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

animals, but rather highlights their significant role as guides to the Greek understanding
of this quality of works of art; in this respect, it is wholly different from the persistence of
modern scholarship in viewing the human form as the single venue for approaching the
issue of lifelikeness in Greek art. In fact, animals prove valuable windows onto the
ancient Greek definition of lifelikeness as accurate representation but also aliveness. 103
They do so by featuring simultaneously as lifelike subjects of representational art, and
also as judges of lifelike works of art. In the latter case, we also witness animals—a part
of nature—validating the belief that some works of art had surpassed nature and were
thus accepted as nature. 104
a. Ancient Texts on Lifelikeness as a Quality of Works of Art in Classical
Greece
A fragment of Aeschylus’s play Theori or Isthmiastae presents an example of
lifelikeness being a valued quality of images in Classical Greece. The fragment refers to
a scene that takes place in the temple of Poseidon at Isthmia. A chorus of satyrs carries
images of themselves:
I’m very grateful to you for this: you’re most obliging. Listen, all of you, and…in
silence. Look and see whether the eidolon could [possibly] be more [like] me,
this mimema by the Skillful One; it can do everything but talk! Look at these!
You see? Yes, come! Come! I bring this offering to the god to ornament his
house, my lovely votive picture. It would give my mother a bad time! If she
103 Such evidence agrees with the definition of lifelikeness in the context of ancient Greek given by C. M.
Havelock, “Art as Communication in Ancient Greece,” in E. A. Havelock and J. P. Hershbell, eds.,
Communication Arts in the Ancient World (New York, 1978) 99: “[l]ifelikeness” should be interpreted in a
broad but literal sense, as “having similarity to life” or “seeming to be alive.””
104 This employment of animals is reminiscent of the inclusion of animals in Renaissance paintings that
depict supernatural visitations such as those of angels and saints. As it has been remarked, the presence of
animals in these paintings and the concurrent belief of animals as creatures defined by sensation instructed
contemporary viewers to perceive the depicted visitations of angels as a real occurrence. For a discussion
of this issue, see W. J. Scheick, “Animal Testimony in Renaissance Art: Angelic and Other Supernatural
Visitations,” in Pollock and Rainwater, eds., Figuring Animals 65-79.
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