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

particular, has dominated twentieth-century scholarship, and only lately a call for
reconsideration has been explicitly verbalized. The long-term survival of such an attitude
is both impressive and intriguing. For this reason, the following section considers two
specific conditions that have allowed for the inattention to animal representations in
Greek sculpture to hold strong: humanism and Christianity.
2. Why Have Representations of Animals in Greek Sculpture Been Neglected?
Published in 1970, the last revised edition of Richter’s 1929 study, The Sculpture
and Sculptors of the Greeks, provides an early example of attributing the prevalence of
the human over the animal form in ancient Greek sculpture to a specific Greek
predilection for athletics:
The athletic ideal helped to concentrate interest in the human figure. It
accustomed people to seeing the human body in all manner of postures and to
appreciating its beauty. Moreover, the Greek with his love of the normal had a
tendency to humanize everything. His gods and goddess are no longer monsters,
as often in Near Eastern art, but assume human form; so do the nymphs, satyrs,
centaurs, Tritons, and the other personifications of nature. Even when these start
with hybrid shapes they soon lose their animal characteristics and gradually
become more and more human. And so Greek sculpture consists largely of
figures of human beings representing divinities, heroes, and athletes. Animals
and decorative motifs find a place and an important one, but they are nevertheless
secondary. The human figure is the theme par excellence. 18
As can be seen, Richter adopts a hierarchical approach to the subjects of Greek sculpture:
animals are important but secondary to representations of the human figure. In
accordance with this belief, animal sculpture occupies a separate, but still very brief
chapter (six pages) when compared to her much lengthier discussion of the human figure,
which dominates all the remaining chapters of her study.
18
G. M. A. Richter, The Sculpture and Sculptors of the Greeks (New Haven and London, 1929; fourth rev.
ed., 1970) 25.
17