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

the discovery of fossils of extinct species of animals, such as dinosaurs with which
nobody was familiar. 191
Turning to the statues of the lion and the dog from the Kerameikos, the elements
composing their style are inconsistent and contradictory respectively, but merge into each
other (blend into one another) and create, in each case, an animal whole whose anatomy
is an incongruous interplay of truthfulness and falsehood/deception, but fused into a
cohesive whole. As a result, the animal represented in each case has a unified form,
whose stylistic structure depends upon a balance (association) and at the same time
tension (opposition) between the poles of its composing elements. Such a situation is
definitely puzzling to the modern viewer, but does not diminish the fact that the forms of
the Kerameikos animals are distinctly different, both visually and conceptually, from the
non-unified forms of fantastic composite creatures (Mischwesen) like the Chimera.
b. Animals and the Question of “What Is It Really Represented?”
The issue of the identification of animals represented in Greek art is not new and
does not refer explicitly to works of sculpture. It encompasses representations in vase
painting too, while confinement to a specific chronological period is not the case. For
example, Hurwit, commenting on the depiction of an animal battling a human figure on a
Late Geometric II (ca. 730 B.C.) ceramic stand from the Kerameikos (Fig. 13), writes:
The beast is usually thought to be a lion, though few lions, I suspect, would be
convinced of that. The creature has short bristles down its back instead of a
shaggy mane and the legs it stands on have hoofs and fetlocks instead of claws.
This all makes for an odd lion. But of course it could be argued that the warrior is
191 For a discussion of representations of the griffin in ancient Greek art and narrative as influenced by the
ancient discoveries of dinosaur bones, see A. Mayor, The First Fossil Hunters. Paleontology in Greek and
Roman Times (Princeton, 2000) 38-53.
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