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

Ernst H. Gombrich
A similar, yet more advanced, account of the development of Greek art in terms of
increasing naturalism appears in the work of Ernst Gombrich. His essay of 1961,
Reflections on the Greek Revolution, makes use of Löwy’s ideas of increasing naturalism
and dissatisfaction. 67 Like Löwy, Gombrich is concerned with the development of Greek
art as a passage from early, insufficient naturalistic images to “the gradual approximation
of images to life.” 68 Unlike Löwy, his discussion extends to encompass Classical Greek
art, which, he considers, highly naturalistic. This conviction stems from his view of the
Classical period as the pinnacle of a “revolution,” a “great awakening,” in Greek art—the
advent of naturalism—whose beginnings he places in the Archaic period (ca. 550 B.C.),
and reasons he seeks to explain in connection with contemporary cultural circumstances
such as the rise of philosophy, science, and drama; thus, Gombrich’s theory emerges as
clearly historical in essence. As was the case with Löwy, animals are not prominent in it.
Instead, the idea that, “Greek art of the classical period concentrated on the image of man
almost to an exclusion of other motifs,” 69 dominates Gombrich’s theory, which unfolds in
the following way:
[T]here are few more exciting spectacles in the whole history of art than
the great awakening of Greek sculpture and painting between the sixth century
and the time of Plato’s youth toward the end of the fifth century B.C. Its dramatic
phases have often been told in terms of the episode from “The Sleeping Princess”
when the kiss of the prince breaks the thousand-year-old spell and the whole court
begins to stir from the rigors of unnatural sleep. We are shown how the stiff and
frozen figures we call Apollines, or kouroi, first move one foot forward, then bend
their arms, how their masklike smile softens, and how, at the time of the Persian
67 E. H. Gombrich, “Reflections on the Greek Revolution,” in E. H. Gombrich, Art and Illusion: A Study in
the Psychology of Pictorial Representation (New York, 1961), a study dedicated to his teachers: E. Löwy,
J. von Schlosser, and E. Kris. For an additional discussion of Löwy’s effect on Gombrich, see Donohue,
The Problem of Description 112, n. 276.
68 Gombrich, Reflections 117.
69 Gombrich, Reflections 144.
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