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

  • Garrison, Fielding H. (Fielding Hudson), 1870-1935.
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.

    26/44 (page 387)
    painters to proceed from a basis of exact science to the far nobler pursuit of ideal beauty. Men of Ucello’s following hewed close to the line; the Carrand Master, the artist of the ‘Men Nude Men’’ in the Stockholm Collection, the creators of those unattributed gems of naturalistic repre¬ sentation now gathered in the Uffizi, the Louvre, London, Berlin, Vienna, Venice, Dresden, and in private hands, flooded the “botega” of Ucello’s day, with a tide, full and flowing, of chalk and wash drawings, pen and silverpoint. These studio sketches and cartoons reveal, to the least prick¬ ings of the paper, the full reach of Florentine technique in drawing the liv¬ ing model. They register most patently the crescent interest in anatomy. Despite earlier hints of the existence of this corporum intus curio- sitas” among workers in the plastic arts, the followers of Donatello were apparently the first to undertake the study of human anatomy, in the modern sense of a sustained serious discipline for artists. That Donatello (1386-1466) himself assisted at an actual anatomy, at least from the spectator’s bench, we need no better proof than his forceful rendering of such a scene in his “Anatomy of the Miser’s Heart,” one of his Paduan^ series of bronze tablets illustrating the miracles of St. Anthony. The almost cruel naturalism and searching myologic detail in Donatello’s sainted peasants proved a source of torment to lesser craftsmen, leading them along paths of purely objective inquiry to the dissecting room. His pupil Antonio Pollajuolo (1429-98), pupil also of Ucello, was the virtual beginner of artistic anatomy in Italy. “He dissected many bodies to study the anatomy,” says Vasari, “and was the first to investigate the actions of the muscles in this manner, that he might afterwards give them their due place and effect in his works.” His drawings created a clear space for the new teaching. His engraving of the “Battle of the Ten Nude Men” electrified the town. His painted themes, in which Hercules generally takes the leading role, are anatomies, of stressed movements, bizarre energy, unimaginably fierce and vengeful power. And the sources of all this sinewy, exuberant phrasing of life spring from immediate and prolonged manipulations of the dead. Pollajuolo had established altogether novel modes of approach to the intimacies of form, and could say with Browning: “The life in me abolished the death in things. ” This quickening impulse soon made itself felt in all the schools, pagan and pietistic, realistic and conven¬ tional, and crossed the Alps northward with Diirer on his return home. Andrea del Castagno (i396?-i457) “lover of the difficulties of art” {ammatore delle difficultd dell’ arte) certainly helped to incorporate the ^ W. Bode, Donatello in Padua, Paris & Leipzig, 1883, Plates X and XI. See also St. Anthony setting a broken leg in the same series.