DIORAMAS125manipulative operations proposed by neoclassical art, such as modera-
tion, restraint, harmony, and balance between parts.^63 Unlike Browne,
Winckelmann was aware of the power that realism carried in classical
art, about which he stated that “the expression of such nobility of soul
goes far beyond the depiction of beautiful nature.”^64
Here thus lies the main problem with the emergence of lifelike taxi-
dermy during the Victorian period. Taxidermists may have indeed be-
lieved that aspiring to the aesthetic standards of classical art would result
in accomplishing genuinely naturalistic renditions of live animals. How-
ever, in pursuing these aesthetics, they also blindly embraced the ideologi-
cal values inscribed in classicism. It is thus important to acknowledge that,
informed by ideological discourses of virtue and moral value, neoclassical
art deliberately aimed at ennobling nature in accordance with historical
and iconographic truth, or as it is otherwise known, decorum.^65
It is important to clarify that, as Winckelmann acknowledged, the
Greeks, in their favoring of nobility, operated a consistently reductivist
approach to anatomy, deliberately simplifying, generalizing, and omitting
for the very reasons argued by Freeman. Archaeologist and art historian
Guy Metraux drew attention to these processes through a categorization
of the three main typologies of manipulation operated by classical art:
“distortion of proportion,” “reconfiguration or invention of skeletal and
muscular structures,” and “contortion of the body” (fig. 3.6).^66 Metraux
argued that in classical art “sculptors were not engaged in descriptive
anatomy. They were involved in manipulating the body for effectiveness
and clarity.”^67 The clarity he referred to constitutes the intrinsic beauty
that Aristotle understood to be embedded in the world as a sign of its ra-
tionally balanced modality.^68 Imperfections and idiosyncratic subjec-
tivities were expelled from Aristotelian conceptions, equating truth to
beauty in the acknowledgment that true knowledge-forming can only be
traced in idealized realism.^69
Browne’s position on lifelike taxidermy thus poses important questions
about the real meaning of the term lifelike realism itself. His persistence
in comparing taxidermy to classical sculpture suggests that the notion
of classical decorum, an integral essence of classical realism, may have
also played an important role. To the Greeks, the aesthetic notion of de-
corum signified that which “is proper, fitting, and just.”^70 It incorporated,
as it still does today, an ideal of beauty that substantially differed from
symmetria, the beauty intrinsic to nature, and that exclusively found its