Sculpture and painting as modes of anatomical illustration / by Fielding H. Garrison and Edward C. Streeter.

  • Fielding Hudson Garrison
Date:
1920
Catalogue details

Licence: In copyright

Credit: Sculpture and painting as modes of anatomical illustration / by Fielding H. Garrison and Edward C. Streeter. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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    the ambition of modern artists. The fore and hind legs of galloping animals, such as those of running stags engraved on an antler from the cavern of Lorthet (Hautes Pyrenees), are exactly as we find them in our instantaneous photographs, an action unknown to all animal painters of later times.^ The most striking of the rock paintings in red and black in the Spanish cave at Cogul (Lerida) represents a sacral dance of nine women around a phallic figure.^ The women have pendulous breasts, narrow waists, flaring haunches, knee-high, bell-shaped skirts of recent fashionable type, and mantillas over the shoulders. The women depicted on the rock-shelter wall of the Alpera cave (Sierra Chinchilla) ^ are steatopygous, with exposed breasts, flaring hips and bell-shaped skirts, strongly suggestive of the physical habitus and national costume of the Spanish maja or gitana. The same bell-shaped skirt is again found in the remarkable post-Neolithic figurines excavated by Sir Arthur Evans in the palace at Knossos (Crete), representing the primordial Alother- Goddess and her votary. The breasts in these finely executed figures are again exposed and anatomically correct in execution. The anatomy of similar human figures on Cretan and Mycenaean seals and signets is far cruder in representation. The Babylonian mother-goddesses sculptured in alto rilievo (Yale Collections) are comely figurations of the nude, usually representing the act of suckling, vague in outline but of gracious charm. The Egyptian paintings are commonly executed in profile, and with suflicienJUclarity of outline. In the bas-relief of the temple at Sakkarah in(upper Egypt (1500 b.c.), the fact that the harp- players are^blm^ while the singers are not, is wonderfully conveyed by a simple indication en profit (Hollander). Earlier Egyptian statuary, from the Sphinx to such figures as the Scribe and the basalt head in the Louvre, or the bronze lady in the Athens Museum, reveals remarkable rugged skill in representing the human face and form., dwindling into mere academic elegance in the figures of the Middle and New Empires. All these figures, of whatever period, exhibit Lange’s ‘daw of frontality,” i.e., they are always represented as gazing directly and rigidly forward, usually motionless, but even in walking, static, in that they rest solidly on the soles of the feet.'^ Perhaps the earliest anatomical models constructed were the ancient Babylonian livers in baked clay, subdivided into squares and studded ^ See S. Reinach, Apollo, New York, 1907, pp. 6-7. ^ H. Breuil and J. Cabre Agiiila, L’Anthropologie, Paris, XX (1909), 17. 3H. Breuil, P. Serrano Gomez, and J. Cabre Aguila, ibid., XXIII (1912), 556. 4 S. Reinach, Apollo, New York, 1907, p. 20.
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