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

further use of animals in both Greek sculpture and painting as a means of not only
evaluating, but also classifying artistic skill.
It is clear from the ancient texts reviewed so far that animals, such as stags, cattle,
horses, lions, dogs, and perhaps insects such as locusts and cicadas were not dismissed
but rather favored and valued as subjects of Classical Greek art in both sculpture and
painting. It is also clear that animals, when employed as such, became vehicles through
which artistic skill was recognized, evaluated, classified and, subsequently, crystallized
as part of the legacy of Greek artists in antiquity. In this way, animal representations
emerge as an integral part of the human achievement in the arts of ancient Greece. When
combined with the abundance of existing animal sculpture, as remarked above by
Vermeule, this evidence indicates that the well-established, scholarly view of the animal
form as secondary to the human one in ancient Greek art, and its consequently justifiable
neglect as a subject of modern study do not stand on solid ground.
4. The Study of Naturalism in Greek Art
As mentioned at the beginning of this chapter, the neglect of representations of
animals in Greek art is particularly evident in the scholarly debate on naturalism. This
concept has been central to the stylistic development of Greek figural art, which has been
conceived in terms of both a progression and progress from unsatisfactorily rendered
representations of the human form to (extremely) accurately rendered ones.
An example of the idea of progression in the development of naturalism in Greek
art can be seen in Gisela Richter’s study of Korai of 1968, where her concluding remark
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