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

eference to the error of the Pliny’s birds, Mitchell notes “the dignity” afforded to them,
which he associates with “their role as omens and prophetic signs in Roman culture.” 131
At the same time, he reveals his view of the story as sitting on the boundary between fact
and fiction. 132
The story, however, shows—regardless of its actual or invented pedigree—that
Pliny acknowledges the role of the birds as credible guides to lifelike art. His
employment of them as judges is particularly instructive; for it appears to be “allowed,” if
not the norm, in the context of judging art. The birds, as they are conceived by Pliny,
validate the quality of Zeuxis’ art in terms of its extreme lifelikeness. 133 Twice they fly
to his convincing images of grapes. Twice they sense these images to be reality. Their
repeated reaction is not a topos of unreliable, erroneous behavior: rather, it is the reliable
test of lifelike art. As trustworthy connoisseurs of lifelike art owing, perhaps, to their
sensory perception, these non-human creatures confirm Zeuxis’ extraordinary skill to
states that pictorial competence is omnipresent in the animal kingdom. Danto also refers (24), albeit
fleetingly, to the pictorial competence of sheep. It has been recently noted that sheep, a species otherwise
known for its lack of intelligence, have sophisticated abilities to both recognize and remember visual
differences. They “recognize different faces (about 50 other sheep and 10 humans and still know them two
years later,” and marmosets “even have a sense of “object permanence”—knowing that something out of
sight still exists.” For these two references, see Morell, “Minds of Their Own” 47 and 58, respectively. In
addition, pigeons are able to recognize video images of themselves faster than it takes three-year old
humans to complete the same task: “Pigeons Show Superior Self-Recognition Abilities to Three Year Old
Humans,” in www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2008/06/080613145535.html.
131
Mitchell, “Illusion” 336.
132
Mitchell, “Illusion” 337.
133
For the influence that the connection between birds, Zeuxis’ grapes, and the concept of lifelikeness
exerted on later painters, see A. Bayer, “Defining Naturalism in Lombard Painting,” in A. Bayer, ed.,
Painters of Reality. The Legacy of Leonardo and Caravaggio in Lombardy (exhibition catalogue, Museo
Civico “Ala Ponzone,” Cremona, February 14-May 2, 2004, and The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New
York, May 27-August 15, 2004 (New Haven and London, 2004) 6, n. 9, where he points out that Vasari in
his account of the landscape paintings of Bernardino Marchiselli, called Bernazano (1492-1522) mentions
that in these landscapes, “there was a field of strawberry plants—“ripe, green, and in flower”—that were so
attractive to some peacocks that the birds actually tried to peck at them, leaving holes in the plaster of the
wall”; also the Milanese painter and author Giovanni Paolo Lomazzo (1538-1592), in his Treatise [of 1584]
on the Art of Painting, Sculpture, and Architecture speaks of the birds depicted in one of Lomazzo’s
paintings (Baptism of Christ) as “so natural that when the painting was placed outside in the sun, some
birds flew around in believing them to be real and alive.”
95