Marco Masseti, Strength and Limitation of Artistic Representations and Literary Descriptions of Animals - p. 11
Since
prehistoric times, naturalism in the visual arts has proved so efficacious as
to allow the unequivocal identification of the species portrayed.
Literary information, on the other hand, is so ambiguous that it does not
often provide sufficient information for correct taxonomic identification.
This is the case for the accounts of most ancient authors, including
Aristotle, Theophrastus, Pliny the Elder and Aelian, as well as many later
authors. Only in a few cases, where the literary account is very
detailed and/or concerns animals with unmistakable phenotypic characteristics,
is it possible to make less approximate taxonomic attributions.
Documenti allegati:
2_masseti.pdf