The Eagle's Nest

LECTURE VIII.

THE RELATION TO ART OF THE SCIENCES OF ORGANIC FORM

149. I have next in order to speak of the relation of art to science, in dealing with its own principal subject—organic form, as the expression of life. And, as in my former lecture, I will tell you at once what I wish chiefly to enforce upon you.

First,—but this I shall have no time to dwell upon,—That the true power of art must be founded on a general knowledge of organic nature, not of the human frame only.

Secondly.—That in representing this organic nature, quite as much as in representing inanimate things, Art has nothing to do with structures, causes, or absolute facts; but only with appearances.

Thirdly.—That in representing these appearances, she is more hindered than helped by the knowledge of things which do not externally appear; and therefore, that the study of anatomy generally, whether of plants, animals, or man, is an impediment to graphic art.

Fourthly.—That especially in the treatment and conception of the human form, the habit of contemplating its anatomical structure is not only a hindrance, but a degradation; and farther yet, that even the study of the external form of the human body, more exposed than it may be healthily and decently in daily life, has been essentially destructive to every school of art in which it has been practised.

150. These four statements I undertake, in the course of our future study, gradually to confirm to you. In a single lecture I, of course, have time to do little more than clearly state and explain them.

First, I tell you that art should take cognizance of all living things, and know them, so as to be able to name, that is to say, in the truest distinctive way, to describe them. The Creator daily brings, before the noblest of His creatures, every lower creature, that whatsoever Man calls it, may be the name thereof.

Secondly.—In representing, nay, in thinking of, and caring for, these beasts, man has to think of them essentially with their skins on them, and with their souls in them. He is to know how they are spotted, wrinkled, furred, and feathered: and what the look of them is, in the eyes; and what grasp, or cling, or trot, or pat, in their paws and claws. He is to take every sort of view of them, in fact, except one,—the Butcher’s view. He is never to think of them as bones and meat.

Thirdly.—In the representation of their appearance, the knowledge of bones and meat, of joint and muscle, is more a hindrance than a help.

Lastly.—With regard to the human form, such knowledge is a degradation as well as a hindrance; and even the study of the nude is injurious, beyond the limits of honour and decency in daily life.

Those are my four positions. I will not detain you by dwelling on the first two—that we should know every sort of beast, and know it with its skin on it, and its soul within it. What you feel to be a paradox—perhaps you think an incredible and insolent paradox—is my telling you that you will be hindered from doing this by the study of anatomy. I address myself, therefore, only to the last two points.

151. Among your standard engravings, I have put that of the picture by Titian, in the Strozzi Palace, of a little Strozzi maiden feeding her dog. I am going to put in the Rudimentary Series, where you can always get at it (R. 125), this much more delightful, though not in all points standard, picture by Reynolds, of an infant daughter of George the Third’s, with her Skye terrier.

I have no doubt these dogs are the authentic pets, given in as true portraiture as their mistresses; and that the little Princess of Florence and Princess of England were both shown in the company which, at that age, they best liked;—the elder feeding her favourite, and the baby with her arms about the neck of hers.

But the custom of putting either the dog, or some inferior animal, to be either in contrast, or modest companionship, with the nobleness of human form and thought, is a piece of what may be called mental comparative anatomy, which has its beginning very far back in art indeed. One of quite the most interesting Greek vases in the British Museum is that of which the painting long went under the title of “Anacreon and his Dog.” It is a Greek lyric poet, singing with lifted head, in the action given to Orpheus and Philammon in their moments of highest inspiration; while, entirely unaffected by and superior to the music, there walks beside him a sharp-nosed and curly-tailed dog, painted in what the exclusive admirers of Greek art would, I suppose, call an ideal manner; that is to say, his tail is more like a display of fireworks than a tail; but the ideal evidently founded on the material existence of a charming, though supercilious, animal not unlike the one which is at present the chief solace of my labours in Oxford, Dr. Acland’s dog Bustle. I might go much farther back than this; but at all events, from the time of the golden dog of Pandareos, the fawn of Diana, and the eagle, owl, and peacock of the great Greek gods, you find a succession of animal types—centralized in the Middle Ages, of course, by the hound and the falcon—used in art either to symbolize, or contrast with, dignity in human persons. In modern portraiture, the custom has become vulgarized by the anxiety of everybody who sends their picture, or their children’s, to the Royal Academy, to have it demonstrated to the public by the exhibition of a pony, and a dog with a whip in its mouth, that they live, at the proper season, in a country house. But by the greater masters the thing is done always with a deep sense of the mystery of the comparative existences of living creatures, and of the methods of vice and virtue exhibited by them. Albert Dürer scarcely ever draws a scene in the life of the Virgin, without putting into the foreground some idle cherubs at play with rabbits or kittens; and sometimes lets his love of the grotesque get entirely the better of him, as in the engraving of the Madonna with the monkey. Veronese disturbs the interview of the queen of Sheba with Solomon, by the petulance of the queen of Sheba’s Blenheim spaniel, whom Solomon had not treated with sufficient respect; and when Veronese is introduced himself, with all his family, to the Madonna, I am sorry to say that his own pet dog turns its back to the Madonna, and walks out of the room.

152. But among all these symbolic playfulnesses of the higher masters, there is not one more perfect than this study by Reynolds of the infant English Princess with her wire-haired terrier. He has put out his whole strength to show the infinite differences, yet the blessed harmonies, between the human and the lower nature. First, having a blue-eyed,7 soft baby to paint, he gives its full face, as round as may be, and rounds its eyes to complete openness, because somebody is coming whom it does not know. But it opens its eyes in quiet wonder, and is not disturbed, but behaves as a princess should. Beside this soft, serenely-minded baby, Reynolds has put the roughest and roughest-minded dog he could think of. Instead of the full round eyes, you have only the dark places in the hair where you know the terrier’s eyes must be—sharp enough, if you could see them—and very certainly seeing you, but not at all wondering at you, like the baby’s. For the terrier has instantly made up his mind about you; and above all, that you have no business there; and is growling and snarling in his fiercest manner, though without moving from his mistress’s side, or from under her arm. You have thus the full contrast between the grace and true charm of the child, who “thinketh no evil” of you, and the uncharitable narrowness of nature in the grown-up dog of the world, who thinks nothing but evil of you. But the dog’s virtue and faithfulness are not told less clearly; the baby evidently uses the creature just as much for a pillow as a playmate;—buries its arm in the rough hair of it with a loving confidence, half already converting itself to protection: and baby will take care of dog, and dog of baby, through all chances of time and fortune.

153. Now the exquisiteness with which the painter has applied all his skill in composition, all his dexterity in touch of pencil, and all his experience of the sources of expression, to complete the rendering of his comparison, cannot, in any of the finest subtleties of it, be explained; but the first steps of its science may be easily traced; and with little pains you may see how a simple and large mass of white is opposed to a rugged one of grey; how the child’s face is put in front light, that no shadow may detract from the brightness which makes her, as in Arabian legends, “a princess like to the full moon”—how, in this halo, the lips and eyes are brought out in deep and rich colour, while scarcely a gleam of reflection is allowed to disturb the quietness of the eyes;—(the terrier’s, you feel, would glitter enough, if you could see them, and flash back in shallow fire; but the princess’s eyes are thinking, and do not flash;)—how the quaint cap surrounds, with its not wholly painless formalism, the courtly and patient face, opposed to the rugged and undressed wild one; and how the easy grace of soft limb and rounded neck is cast, in repose, against the uneasily gathered up crouching of the short legs, and petulant shrug of the eager shoulders, in the ignobler creature.

154. Now, in his doing of all this, Sir Joshua was thinking of, and seeing, whatever was best in the creatures, within and without. Whatever was most perfectly doggish—perfectly childish—in soul and body. The absolute truth of outer aspect, and of inner mind, he seizes infallibly; but there is one part of the creatures which he never, for an instant, thinks of, or cares for,—their bones. Do you suppose that, from first to last, in painting such a picture, it would ever enter Sir Joshua’s mind to think what a dog’s skull would look like, beside a baby’s? The quite essential facts to him are those of which the skull gives no information—that the baby has a flattish pink nose, and the dog a bossy black one. You might dissect all the dead dogs in the water supply of London without finding out, what, as a painter, it is here your only business precisely to know,—what sort of shininess there is on the end of a terrier’s nose; and for the position and action of the creatures, all the four doctors together, who set Bustle’s leg for him the other day, when he jumped out of a two-pair-of-stairs window to bark at the volunteers, could not have told Sir Joshua how to make his crouching terrier look ready to snap, nor how to throw the child’s arm over its neck in complete, yet not languid, rest.

155. Sir Joshua, then, does not think of, or care for, anatomy, in this picture; but if he had, would it have done him harm? You may easily see that the child’s limbs are not drawn with the precision that Mantegna, Dürer, or Michael Angelo would have given them. Would some of their science not have bettered the picture?

I can show you exactly the sort of influence their science would have had.

In your Rudimentary Series, I have placed in sequence two of Dürer’s most celebrated plates (R. 65, R. 66), the coat of arms with the skull, and the Madonna crowned by angels; and that you may see precisely what qualities are, and are not, in this last, I have enlarged the head by photography, and placed it in your Reference Series (117). You will find the skull is perfectly understood, and exquisitely engraved, but the face, imperfectly understood and coarsely engraved. No man who has studied the skull as carefully as Dürer did, ever could engrave a face beautifully, for the perception of the bones continually thrusts itself upon him in wrong places, and in trying to conquer or modify it, he distorts the flesh. Where the features are marked, and full of character, he can quit himself of the impression; but in the rounded contour of women’s faces he is always forced to think of the skull; and even in his ordinary work often draws more of bones and hair, than face.

156. I could easily give you more definite, but very disagreeable, proofs of the evil of knowing the anatomy of the human face too intimately: but will rather give you further evidence by examining the skull and face of the creature who has taught us so much already,—the eagle.

Here is a slight sketch of the skull of the golden eagle. It may be interesting to you sometimes to make such drawings roughly for the sake of the points of mechanical arrangement—as here in the circular bones of the eye-socket; but don’t suppose that drawing these a million of times over will ever help you in the least to draw an eagle itself. On the contrary, it would almost to a certainty hinder you from noticing the essential point in an eagle’s head—the projection of the brow. All the main work of the eagle’s eye is, as we saw, in looking down. To keep the sunshine above from teasing it, the eye is put under a triangular penthouse, which is precisely the most characteristic thing in the bird’s whole aspect. Its hooked beak does not materially distinguish it from a cockatoo, but its hooded eye does. But that projection is not accounted for in the skull; and so little does the anatomist care about it, that you may hunt through the best modern works on ornithology, and you will find eagles drawn with all manner of dissections of skulls, claws, clavicles, sternums, and gizzards; but you won’t find so much as one poor falcon drawn with a falcon’s eye.

157. But there is another quite essential point in an eagle’s head, in comprehending which, again, the skull will not help us. The skull in the human creature fails in three essential points. It is eyeless, noseless, and lipless. It fails only in an eagle in the two points of eye and lip; for an eagle has no nose worth mentioning; his beak is only a prolongation of his jaws. But he has lips very much worth mentioning, and of which his skull gives no account. One misses them much from a human skull:—“Here hung those lips that I have kissed, I know not how oft,”—but from an eagle’s you miss them more, for he is distinct from other birds in having with his own eagle’s eye, a dog’s lips, or very nearly such; an entirely fleshy and ringent mouth, bluish pink, with a perpetual grin upon it.

So that if you look, not at his skull, but at him, attentively enough, you will precisely get Æschylus’s notion of him, essential in the Greek mind—πτηνὸς κύων δαφοινὸς αἰετός—and then, if you want to see the use of his beak or bill, as distinguished from a dog’s teeth, take a drawing from the falconry of the Middle Ages, and you will see how a piece of flesh becomes a rag to him, a thing to tear up,—διαρταμήσει σώματος μέγα ῥάκος. There you have it precisely, in a falcon I got out of Mr. Coxe’s favourite fourteenth century missal.

Now look through your natural history books from end to end; see if you can find one drawing, with all their anatomy, which shows you either the eagle’s eye, his lips, or this essential use of his beak, so as to enable you thoroughly to understand those two lines of Æschylus: then, look at this Greek eagle on a coin of Elis, R. 50, and this Pisan one, in marble, Edu. 131, and you will not doubt any more that it is better to look at the living birds, than to cut them to pieces.

158. Anatomy, then,—I will assume that you grant, for the moment, as I will assuredly prove to you eventually,—will not help us to draw the true appearances of things. But may it not add to our intelligent conception of their nature?

So far from doing this, the anatomical study which has, to our much degradation and misfortune, usurped the place, and taken the name, at once of art and of natural history, has produced the most singularly mischievous effect on the faculty of delineation with respect to different races of animals. In all recent books on natural history, you will find the ridiculous and ugly creatures clone well, the noble and beautiful creatures done, I do not say merely ill, but in no wise. You will find the law hold universally that apes, pigs, rats, weasels, foxes, and the like,—but especially apes,—are drawn admirably; but not a stag, not a lamb, not a horse, not a lion;—the nobler the creature, the more stupidly it is always drawn, not from feebleness of art power, but a far deadlier fault than that—a total want of sympathy with the noble qualities of any creature, and a loathsome delight in their disgusting qualities. And this law is so thoroughly carried out that the great French historian of the mammalia, St. Hilaire, chooses, as his single example of the highest of the race, the most nearly bestial type he can find, human, in the world. Let no girl ever look at the book, nor any youth who is willing to take my word; let those who doubt me, look at the example he has given of womankind.

159. But admit that this is only French anatomy, or ill-studied anatomy, and that, rightly studied, as Dr. Acland, for instance, would teach it us, it might do us some kind of good.

I must reserve for my lectures on the school of Florence any analysis of the effect of anatomical study on European art and character; you will find some notice of it in my lecture on Michael Angelo; and in the course of that analysis, it will be necessary for me to withdraw the statement made in the “Stones of Venice,” that anatomical science was helpful to great men, though harmful to mean ones. I am now certain that the greater the intellect, the more fatal are the forms of degradation to which it becomes liable in the course of anatomical studies; and that to Michael Angelo, of all men, the mischief was greatest, in destroying his religious passion and imagination, and leading him to make every spiritual conception subordinate to the display of his knowledge of the body. To-day, however, I only wish to give you my reasons for withdrawing anatomy from your course of study in these schools.

160. I do so, first, simply with reference to our time, convenience, and systematic method. It has become a habit with drawing-masters to confuse this particular science of anatomy with their own art of drawing, though they confuse no other science with that art. Admit that, in order to draw a tree, you should have a knowledge of botany: Do you expect me to teach you botany here? Whatever I want you to know of it I shall send you to your Professor of Botany and to the Botanic Gardens, to learn. I may, perhaps, give you a rough sketch of the lines of timber in a bough, but nothing more.

So again, admit that, to draw a stone, you need a knowledge of geology. I have told you that you do not, but admit it. Do you expect me to teach you, here, the relations between quartz and oxide of iron; or between the Silurian and Permian systems? If you care about them, go to Professor Phillips, and come back to me when you know them.

And, in like manner, admit that, to draw a man, you want the knowledge of his bones:—you do not; but admit that you do. Why should you expect me, here, to teach you the most difficult of all the sciences? If you want to know it, go to an hospital, and cut dead bodies to pieces till you are satisfied; then come to me, and I’ll make a shift to teach you to draw, even then—though your eyes and memory will be full of horrible things which Heaven never meant you so much as a glance at. But don’t expect me to help you in that ghastly work: any more than among the furnaces and retorts in Professor Maskelyne’s laboratory.

161. Let us take one more step in the logical sequence. You do not, I have told you, need either chemistry, botany, geology, or anatomy, to enable you to understand art, or produce it. But there is one science which you must be acquainted with. You must very intensely and thoroughly know—how to behave. You cannot so much as feel the difference between two casts of drapery, between two tendencies of line,—how much less between dignity and baseness of gesture,—but by your own dignity of character. But, though this is an essential science, and although I cannot teach you to lay one line beside another rightly, unless you have this science, you don’t expect me in these schools to teach you how to behave, if you happen not to know it before!

162. Well, here is one reason, and a sufficiently logical one, as you will find it on consideration, for the exclusion of anatomical study from all drawing schools. But there is a more cogent reason than this for its exclusion, especially from elementary drawing-schools. It may be sometimes desirable that a student should see, as I said, how very unlike a face a skull is; and at a leisure moment he may, without much harm, observe the equivocation between knees and ankles by which it is contrived that his legs, if properly made at the joints, will only bend backwards, but a crane’s forwards. But that a young boy, or girl, brought up fresh to the schools of art from the country, should be set to stare, against every particle of wholesome grain in their natures, at the Elgin marbles, and to draw them with dismal application, until they imagine they like them, makes the whole youthful temper rotten with affectation, and sickly with strained and ambitious fancy. It is still worse for young persons to be compelled to endure the horror of the dissecting-room, or to be made familiar with the conditions of actual bodily form, in a climate where the restraints of dress must for ever prevent the body from being perfect in contour, or regarded with entirely simple feeling.