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by drawings of their typical appearances, when recent.
But anatomy is embraced in the needs of other crafts besides the surgeon's. The artist too requires a knowledge of anatomy for the successful prosecution of his art. Yet we must bear in mind that long before the scalpel had displayed the wonders that lay hidden in the bodies of man and beast, cunning hands had laboured, and not in vain, to perpetuate their form in stone or in marble.
Both ancient Greece and modern Italy seem to have shared alike an exquisite appreciation of the lovely harmony and symmetry of the human form.
Alberti says "we ought not so much to love the likeness as the beauty, and to choose from the fairest bodies severally the fairest parts," and Guido sighs for the wings of an angel to ascend to Paradise and behold with his own eyes the forms and faces of the blessed spirits, that he might put more of heaven into his pictures.[1]
The highest ideal of beauty must ever be in harmony with the truest expression of form. The artist seems to have, here and there, caught the spirit of deeper truths which, ages after, the labours of the comparative anatomist have established.
The few examples of unmutilated Greek feet which remain to us, if compared with the conventional foot of the present day, will serve to explain my meaning.
The great toe of the human foot is developed, as you are aware, in adaptation to man's progress in
- ↑ Pilkington's 'Dictionary of Painters.'
