The Man and the Lion

[2] The commentator Francisco Rodríguez Adrados places the fable among those dialogues where boasting is logically refuted[3] and cites as a parallel a pre-Aesopic tale in which a fox and a monkey are on a similar journey.

[9] Jefferys Taylor, however, argues facetiously, at the end of his Aesop in Rhyme (1820), that it is the fact that lions cannot sculpt which is the true proof of their inferiority.

Gustave Doré pictured the admirers of a statue in an art gallery in full flight before a bystanding lion.

[12] Benjamin Rabier's comic publication paired a group of admiring connoisseurs with a pendant of a lion creating his own painting in the desert.

[14] A later feminist critique makes the same point,[15] citing Geoffrey Chaucer's Wyf of Bath, who in defence of her sex demanded "Who peyntede the leoun, tel me who?"