Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 41.djvu/34

24 his studies for the birds of his monument upon a golden eagle which was captured there, so art began about the middle of the century to free itself from this dead conventionalism, and, combining truth to Nature with beauty, applied itself again to the observation and appropriation of the world of living plants around us. Japanese art long ago struck out the right way in this region, and has been an inspiring motive for us. The minor rations of the house, and the decorations of women's clothing, have been most happily enriched by it.

Perhaps the naturalist will be accused of a lack of logical sequence if he, in another direction, renounces regard for the laws of Nature in art. The thousand soaring and flying figures in the art works of ancient and modern times undoubtedly defy the universal and fundamental law of gravitation quite as much as the most offensive creation of a perverted fancy defies the fundamental laws, vital only in a few adepts, of comparative anatomy. Still, they do not displease us. We should rather see them without wings than with paratypical wings which could not be of use when of the usual size and without an immense muscular development. We are thus not shocked at the Sistine Madonna standing on the clouds and the figures beside her kneeling on the same impossible ground. The face of Ezekiel in the Pitti Palace is less acceptable. On the other hand, to mention later examples, in the procession of the gods hastening to the help of the Trojans, by Flaxman, Cornelius's Apocalyptic horseman, and Ary Scheffer's divine Francesca di Rimini, which Gustave Doré hopelessly tried to rival, our pleasure is not disturbed by the unphysical character of the positions. We likewise do not object to Flaxman's Sleep and Death bearing the body of Sarpedon through the air.

Herr Exner, in his admirable address on the Physiology of Flying and Soaring in Plastic Art, tries to answer the question why these impossible representations of conditions never seen in man or beast, appear so natural and unexceptionable. I can not agree in the solution with which he seems prepossessed. He thinks that we experience something similar in ourselves in swimming, and that in diving we see persons swimming over us, as we would in flying. If we reflect within how short a time swimming has been made more general among civilized men, and recently it has become an exercise of women, who are no less with the soaring figures, doubt arises concerning Herr Exner's merit explanation. It would be even hazardous to appeal in a Darwinian fashion to an atavistic impression coming down from the fish ago of man. And are not the sensations and the views