Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 41.djvu/29

Rh their greatest strain: we see their muscles swell and contract, while at last the missile still appears in the picture after it has been thrown; for it can not move faster than the hand at the moment it leaves it. Equally useful are the instantaneous photographs of domestic and wild animals of all kinds which Herr Anschütz has taken destined to be to the animal painter.

Instantaneous photography has been applied with surprising results, as every one knows, even to the surf in storms. But the sea painter must not forget, in the use of such pictures, that our eye can not see the waves as the quickly perceiving plate does, and that one may therefore easily give us a picture of them as incorrect in some respects as that of the stationary clock or of the man stumbling over his feet.

Finally, the former method of representing lightning as a fiery zigzag is, as Mr. Shelford Bidwell has very recently shown by the evidence of two hundred instantaneous photographs, quite as false as were the old pictures of racing horses. Mr. Eric Stuart Bruce has, indeed, tried to save the zigzag lightning of the artists by seeing in it the reflection on the cumulus clouds; but we can not understand how an acute-angled zigzag can be produced in that way.

Prof, von Brücke has in a special essay worked out the rule for the representation of motion in art, which, like the laws of the combination of colors, has been unconsciously followed by the masters. From photography in natural colors, of which artists and laymen continue to dream and hope much, there is unhappily not only for the immediate future, but, on theoretical grounds which experience will hardly contradict, for all the future, little or nothing to be expected. There is a question whether photography will not have an unfavorable influence in the arts of reproduction, copper-engraving, lithography, and wood-engraving, whose place it is taking to a widening extent. So faithful is it that it even in a certain sense depreciates the original pictures of the old masters by making them common property.

Is it possible that it should not seem wholly superfluous to speak here of the advantage which the study of anatomy affords to the artist? Has not the Borghese gladiator suggested the conjecture of anatomical mysteries among the Grecian artists as the only means by which they could achieve so perfect a representation of the uncovered male bod? Did not Michael Angelo acquire by long years of anatomical study the knowledge that justified the unparalleled boldness of his attitudes and foreshortenings of the body, which have remained to this day the object