I love anatomy. Like all students at the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts (PAFA), I studied extensively from life, working from the model every day, all day and many nights. And like all students at the PAFA in the 1970’s, I attended the anatomy lectures of the legendary Robert Beverly Hale (Drawing Lessons of the Great Masters.) For more understanding of the bony landmarks of the body and the major muscles, I took private lessons in artistic anatomy with sculptor EvAngelos Frudakis. Additionally, a friend of mine studying at the University of Pennsylvania Medical School sneaked me into the dissection labs so I could draw his cadaver. I discovered that I was not bothered by the smell of formaldehyde, and it wasn’t creepy or weird, but fascinating. I remember a “Eureka!” moment when I picked up a pectoralis and discovered that which may be a statement of the obvious, but I had to learn through actual experience: muscles are not intellectual configurations, constructs in a book. They are physical objects with mass and weight that obey the laws of physics, in particular, gravity. This is a big deal for a sculptor. I drew the human skeleton a lot, and one exercise I found particularly useful was to look at a model posing in one room, and draw the model’s skeleton from memory in another room. I also remember liking to draw Houdon’s Ecorché.
Leonardo was the father of artistic anatomy and remains
the greatest of all. But of all artists whose work
remains an unanswerable mystery, Leonardo is the most incomprehensible to me.
Unlike artists whose work is baffling for technical reasons (Rembrandt’s
glazes, for example) or artists whose work contains a breadth and scope of
almost inhuman creativity (Shakespeare, Mozart) Leonardo’s work is unfathomable
intellectually. How could anyone dissect
and analyze the human heart before dissection, anatomy or even science, as we
know it today had even been invented?
How could he have understood the valves and ventricles of the heart five
hundred years before anyone else? And then drawn the heart so accurately it can
still be used in medical textbooks today?
Leonardo’s drawings are almost shocking in person because
of their size. They’re much smaller than
the reproductions, which usually appear in books, which make them even more
inscrutable when you see them in person.
They’re so finely drawn, so delicate and so absolutely correct. They are so beautiful and so perfect. All of my life I’ve thought that two of Leonardo’s
horse drawings would make great relief sculptures. One drawing was a study for his painting,
“The Battle of Anghiari.” The other drawing
was a study for Leonardo’s only sculpture, the monumental "Gran
Cavallo", also known as the Sforza horse, which was tragically destroyed
centuries ago.
Many artists have attempted to recreate Leonardo’s
sculpture and some of the results are spectacular. However, none of them seem right to me. None have that ineffable delicacy and grace
that characterize Leonardo’s work, nor the gentle sweetness that his work
shares with that of his teacher, Andrea del Verocchio. In particular, none emphasize the S curve and
the spiral, which Leonardo seemed to see in everything. So I decided to try making a relief of
Leonardo’s Sforza horse. Using a drawing
of Leonardo’s as a basis for a sculpture is necessarily an exercise in
humility; anything I do can only be a pale shadow of the original. But I wanted to try. First, I made of drawing of the trotting horse
based on Leonardo’s Sforza horse drawing. Since the horses in the Sforza stables were Andalusians, I tried to draw a horse that looked like an Andalusian in its proportions, long mane and flowing tail. Next, I drew the skeleton of the trotting horse. Then I did a drawing of the trotting
horses’ muscles. Finally, I sculpted a clay
relief referring constantly to all three of my drawings. (I try not to look at Leonardo’s work at this
point because the comparison is just embarrassing.) I use my anatomical
drawings to work from, so the drawings become crumpled and battered through
use. It’s OK. These aren’t meant for exhibition; they’re
work drawings.
Even though I’ve drawn horses for years, it was only
during this drawing of the horse skeleton that I realized that horses have no
clavicles. Comparative anatomy is
interesting and full of surprises. Of
course, compared to humans, mammals with tails have lots more vertebrae. And most mammals have their tibia/fibula and
tarsus bones in surprising places if you’re used to human anatomy. But that’s what makes it so interesting!
A couple of years ago, I was working in clay on two life
size sculptures of fawns. I was working
from my own clay sketches and my usual drawings of the skeletons and
muscles. It didn’t go well. I floundered around, struggling with every
detail, until I happened to find on my daily walk in the woods a skeleton of a
fawn. Of course I brought it home, and
from then on, my terracotta fawns went well.
Incidentally, there is an amusing connection between the
PAFA, horses and anatomy. When Thomas
Eakins was director of the school, from 1882 – 1886, he caused an uproar doing various things that were scandalous in the 19th century. Rumor had it that the thing Eakins did that finally got him fired was to bring the
cadaver of a horse into the life studios so that students could learn animal anatomy
directly from the source, straight from the horse’s mouth.
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