DOI Seite / Zitierlink:
https://doi.org/10.11588/diglit.5596#0100
THE IDEAL.
75
With maddened pain, like Virgil's hero, the mouth is
but surely the mind must owe something to its connection with
an operation of the features, which precedes its own conscious
activity, and which is unerring in its exercise from the very
commencement." {Tlie Anatomy and Philosophy of Expression.)
Though the accurate knowledge of anatomy evinced by the
ancient sculptors forbids us to agree with Burke, who, in hia
chapter on Taste, compares the anatomist to the cobbler mentioned
in the story of Apelles; or with Byron, who in speaking of the
Venus writes :—
" I leave to learned fingers and wise hands,
The artist and his ape, to teach and tell
How well his connoisseurship understands
The graceful bend, and the voluptuous swell:
Let these describe the indescribable :
I would not their vile breath should crisp the stream
Wherein that image shall for ever dwell;
The unruffled mirror of the loveliest dream
That ever left the sky, on the deep soul to beam ;"
yet the' too exacting claims of the anatomist, if acted on, would
produce that individuality, which the Greeks so carefully avoided ;
while the explaining away of all moral sentiments by the me-
chanical operation of the muscles, is what every thinking man
would condemn as cold insensibilitj^, and as being false as it is
cold; while it is opposed to what all artists recognize as being
the highest excellence of Greek art. It would be well for the
writer in question had he studied the opinions of other anatomists.
Dr. Fau says, " Do not neglect antiquity and study anatomy, but
study the antique that you may see the necessity of being
acquainted with anatomy." He might have added,—and study
anatomy in order that you may understand the antique. Dr. Knox
says, "The antique masters knew practically the theory of beauty,
they knew that when nature aimed at the beautiful in form, (and
without form, there is, there can be no beauty,) she never dis-
75
With maddened pain, like Virgil's hero, the mouth is
but surely the mind must owe something to its connection with
an operation of the features, which precedes its own conscious
activity, and which is unerring in its exercise from the very
commencement." {Tlie Anatomy and Philosophy of Expression.)
Though the accurate knowledge of anatomy evinced by the
ancient sculptors forbids us to agree with Burke, who, in hia
chapter on Taste, compares the anatomist to the cobbler mentioned
in the story of Apelles; or with Byron, who in speaking of the
Venus writes :—
" I leave to learned fingers and wise hands,
The artist and his ape, to teach and tell
How well his connoisseurship understands
The graceful bend, and the voluptuous swell:
Let these describe the indescribable :
I would not their vile breath should crisp the stream
Wherein that image shall for ever dwell;
The unruffled mirror of the loveliest dream
That ever left the sky, on the deep soul to beam ;"
yet the' too exacting claims of the anatomist, if acted on, would
produce that individuality, which the Greeks so carefully avoided ;
while the explaining away of all moral sentiments by the me-
chanical operation of the muscles, is what every thinking man
would condemn as cold insensibilitj^, and as being false as it is
cold; while it is opposed to what all artists recognize as being
the highest excellence of Greek art. It would be well for the
writer in question had he studied the opinions of other anatomists.
Dr. Fau says, " Do not neglect antiquity and study anatomy, but
study the antique that you may see the necessity of being
acquainted with anatomy." He might have added,—and study
anatomy in order that you may understand the antique. Dr. Knox
says, "The antique masters knew practically the theory of beauty,
they knew that when nature aimed at the beautiful in form, (and
without form, there is, there can be no beauty,) she never dis-