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

John Boardman
The link between the development of Greek art in terms of naturalism and
dissatisfaction with existing images is also found in the work of John Boardman. As was
the case with Löwy and Gombrich, the human figure dominates Boardman’s work.
These characteristics are evident in his study of 1996, Greek Art, where he summarizes
the history of Greek art in terms of realism—his preferred term—by using sculpture as a
starting point:
[T]here is little in 7 th -century sculpture to suggest that within two centuries Greek
artists were to carve statuary of the quality and appearance that we admire on the
Parthenon. In a way this is the most remarkable lesson of any history of Greek
art: its rapid development from strict geometry admitting hardly any figure
decoration, to full realism of anatomy and expression. Perhaps this was the result
of continual dissatisfaction, an unease which the Egyptians, for instance, never
felt with an idiom that served them successfully for millennia. In Greece we shall
see how the early geometry broke before the influence of foreign arts, and how
the Greek artists absorbed these alien techniques and forms to weld them into an
art in which the best formal qualities of a native tradition remained dominant.
And then, about the time of the Persian Wars in the early 5 th century, a break with
Archaic conventions heralded the Classical revolution, achieving that unparalleled
blend of realism and the ideal which we recognize as the hallmark of the classical,
centred on representation of the human body. 81
Boardman explains the development of Greek sculpture from the beginning to the fifth
century B.C. as a progression from hardly figural to fully representational images, thus
revealing a scheme of development based on typology. That this scheme relies also on
the idea of progression from simple to accomplished representations is evident from his
comment that, in terms of quality and appearance, seventh-century sculpture has nothing
in common with the fifth-century sculptures of the Parthenon, which he perceives as
examples of “full realism in anatomy and expression.” 82 These explanations show the
81 Boardman, Greek Art 28.
82 For a discussion of typology and accomplished representation as elements of the development of ancient
Greek art mentioned by ancient writers, see Donohue, The Problem of Description 49-50; also her Xoana
48