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

een noted, a confluence of three different cultures—Lycian, Greek, Egyptian—and its
sculpture, a strong Greek component. 147 As with the lion at the Metropolitan Museum,
Richter identifies a blending of canine and leonine elements in the lion of the
Mausoleum, which does not comply with her conception of naturalism as anatomical and
behavioral accuracy:
[T]he sculptor has given it the build of a dog with straight legs placed wide apart
and he has in no way conveyed that strange restlessness of a lion’s body which
suggests motion even when in repose, or the quality of his skin as it glides to and
fro over the powerful muscles. And the detailed modeling makes us the more
conscious of the misunderstanding of such salient features. 148
Wishing to explain further this misunderstanding, Richter states that “the artist had no
opportunity to study from life.” 149 Consonant with what was seen earlier to have been
said about the Chimaera Painter and Aegean artists, Richter’s statement reintroduces the
idea of artists’ unfamiliarity with leonine anatomy; as such, it reflects her explanation of
the style of the Masoleum lion as deriving from the sculptor’s observation of a dog (while
intended to render a lion), and therefore, as sharing the lack of a living model and
subsequent borrowing from the anatomy of a familiar species.
Such borrowing is a notion not without merit, since it is known to occur also in
Late Bronze Age Aegean glyptic art as evidenced, for example, by a gold seal from Shaft
Grave III at Mycenae (Fig. 9). Regarding the wounded lion depicted on it, it has been
147 The inventory number of the statue of the lion housed now in the British Museum is 1075. For these
points regarding the Mausoleum at Halicarnassus, and also a detailed discussion of its architecture and
sculptures, see Ridgway, Fourth-Century Styles 129, and 111-135; also Jenkins, Greek Architecture and Its
Sculpture 203-227, in particular 211-223, for a good summary of the suggested reconstructions of the
monument, and how they connect to the question of the display of the surviving freestanding sculptures.
148 Richter, Sculpture and Sculptors of the Greeks 75, fig. 363, and Animals in Greek Sculpture 8, 51-52,
fig. 28 (BM 1075). For the statues of standing lions from the Mausoleum of Halicarnassus, thought to be at
least 56, see G. B. Waywell, The Free-Standing Sculptures of the Mausoleum at Halicarnassus in the
British Museum (London, 1978) 68; also 27-34 and 180-209 for a detailed catalogue of both statues and
fragments of lions from the Mausoleum currently housed in the British Museum.
149 Richter, Sculpture and Sculptors of the Greeks 75.
105