JF Ptak Science Books Post 1360
Looking at old prints sometimes reveals more than just their own history, simple or not: there are, from time to time, subtle bits of otherness that creeps into the image, if you allow yourself the time to see it. And sometimes looking at images of the past reveal a little of the future, or the possibility of the future. A great example of this is William Rimmer’s (1816-1879) Art Anatomy, this edition published in 1877 (and about which I wrote earlier in this blog1).
The work reminds me of at least two touchpoints, one from art, the other literary. First and foremost, the added elements, the humanist touches and flairs (and I mean Humanist as in the 16th century variety) , the mytholigizing elements, the little designs that are added to the anatomical details
that run throughout the course of the work, remind me of the work of the Dadaists that would come forty years later. As will be seen below, there really isn't much necessity for all of the added extras, the fabulous add-ons, that Rimmer incorporates in this work. This part of the work definitely has an antiquarian flavor to it, the major anatomies of the 16th and even into te 17th century having a pronounced artistic flavor to them.
In a more removed sense, I get a heavy dose of memory of Marcel Proust from the Rimmer images. In a sense, Rimmer is trying to affect change, an instability, into the most common and stable presentations in art, human anatomy. There is a strong his history of presenting anatomy in an artistic format--Vesalius is one famous example--where skeletons are posed reading books, or holding their skin or contemplating a(nother) skull--but not so much past the late 17th century. Though very few of the "decorated" anatomies have ever taken their artistic license quote so fabulously as Rimmer. And Proust I think is a Great Destabilizer--he works very hard to push the center of gravity away from where it should be on just about everything. He drags himself to the proposition at hand, to the memory, to the situation, and though all of his great personal destabilizers--his allegeries, his allegeries to the things that he loves, his allergies to his allergies, his vast catalog of physical complaints, his pale melancholia, his fits, his spectacular memory, his ability to see differently, and on and on, all seemed to coalescence into a colossal ability to see even the smallest detail outside of its small details. Perhaps this is a stretch, but that is the literary sense-impression I have from Rimmer.
Notes.
1. For some reason I never included any of the images available for sale in my blog bookstore--though now I have.
Thanks for this, I've seen a couple of these illustrations reproduced in contemporary art instruction books (hooray for the public domain?) but they were never sourced. I think I will head over to the local university library's rare books collection (I bet this book is in the medical library).
But.. the human figure is not really "the most common and stable presentations in art." Representation of the human form has never been stabile. It has changed radically, from the Venus of Willendorf through radical abstraction like De Kooning's women. Even if we pick a middle ground, of artists who were trying for a conventional "representational" portrayal of the human body, with some attempts at accuracy, the techniques of presentation have changed dramatically between art historical eras. Some eras preferred chubby, bulging women; some preferred thin women with exaggerated features that lengthened the body even more. In the eras before extensive anatomy studies reached artists (like this book) naive representations of women varied significantly.
This is one of the reasons art students are required to take Life Drawing classes, so they can grapple with the eternal question of how to represent the human form, and make their own decisions about how it should be represented. All visual arts are an abstraction, the choice of how that abstraction is made is what gives art substance that is more than skin deep.
Posted by: Charles | 08 February 2011 at 03:41 AM