Beauty in woman: analysed and classified : with a critical view of the hypotheses of the most eminent writers, painters, and sculptors / by Alexander Walker.
- Alexander Walker
- Date:
- 1892
Licence: Public Domain Mark
Credit: Beauty in woman: analysed and classified : with a critical view of the hypotheses of the most eminent writers, painters, and sculptors / by Alexander Walker. Source: Wellcome Collection.
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![porting great weights, and of what are most fit for the utmost light agility, as also for every degree, between these two extremes.” After some illustrations of this, which naturally leave the method very vague, he adds, “ I am apprehensive that this part of my scheme, for explaining exact proportion, may not be thought so sufficiently determinate as could he wished.” So that Hogarth’s method as to proportions, both general and particular, reduces itself to the employ- ment of the eye and the nice sensation we have of quantities or dimensions. But the Greek artists had not only done what Hogarth thus vaguely speaks of, but advanced much further; and indeed all that has been done on this important subject belongs rather to the history of art than that of nature. “ It is not,” says Buffon, “ by the comparison of the body of one man with that of another man, or by measures actually taken in a great number of subjects, that we can acquire this knowledge [that of proportion]; it is by the efforts which have been made exactly to copy and imitate nature; it is to the art of design that we owe all that we know in this respect. Feeling and taste have done all that mechanics could not do; the rule and the compass have been quitted in order to profit by the eye; all the forms, all the outlines, and all the parts of the human body, have been realized in marble; and we have known nature better by the representation than by nature itself. It is by great exercise of the art of design and by an exquisite sentiment, that great statuaries have succeeded in making us feel the just proportions of the works of nature. The](https://iiif.wellcomecollection.org/image/b28050964_0297.jp2/full/800%2C/0/default.jpg)
