A dictionary of terms in art / edited and illustrated by F.W. Fairholt.

  • Frederick William Fairholt
Date:
1903
Catalogue details

Licence: In copyright

Credit: A dictionary of terms in art / edited and illustrated by F.W. Fairholt. Source: Wellcome Collection.

    35/488 (page 25)
    is not always that genius, taste, and readi- ness iz seizing nature, will suffice without actual study. The anatomy of the artist is not that of the physician, for the former only studies the bones and muscles so far as they influence the external form ; in the blood-vessels, for instance, he merely re- quires to know those which appear in representing passion.* The physician stu- dies, in the corpse, the muscles and their mechanical functions; the artist, on the contrary, examines their play, their life, regarding them as the type of physical strength, of the state of mind; as a mirror of that which agitates the soul,—a reflex of the spiritual life. Anatomy, in a medical point of view, is a purely material study, useful to the artist in his representations of dead bodies; in an artistic sense, it is an abstruse physiological science. Skeletons and anatomical drawings are not enough for the artist; he must penetrate into the mysterious region where the soul moves the springs of the body, speaking in a language which will be intelligible as long as man exists. To this language descrip- tive anatomy is only the dictionary ; living, acting, sentient man, must form the study ; for where passions are struggling —where grief, joy, and love, are acting— there must the artist learn the idiom. Thus did Michael Angelc, Jacques Callot, and Hogarth, study life, and thus did the Dutch conceive their faithful representa- tions of human nature ; the great painters of the sixteenth century, Da Vinci. Raf- faelle, Titian, and Michael Angelo, em- ployed much time in anatomical drawings, but few of which are preserved to us. Such drawings, or anatomical tablets, as they were called, were first engraved in wood, and then in metal, and latterly in lithography, so that the anatomical wants of the artist are well supplied.t ANCHOR, i Christian Art, is the symbol of hope, firmness, tranquillity, patience, and faith. Among those saints, of whom the anchor is an attribute, are Clement of Rome and Nicolas of Bari. Pope Clement, who suffered martyrdom in the year 80, had received the anchor as an attribute, either because he was bound to one when thrown into the sea, or because, in a pretended letter from the * The accompanying woodcut represents the anatomy of a Winged Victory slaying a Bull (the original of which is in the British Museum), and is copied from the frontispiece to a Discourse on the Nature of Limbs. By Richard Owen, F.R.S. London, 1849. t The best treatise on the Anatomy of the External Forms for the use of artists is that by Dr. Fau, translated by Dr. Knox. London, 1849. It has excellent engravings.