Many Greco-Roman anecdotes about encounters between images and their viewers explore the deceptive powers of naturalism. In Pliny’s famous account of the contest between Zeuxis and Parrhasius, birds attempt to peck at Zeuxis’s painted grapes, mistaking the image for what it represents (Natural History 35.65-66). This moment of ontological oscillation, in which the perceived distinction between representation and reality collapses, is usually understood as a demonstration of the painter’s virtuosity. Yet the anecdote also presupposes that animals possess the perceptual and semiotic capacities required to be deceived by an image.

Animals, however, are themselves producers of visual deception. Like the painted grapes, an octopus camouflaging itself as its surroundings presents itself as something it is not. Ancient zoological texts frequently remark upon this capacity, while vase paintings and mosaics turn animal camouflage into an object of representation. Read in this context, Pliny’s anecdote suggests a continuity between animal and human practices of image-making and viewing.

An ethological perspective also complicates conventional accounts of naturalism. Visual deception does not necessarily lead viewers to recognize and admire pictorial illusion, as in trompe-l’œil painting. Modelled on animal camouflage, it may instead hold the viewer within a state of perceptual ambiguity. Such deception is more than a representational phenomenon: it is a form of adaptive and social behaviour, embedded in interactions between agents and observers and, in the animal world, directed towards survival.

This lecture therefore considers human and animal image-making as part of a spectrum of mimetic behaviour grounded in perceptual and cognitive capacities shared across species. Building on Philippe Descola’s anthropological account of early modern naturalist painting, it proposes an ethological foundation for naturalism in the arts.