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

What the modern scholar considers to be an artistic mistake or misunderstanding
could be as valid a stylistic element as any other to the Classical Greek viewer of animal
art. Plato maintains that, in his day, artistic representations of the human form were
scrutinized for their accuracy, and, frequently, considered defective, but he also admits
that non-human representational subjects were tolerated for their inaccuracies and
deceptiveness as long as they carried the smallest degree of likeness to their prototypes.
Unlike the modern critic, however, the Classical Greek viewer was open to inconsistent,
incongruous, and contradictory renderings of animals in art as long as s/he could
recognize what was represented on the basis of his/her previous knowledge. For Plato,
therefore, and his contemporaries, the convincingness of an artistic representation of an
animal was not always linked to accuracy. The notions, therefore, of inconsistency,
incongruity, and contradiction that shaped and, at the same time, bound together the
elements of the naturalistic style of an animal in art were acceptable, expected, and
dependent upon the knowledge of the represented animal available to the viewer.
By focusing on a small number of Classical Greek statues of animals, this study
has tried to draw attention to the conceptual context of Classical Greek culture with
regard to animals and how this context shapes the naturalistic style of animals
represented in art. As the fourth-century funerary statues of the lion from the grave
precinct of Dionysios of Kollytos in the Athenian Kerameikos and the dog from the grave
precinct of Lysimachides of Acharnai, also in the Kerameikos, show the naturalistic and
non-naturalistic elements in their inconsistent and contradictory styles respectively are
shaped by contemporary ideas about the lion and the dog. This is evidence that existing
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