The human figure; its beauties and defects / Authorised translation revised by the author.

  • Brücke, Ernst Wilhelm von, 1819-1892
Date:
1891
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: The human figure; its beauties and defects / Authorised translation revised by the author. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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    has been quoted as evidence for deriving Greek from Egyptian art; but C. Langer (“ Anatomie der ausseren Formen des menschlichen Kdrpers,” Vienna, 1884) has observed, quite accurately, that this phenomenon is by no means of universal occurrence in archaic statues, and that in one of the best known, the Apollo ♦ of Tenea, the ears are correctly set on the head. The chin in the antique is rounded, often with a slight median depression, and with the most convex part of its surface directed less obliquely backward and more forward than in most of the living faces we see around us. The antique type of face is regarded by many as an ideal form which is not to be found at the present day, and perhaps never existed at all ; but an atten- tive observer may succeed in meeting with heads in Italy, and occasionally even in Germany, which approach this ideal very closely ; and I am informed by an excellent artist, who has lived for a long time in the East, that the type may be met with in Smyrna in its purest form. It is worthy of remark that the aquiline nose, which is by no means of rare occurrence in Italy, never found any acceptance in relation to female beauty among the artists of the middle ages and renaissance. When they do deviate from the Greek profile, they tend to make the bridge of the nose no longer join the forehead by a straight line ; but where they alter the form of the nose itself, they never do it so as to convert it into an aquiline nose.