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

Egyptian figure type from the aspect of an art which wants to “convince,” it undoubtedly
raised the question why it looks unconvincing,” he says. 71 Thus, discontent with the
unconvincing images they inherited from the arts of Egypt and the Near East, early Greek
artists turned to close observation of nature—an idea clearly borrowed from Löwy—but
also to acquire skilled craftsmanship. A detailed account of this argument, with special
emphasis on sculpture, appears not in the Reflections, but in The Great Awakening, which
is part of his earlier study, The Story of Art (1951):
When Greek artists began to make statues of stone, they started where the
Egyptians and Assyrians had left off…[T]hey studied and imitated Egyptian
models, and…they learned from them how to make the figure of a standing young
man, how to mark the divisions of the body and the muscles which hold it
together. But…the artist who made th[ese] statue[s] was not content to follow
any formula, however good, and that he began experimenting for himself. He was
obviously interested in finding out what knees really looked like. Perhaps he did
not quite succeed; perhaps the knees of his statue are even less convincing than
those of Egyptian statues; but the point was that he had decided to have a look for
himself instead of following the old prescription. It was no longer a question of
learning a ready-made formula for representing the human body. Every Greek
sculptor wanted to know how he was to represent a particular body. The
Egyptians had based their art on knowledge. The Greeks began to use their eyes.
Once this revolution had begun, there was no stopping it. The sculptors in their
workshops tried new ideas and new ways of representing the human figure, and
each innovation was eagerly taken by others who added to their own discoveries.
One discovered how to chisel the trunk, another found out that a statue many look
much more alive if the feet are not placed too firmly on the ground. Yet another
would discover that he could make a face come alive by simply bending the
mouth upwards so that it appeared to smile. Of course, the Egyptian method was
in many ways safer. The experiments of the Greek artists sometimes misfired.
The smile might look like an embarrassed grin, or the less rigid stance might give
the impression of affectation. But the Greek artists were not easily frightened by
these difficulties. They had set out on a road on which there was no turning
back. 72
That the Greek revolution against unconvincing images moved only forward indicates
that, in Gombrich’s view, the naturalistic development of Greek art, throughout its early,
71 Gombrich, Reflections 134.
72 E. H. Gombrich, The Story of Art (New York, 1951) 52.
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