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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![We expect different proportions of form from the painter, in his representation of a warrior and a shepherd, of a senator and of a peasant, of a wrestler and a boatman, of a savage and of a man of cultivated manners. . . . We expect, in the same manner, from the statuary, very different pro- portions in the forms of Jove and of Apollo [this should have been excepted], of Hercules and of Antinous, of a Grace and of Andromache, of a Bacchanal and of Minerva,” etc. That, in all these cases, the beauty is partial, is evident from the circumstance that what is found in one is wanting in another; and partial beauty is not perfect beauty. But this last point has been well stated by Reynolds and Barry. “ To the principle I have laid down,” says Rey- nolds, “ that the idea of beauty in each species of being is an invariable one, it may be objected, that in every particular species there are various central forms, which are separate and distinct from each other, and yet are undeniably beautiful; that in the human figure, for instance, the beauty of Her- cules is one, of the*Gladiator another, of the Apollo another [again the same error]; which makes so many different ideas of beauty. . . . It is true indeed, that these figures are each perfect in their kind, though of different character and proportions; but still none of them is the representation of an individual, but of a class. And as there is one general form, which, as I have said, belongs to the human kind at large, so in each of these classes there is one common idea and central form, which is the abstract of the various individual forms belonging to that class. Thus, though the forms of](https://iiif.wellcomecollection.org/image/b28050964_0346.jp2/full/800%2C/0/default.jpg)
