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

the Archaic and less often of the Classical periods, which address the beholder usually in
the first, but also third person. This treatment, as seen in the case of Myron’s cow, was a
conscious attempt to help the representational subject become alive/ animated by
borrowing the voice of the spectator and engage in conversation with him. 615
Aristotle
The next fourth-century author to use zw|~on in connection with the arts is
Aristotle. The word occurs eight times in three of his treatises: Generation of Animals,
Categories, and On Memory and Recollection.
In the Generation of Animals, Aristotle uses the term to refer to the subject of
representation in a painting. After his description of the formation of skin on an animal
embryo, Aristotle explains the formation of the body as a gradual process of
development:
Now the upper portion of the body is the first to be marked off in the course of the
embryo’s formation; the lower portion receives its growth as time goes on. (This
applies to the blooded animals. In the early stages the parts are all traced out in
outline; later on they get their various colors and softnesses and hardnesses, for all
the world as if a painter were at work on them, the painter being Nature. Painters,
as we know, first of all sketch in zw|~on in outline, and after that go on to apply the
colors. (GA 743b) [49]
615 Svenbro, Phrasikleia 30, clarifies that this phenomenon “does not mean to say that they [the objects] are
their own authors,” but rather the viewers, through reading, are the instruments that enable the objects to
speak. As for actual examples of objects of this type, he mentions (30) the inscription on the early
seventh-century bronze statuette of a man dedicated by Mandrokles to Apollo at Thebes: “Mandrokles
dedicated me”; the message (30, n. 19) written on a sixth-century amphora: “Kleimachos made me and I
am his”; the inscription (32, n. 25) written on a funerary monument: “Here I am, the tomb of Krites,”
which declares a sema from the plain of Marathon dating from 500 B.C.; and also 39, n. 58, “the dedication
by Praxiteles, inscribed on a votive base discovered at Olympia and dating from the first half of the fifth
century: “Praxiteles, a citizen of Syracuse, dedicated this statue…and this is the monument commemorating
his virtue.” For a similar discussion of inscribed objects in Greek culture, with emphasis on the Archaic
period, see Hurwit, “The Words in the Image” 180-190.
316