphins] could do that people have always doubted about animals.
For example, they correctly interpreted, on the very first occasion, gestured instructions given by a person
displayed on a TV screen behind an underwater window. They recognized that television images were
representations of the real world that could be acted on in the same way as in the real world.” Also, for
evidence of picture cognition in pigeons which suggests that they see photographs and still video images,
but not line drawings, as representations of real objects, see S. Watanabe, “How Do Pigeons See Pictures?
Recognition of the Real World from its 2-D Representation,” in J. Fagot, ed., Picture Perception in
Animals (Philadelphia, 2000) 71-90; also, for the ability of pigeons to recognize video images of
themselves faster than it takes three-year old humans to complete the same task, see “Pigeons Show
Superior Self-Recognition Abilities to Three Year Old Humans,” in
www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2008/06/080613145535.html; and A. C. Danto, “Animals as Art
Historians: Reflections on the Innocent Eye,” in A. C. Danto, Beyond the Brillo Box. The Visual Arts in
Post-Historical Perspective (New York, 1992) 24, who, on the basis of studies of pigeons’ ability to
categorize pictures by subject, and hence to appreciate differences between pictures of different things,
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