Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 41.djvu/30

20 of the admiration of naturalists like Prof. Henke and Prof, von Brüke? Are there not institutions maintained by the state wherever art is systematically cultivated for the purpose of giving youth opportunity to train the eye on the cadaver to a clearer perception of what can be seen in the living body beneath the akin? Have not three of the later members of this Academy been commissioned in succession to give such instruction here in Berlin? Finally, have we not excellent manuals of anatomy prepared especially for artists?

But the most distinguished art-writer of our day, who assumes a tone of authority that no Lessing exercised, and who enjoys at home the honor and fame of a Lessing, Mr. Ruskin, in his lectures at the Art School in Oxford, on the Relation of Science to Art, expressly forbids his pupils busying themselves with anatomy. Likewise, in his preface, he laments the deleterious influence anatomy had on Mantegna and Dürer, in contrast with Botticelli and Holbein, who kept themselves free from it. "The habit of contemplating the anatomical structure of the human form," he says later on, "is not only a hindrance but a degradation, and has been essentially destructive to every school of art in which it has been practiced"; and he adds to this that under its influence the painter, as in the case of Dürer, sees and portrays only the skull in the face. "The artist should take every sort of view of animals except one the butcher's view. He is never to think of them as bones and meat."

It would be a waste of time and trouble to refute such errors, and demonstrate what an indispensable help the artist finds in anatomy, without which he would be groping as in a fog. It is very nice for him to depend upon his eyes, but still better to have learned, for example, in what the female skeleton is different from the male; why the knee-pan follows the direction of the foot when the leg is stretched out, but does not when it is bent; why the profile of the upper arm with the hand supine is different from the profile in pronation; why the furrows and wrinkles of the face run as they do in relation to the muscles beneath them. Camper's facial angle, although it has dethroned for more important objects by Herr Virchow's basal-angle, furnishes a great deal of information. How, without acquaintance with the skull, a forehead can be modeled, or the figure of a forehead like that of the Jupiter of Otricoli or of the Hermes can be understood, is hardly comprehensible. It is true that anatomical forms may be abused by fantastic exaltation, as has been often remarked with respect to Michael Angelo's