8 



Greek Biology 



accurately portrayed, as in a sixth-century representation on 

 an Ionian vase of a lioness an animal then very rare on the 

 Eastern Mediterranean littoral, though still well known in 

 Babylonia, Syria, and Asia Minor. The details of the work 



show that the artist must 

 have examined the animal 

 in captivity (Figs. I and 2). 

 Animal paintings of this 

 order are found scattered 

 over the Greek world with 

 special centres or schools 

 in such places as Cyprus, 

 Boeotia, or Chalcis. The 

 very name for a painter in 

 Greek, zoogfaphos, recalls 

 the attention paid to living 

 forms. By the fifth cen- 

 tury, in representing them 

 as in other departments of 

 Art, the supremacy of Attica 

 had asserted itself, and there 



FIG. 3. Paintings of fish on plates. are man 7 beautiful Attic 

 Italo-Greek work of the fourth century vase-paintings of animals to 



place by the side of the 

 magnificent horses' heads of 

 the Parthenon (Fig. 6). In 

 Attica, too, was early de- 

 veloped a characteristic and closely accurate type of repre- 

 sentation of marine forms, and this attained a wider vogue 

 in Southern Italy in the fourth century. From the latter period 

 a number of dishes and vases have come down to us bearing 

 a large variety of fish forms, portrayed with an exactness that 

 is interesting in view of the attention to marine creatures in 

 the surviving literature of Aristotelian origin (Fig. 3). 



These artistic products are more than a mere reflex of the 



B.C. From Morin. 



A. Sargus vulgaris. 



B. Crenilabrus mediterraneus. 

 c. Uranoscopus scaber ? 



