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

anks this artist’s skill higher than the capacity of the bronze used for the creation of the
statue. The poet holds the use of bronze responsible for delaying his impression that the
statue will low. 121 His comment reveals a positive attitude towards bronze as a suitable
material for lifelike art perceived as alive. His reference to bronze as “senseless,”
acknowledges the status of the heifer as an inanimate object, and further notes his
awareness that he is looking at art and not “life.”
The third epigram, by Geminus, also from the first century B.C., contains the
same praise of the aliveness the statue as the epigrams attributed to Antipater. The poet
addresses the viewer directly, by noting that the heifer acts naturally:
It is the base to which it is attached that keeps
back the heifer, and if freed from it will run off
to the herd. For the bronze lows. See how much
alive the artist made it. If you yoke a fellow to it,
perhaps it will plough.
(Geminus, Anth. Pal. 9.740) [95]
The heifer is acknowledged as a statue fixed on a base; yet if freed, the heifer will run off
to its herd, and if yoked to another animal, will plough. Again, the boundary between art
and reality is freely crossed here, without any concern on the side of Geminus, who acts
here as both a viewer and a narrator. He further states, like Antipater above, that the
bronze lows. He is aware that this is lifeless art, but allows himself to imagine that the
heifer behaves naturally as if it were alive. His comment reveals a positive attitude
towards bronze as a suitable material for lifelike art that is consciously equated here with
“reality.” Further, his remark that the artist of the heifer made it to look alive suggests
that lifelikeness was thought to result from the skill of the artist combined with the use of
bronze.
121
Pliny (NH 34.5.10) states that Myron used Aeginetan bronze, which he ranks second in fame after that
of Corinth.
78