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

especially of the neck and flanks, strike the eye more readily.” 175 With respect to the
same statue, but with emphasis now placed on its execution, Richter says: “we
can…enjoy the keen look of the eyes and the splendid structure of the long, lean body;
the shoulder-blade, humerus, and ribs are shown strongly protruding, and a long ridge
marks the abdominal muscle. The modeling is still angular and harsh.” 176
As can be seen, Payne and Mackworth-Young note the inconsistency in the style
of the statue, but provide no explanation of it. Yet it is worth noting that both in their
case as well as that of Richter, the positive evaluation of the dog derives from its
convincing anatomical details, which, in turn, reveals a modern conception of naturalism
as anatomical accuracy, but, at the same time, fails to consider that this conception may
not be an accurate reflection of the evaluation of the statue in the late sixth century B.C.
The presence of an inconsistent style has been also noted in a fifth-century marble
statue of a dog that was found in the area of the eastern cemetery of Pella in Macedonia
(Fig. 12a-b). 177 The dog, which sits upright on its haunches, has been dated to around
460-450 B.C. and is thought to have stood on a tomb “much like the grave monuments in
the Kerameikos or other Greek sites,” a suggestion which has been further interpreted as
evidence that Pella was an important center of Greek culture in the mid-fifth century
175 Payne and G. Mackworth-Young, Archaic Marble Sculpture from the Acropolis (New York, 1951) 51,
pl. 131, 3. The dog (Acropolis Museum 143) is the surviving half of a pair of dogs (the other one
[Acropolis Museum, 550] being in fragmentary condition). For a discussion of these dogs, their alleged
discovery south of the Parthenon, attribution to the sanctuary of Artemis Brauronia, and also date
oscillating between 540 and 520 B.C., with the majority of scholars favoring the later one, see B. S.
Ridgway, The Archaic Style in Greek Sculpture (second ed., Chicago, 1993) 201. She does not preclude
the possibility (201) that these two dogs and the Rampin horseman with his companion piece found west of
the Erechtheion might have formed a single group: “two young men, returning perhaps from the hunt (the
Dioskouroi after the Kalydonian boar hunt?) accompanied by their dogs,” but she does note that the
findspot of the riders is different from that of the hounds.
176 Richter, Animals in Greek Sculpture 31.
177 The statue was discovered by chance in 1954, in the area of the eastern cemetery of Pella, and three
years before the beginning of the excavations at the site: P. M. Petsas, Pella. Alexander the Great’s Capital
(Thessaloniki, 1978) 49. For the date of the statue as being based on style rather than archaeological
context, see Kawami, “Greek Art and Persian Taste” 263.
118