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

The theory that naturalism played the crucial role in the development of Greek art
continues to find place in modern scholarship, as the studies of Richard Neer (2002), Jás
Elsner (2006), and Jeremy Tanner (2006) indicate. 41
With the exception of Richter’s study of Animals in Greek Sculpture, where, as
mentioned earlier, she treats representations of animals according to the same scheme of
advancing naturalism reserved for the human form, no other study of this subject in
Greek art has given consideration to animals. Thus, the relevant theories of Emanuel
Löwy, Ernst Gombrich, John Boardman, and William Childs, which will be addressed in
detail shortly, focus almost exclusively on the human form. Animals, however, allow us
to see how naturalism in Greek art was perceived and evaluated. Before examining this
evidence, it is necessary to see, first, how the concepts of naturalism and realism—
usually considered a sister term—have been employed in the modern study of ancient
Greek art.
a. The Use of “Naturalism” and “Realism” in the Modern Study of Greek Art
In scholarly discussions of Greek art, the concept of naturalism is usually
discussed hand in hand with that of realism. 42 An example of this tendency is found in
41 R. T. Neer, Style and Politics in Athenian Vase-Painting. The Craft of Democracy, ca. 530-460 B.C.E.
(Cambridge and New York, 2002) tries to explain the phenomenon of naturalism in Greek art, on the basis
of vase painting and its connection with textual narrative in ancient Greece; see the review by J. Boardman
in Common Knowledge 10 (2004) 353. J. Elsner, “Reflections on the ‘Greek Revolution’ in Art,” in S.
Goldhill and R. Osborne, eds., Rethinking Revolutions through Ancient Greece (Cambridge and New York,
2006) 68, explains the rise of naturalism in Greek art as: “a specific set of transformations in the
subjectivity of viewers—as constructed through their confrontation with objects—that took place in
relation to the formal changes between archaic and classical image-making.” For substantial, both literary
and epigraphic, evidence, however, that presents the viewing of works of art in ancient Greece (i.e., fifth
century B.C. to second-century A.D.) as a consistent process in which the viewer created and assigned
meaning to works of art through active discourse, see T. J. Rusnak, Jr., “The Active Spectator: Art and the
Viewer in Ancient Greece” (diss. Bryn Mawr College, 2001). J. Tanner’s study, The Invention of Art
History in Ancient Greece: Religion, Society and Artistic Rationalisation (Cambridge and New York,
2006), is a broad discussion of the development of naturalism in the “Greek Revolution” based on a
sociological approach; for its review, see A. A. Donohue in CW 101.1 (2007) 109-110.
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