Anatomy for artists / by John Marshall ; illustrated by two hundred original drawings by J.S. Cuthbert, engraved by J. and G. Nicholls.

  • Marshall, John, 1818-1891.
Date:
1883
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Anatomy for artists / by John Marshall ; illustrated by two hundred original drawings by J.S. Cuthbert, engraved by J. and G. Nicholls. Source: Wellcome Collection.

Provider: This material has been provided by UCL Library Services. The original may be consulted at UCL (University College London)

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    thouglits, and with the actions hy which these are revealed, the artist is com- pelled to realise his ideas and conceptions concerning man, as well as those concerning all other surrounding objects, both animate and inanimate, in some material form. In regard to much that occupies his highest thoughts, and requires his most earnest devotion, the form he has to represent is the human form; and thus he is committed to the most minute study, and the most intimate observation of the shape and actions of the Human Body. In pursuing this line of research, from an artistic point of view, it is impossible that the painter, and especially the sculptor, should long avoid comparing the form of man with that of such animals as approach him more or less closely in organisation ; and, in such a comparison, they must undoubtedly, from an aesthetic standpoint, at once agree in assigning to man, above all other animate beings, the incontestable palm of beauty. It is, no doubt, true that by far the greater number of animals, whether high or low in the scale of creation, are intrinsically beautiful,—many of them exceedingly beautiful; and, on the other hand, man's own estimate of the perfection and beauty of form of his own species, may be, and must be influenced by the fact that his intellectual and moral ties bind him specially to his fellow-creatures. But it would be strange, inconsistent, and contrary to the harmony of Nature, if man—having especial sympathies with himself, and with his own species, and, moreover, alone possessing, of all living beings on this earth, not merely senses agreeably acted upon by whatsoever is lovely and pleasing, but an ahstract idea, a mental conception of Beauty in itself, an elevated sense, a pure cesthesis of the Beautiful, and, even, an intellectual insight into its principles and causes,—should find himself to be, in any degree, bereft of that quality in comparison with other living creatures, or to be incorporated in a shape inferior to that of any one of the animal forms with which he is here associated, or to be less favoured in regard to those essential qualities of proportion, modelling, and grace of movement, which constitute to him the physically Beautiful, and serve at once to excite and test, to please and satisfy, his esthetic perceptions. In symmetry of construction and outward form, animals generally, being living machines intended for locomotive action, requiring the power of balancing and moving themselves upon or in the earth, on the surfaces of trees or plants, upon or in the water, or through the air, as the case may be, are, as a rule, quite upon an equality with man. So also they resemble him in exhibiting axial simplicity, serial repetition and manifold homologies, with contrasts, of parts. But, in refined proportions of length, breadth, and depth, in the well-balanced ratios of different parts to each other and to the whole, in subtilty and grace of outline, in fulness of detail, in ever-varying undulations of surface, in richness of local modelling, in the exquisite hue and lustre of the skin, and in the peculiar capillary adornment of the head.