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

The Possibility of Influence from Bronze Age Representations of Animals
The stylistic affinity between Bronze Age naturalistic representations of animals
and those in Classical Greek sculpture is a topic that has not passed unnoticed in modern
scholarship. Vermeule, for example, addressed it in his discussion of Classical Greek
funerary statues of animals. There, he speaks of a great affinity between the naturalism
of prehistoric and later animals, or more precisely, of the lasting influence of Bronze Age
depictions of animals, such as lions, dogs, and bulls on those of the same animals in
Archaic and, especially, Classical Greek art, and sculpture in particular. 153 Focusing on
these three animals, Vermeule says:
The lions who leap at bulls and who face each other in various heraldic poses on
Mycenaean gems are little different from the felines on coins and gems from 480
to 375 B.C. They have the same circumscribed manes, the same round, fairly flat
faces, and the same long, feline legs with large paws. The affinity is not
coincidental; prehistoric stones were certainly excavated and circulated in
classical times, and the animals on the gate at Mycenae were not the first or the
only testimonia to prehistoric ability in the natural, forceful rendering of animals
that was available to archaic and classical sculptors. In the instance of bulls one
has only to compare, the large marble creature in the Kerameikos necropolis….
with the bulls on the Vaphio cups “to realize how little the generations after
Pheidias could improve on the art of the mid-second millennium B.C. The art of
rendering dogs may even have declined, comparing the Kerameikos mastiff with
the whippet-like hounds in the Mycenae and Tiryns frescoes. In brief, animals
offer the best subjective examples of artistic continuity from the art of the Bronze
Age to that of Skopas and Lysippos.” 154
In the case of lions, the similarity that Vermeule detects between the naturalistic style of
those depicted in Bronze Age art and those in Classical sculpture refers to the rendering
of anatomical aspects, such as their manes, faces, legs, and paws, which, in turn, indicates
that he is not immune to the conception of naturalism as anatomical accuracy. But, as
noted above, Bronze Age depictions of lions were not devoid of anatomical inaccuracies.
153 Vermeule, “Greek Funerary Animals” 52.
154 Vermeule, “Greek Funerary Animals” 52.
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