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

eaction in the viewer is also witnessed in Kynno’s identification of the artist as Apelles
and her statement that: “Anyone who has looked on him or his works without just
excitement ought to hang by the foot in the fuller’s house.” In addition, her designation
of the hands of Apelles as “truthful in every line,” implies that accuracy (fidelity to
natural form) was a constituent element of lifelikeness in art. Overall, the dialogue
between Phile and Kynno indicates that animals offer a useful insight onto the Greek
understanding of lifelikeness in art as aliveness and representational accuracy, and also as
a criterion of works of art dependent upon the viewers’ emotional response to it.
C. Funerary Statues of Animals
The central role of animal images in the perception of lifelikeness in art as
aliveness is further demonstrated by funerary epigrams, both inscriptional and literary, in
which animal subjects represented in funerary statues, are given voice and engage in
direct conversation with the viewer. An early example of this form is an inscribed
epigram that was found at Demetrias in Thessaly and dates to the early fifth century B.C.
Fragmentary and inscribed on the base of a sphinx, the epigram preserves the following
dialogue between the sphinx and the viewer (Fig. 4):
A: O Sphinx, dog of Hades, whom do you…watch over,
sitting [on guard over] the dead?
B: Xe[nocrates’ tomb this is…]. [79] 123
In this epigram, the viewer asks the sphinx a question and the statue answers as if it were
alive. By reading the epigram, the viewer lends his or her voice to the sphinx. The
viewer is aware of the lifeless status of the sphinx, but as the latter speaks through its
123 P. Friedländer and H. B. Hoffleit, Epigrammata. Greek Inscriptions in Verse. From the Beginnings to
the Persian Wars (Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1984) 129, no. 139A.
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