true vehicle for the surface representation of muscular anatomy and its underlying bony structures is the male body. In the female body, which is physically and physiologically an "adiabatic system" or storehouse of energy, not specially intended for violent motor activity, the musculature is usually flabby and little developed, except in athletics or strenuous occupations. Artistic representation of its suave contours is usually effected by accounting for the depositions of subcutaneous fat, which set in at puberty and usually go on increasing up to the change of life. Countless variations have been played upon this theme, the recital of which is part of the story of modern painting.

The history of modern painting, one of the greater glories of modern France, is briefly as follows: In the early part of the nineteenth century, a definite and determined reaction against the erotic pictures of Boucher, Fragonard and Greuze was ushered in by Vien and apotheosized by David. Austere, prudish, insipid themes from Greek and Roman history became the fashion. The classical tradition of the méthode David was continued by Ingres, a superlative draughtsman, whose pencil sketches make him, in Huneker's phrase, "the greatest master of pure line who ever lived." With the advent of Géricault and Delacroix, French art broke away from the stiff formal tradition, with its historical or literary subject matter. Géricault was almost the only artist in the nineteenth century who dissected, and he dissected even the viscera. With Géricault and Delacroix came two of the fundamental postulates of modern painting, viz., unrestricted freedom in the choice of subjects and the feeling that color rather than line is its true means of expressing form, volume, depth, light, air and motion. Emancipation from formal or literary subject matter was largely due to the Spanish artist Goya, who boldly took his themes from the varied life about him, painting almost every conceiv

able subject, and, in his diabolical etchings, revived the intensely dark backgrounds of Rembrandt and Hals. From Goya stemmed Gustave Courbet, who was reviled all his life for his daring choice of unconventional subjects and who was one of the earliest of the great landscape painters of France. From the Spanish tendency came also the caricaturist Honoré Daumier, whose gloomy backgrounds again suggest Rembrandt and Goya, and whose nude studies of bathing and wrestling figures introduced a tendency of colossal importance in recent painting, namely, the rendering of mass in motion, of the sensations of tactile volume, contour, weight and muscular exertion by the sheer and rugged blocking out of dark tones against the light. It is the physiological anatomy of Michelangelo rendered in a new medium. Another product of the Goya tradition was Edouard Manet, who exhausted all the possibilities of unconventional subject matter ("after Manet, there was nothing new to paint"), who eliminated non-essentials to the point of elliptical portraiture of the face, but who, with all his feeling for surfaces, never achieved form, depth and volume in three dimensions. With Manet, came the great landscape painters of the Barbizon school and, inspired by the English Turner, the Impressionists, better termed the Luminists, who sought to represent sunlight, heat, wind and flowing water by means of color alone. The Impressionist movement culminated in Paul Cézanne, who strove to represent form, subjective solidity and movement itself by the juxtaposition of planes of color. As Berenson says, Cézanne gave tactile values even to the sky.36 These new devices were, most of them, utilized in triumphant synthesis in the last paintings of the aged Paul Renoir, defined by a competent critic as "among the greatest paintings of all time." The summit having been attained, de

36 Berenson: "The Central Italian Painters of the Renaissance." New York: 1897, 101.

cadence at once set in. Cézanne and Whistler had been influenced by the Japanese. Matisse reverted to the flat two-dimensional art of Persia. Out of African negro sculpture and its angularities came Picasso and the Cubists, who discarded color in favor of block representation in two tones and volume in favor of multilateral vision, or the simultaneous presentation of many aspects of the same object ("Nude Descending a Staircase"). The Futurists, meanwhile, aspired to "empathy" or the identification of the spectator with a series of successive or simultaneous actions supposed to be represented in the picture ("Dynamism of an Auto"). This was the "cosmic tarantella," the chaotic Walt Whitman view of nature, which Berenson derides as the logical opposite of true art, the essence of which, from the time of the Greeks, has been selection. Finally, in the work of the Synchromists, all subject matter in the shape of recognizable objects was eliminated in favor of experiments in juxtaposition of primary colors, and the sterilizing process was complete. Viewed historically, Cubism and Synchromism are technical experiments toward the purification of painting as the art of conveying sensations of form, volume and movement by means of color alone.37 In sculpture, Falguière followed the traditions of Canova and Houdon; Rodin revived the muscular anatomy of Michelangelo.

The effect of the purifying process upon anatomical representation in painting and sculpture was characteristic.

To a surprising science of anatomy, acquired by dissecting, the great Florentine artists added their own intuitions about the dynamics of painting. The success of Giotto, Masaccio, Michelangelo in conveying the physical sensation of solidity and of vio

37 This argument has been derived, in the main from Willard Huntington Wright's "Modern Painting" (New York, 1915), which does for modern French painters what Berenson's volumes do for the Italian painters of the Renaissance.

lently opposing forces was inherent in their genius, a matter of intuition alone. Their knowledge of anatomy was great, but only Leonardo had any physiological knowledge of the interplay of antagonistic muscles. To purify painting by the scientific study of color, to render the sensations of light, volume, solidity, weight and movement by the orchestration of color alone, was the ambition of all truly modern painters, from Daumier to Cézanne; and Cézanne, as Wright says, "halted at the gateway of great composition," because, like Gauguin, he took up painting too late in life. Under these conditions, representation of the nude became less a matter of anatomic knowledge and study than of color instrumentation and dynamics. The nudes of Daumier have actual mass, weight and solidity; like his caricatures they were "great pieces of rugged flesh which had all the appearance of having been chiselled out of a solid medium with a dull tool. The drawing came afterward as a direct result of the tonal volumes." (Wright.) Manet's "Dejeuner sur l'Herbe," on the other hand, is only a two-dimensional affair of brilliant. surfaces. One of the few modern female nudes in which musculature is apparent, it is none the less as flat as a pancake. In the nudes of Renoir, tangibility, bulging volume, the sensation of mass and weight, as in a living body, are achieved by means of color alone. Cézanne's rough croquis of nudes in motion look, many of them, like the drawings of a madman-an artist's experiments in the dynamics of vision. The sketches of Bakst are a wild carnival of le mouvement in two dimensions. And all these men had their forbears. Renoir derives from Correggio, Rubens, Boucher, and the rock-sculptures in the Indian grottoes; Daumier from Rembrandt and Goya; Rodin, in tendency and remarkable knowledge of anatomy, from Michelangelo; the blockrepresentations of the Cubists from the figurines of the Cro-Magnon artists, from.

negro sculpture, from Dürer's anthropometric diagrams. The study of the musculature of the back in Courbet's Femme de Munich is singularly like certain canvasses of Rubens. The reclining and semi-recumbent figures of Michelangelo, Correggio, Titian, Tintoretto and other Italians, a pose which for three centuries was a motif in books of anatomic illustration from Ber

Women of Tahiti

BY PAUL GAUGUIN

engario da Carpi to Gautier d'Agoty, were repeated by Velasquez and resumed by Boucher, Fragonard, Goya (Maja nuda), Courbet and Renoir. Meanwhile, alongside of the conscious effort to purify painting by making it a matter of color dynamics alone, other tendencies sprang up. Gauguin, Degas, Rops, Toulouse-Lautrec studied the nude from curious angles, ethnic, social, latterly pathological; and here Fletcher's dictum that the true content of "artistic anatomy" is physiology and external pathology becomes singularly apposite. Gauguin's studies of Tahitian men and women are genuine contributions to ethnology, like Greek statuary, Holbein's English faces, Lucas Cranach's slant-eyed Wittenberg maidens, Rubens' negro, Raeburn's Scots, Goya's Spaniards, Defregger's Tyrolese, Zorn's Swedes, Alfred Stevens' Belgians, Reinhold Begas' Prussian girls, Sargent's Nilotic woman,

Sichel's Miss Fai, or Zuloaga's Marcelle Souty. The predilection of Correggio, Andrea della Robbia, Andrea del Sarto and Rubens for naked bambini has afforded solace to scores of modern German artists, notably in Moritz von Schwindt's cartoons for frescoes in the Royal Palace at Munich. Rodin's "La Belle Heaulmière" reproduces all the horrors of Villon's ballade, and the jaded ugliness of prostitutes has been vulgarized by Rops, Forain, Louis Legrand and Toulouse-Lautrec. Dürer's "Four Naked Women" and Rembrandt's nude engendered, in fact, a whole school of modern pictures, in which the female body is seen as deformed and ruined by advancing age, maternity, change of life, grinding toil, vice or prostitution. Degas, who shut himself up all his life to paint ballet girls, race horses and milliners, achieved the culmination of this tendency in his pictures of ugly women bathing in tubs. Personally in his "benevolent malice" and reconcilement to the boredom of life, he was the artistic counterpart of the novelist Huysmans, of the catlike temperament, described by Arthur Symons as "courteous, perfectly polite, almost amiable, but all nerves, ready to shoot out his claws at the least word."

"Perhaps it is only a stupid book that some one has mentioned, or a stupid woman; as he speaks, the book looms up before one, becomes almost monstrous in its dullness, a masterpiece and a miracle of imbecility; the unimportant little woman grows into a slow horror before your eyes. It is always the unpleasant aspect of things that he seizes, but the intensity of his revolt from that unpleasantness brings a touch of the sublime into the very expression of his disgust. . . . He speaks with an accent as of pained surprise, an amused look of contempt, so profound, that it becomes almost pity, for human imbecility."

Such have been the tendencies of recent

painting of the nude, the apotheosis of the ugly and the disagreeable, running strangely parallel with the substitution of the photograph and the dissected cadaver in place of hand-drawings for the teaching of anatomy. Qur thesis, however, is to the effect that genuine anatomic illustration arose not in didactic hand-drawings made by physicians, but without didactic intention, in the sculptures and figure paintings of the great Florentines, in immortal beauty comparable only with the statuary of the Greeks and the Gothic imagiers.

In the words of Berenson :38

“What brought about this change? In the first place, the Serpent, that restless energy which never allows man to abide long in any Eden, the awakening of the scientific spirit. Then the fact that, by a blessed accident, much, if not most, of this awakened energy was at first turned not to science but to art. The result thereof was Naturalism, which I have defined elsewhere as science using art as the object of its studies, and as its vehicle of expression. Now science, devoting itself, as it earnestly did at the beginning of the fifteenth century, to the study of the shapes of things, did not take long to discover that objective reality was not 38 Berenson: "The Central Italian Painters of the Renaissance." New York: 1907.

on the side of the art then practised. And, thanks to the existence at that moment of a man not less endowed with force to react against tradition, than with power to see a power, I believe, unparalleled before or since-thanks to this one man, Donatello, art in an instant wrenched itself free from its immediate past, threw to the winds its whole mediæval stock of images, and turned with ardour and zeal to the reproduction of things as research was discovering them to be.

"Created by Donatello and Masaccio, and sanctioned by the Humanists, the new canon of the human figure, the new cast of features, expressing, because the figure arts, properly used, could not express anything else, power, manliness, and stateliness, presented to the ruling classes of that time the type of human being most likely to win the day in the combat of human forces. It needed no more than this to assure the triumph of the new over the old way of seeing and depicting. And as the ideals of effectiveness have not changed since the fifteenth century, the types presented by Renaissance art, despite the ephemeral veerings of mere fashion and sentiment, still embody. our choice, and will continue to do so, at least as long as European civilisation keeps the essentially Hellenic character it has had ever since the Renaissance."

'N Rabelais' day, and for long before, and, also, for a very considerable time after, all terrestrial matter was held

I

to be composed of four elements, earth, air, fire and water. As regards the universe, a fifth element, spiritual in its nature, was assumed, which was called the quinte or fifth essence. This quintessence was supposed to be the ethereal substance of which the stars were composed. The domain of this quinta essencia was gradually extended so that it was thought to permeate all things, and, therefore, it bore a remote resemblance to the luminiferous ether of the modern physicists. This essence, or essential part or soul of things became an object for investigation by the alchemists, who imagined that by clearing away the gross body of the elements they could arrive at the spiritual core or substance.

With its original meaning either neglected or forgotten, and the word now only employed to indicate either extreme or ridiculous refinement, it is difficult for us to appreciate the preponderating influence the idea it once represented had in science and philosophy. The subject is mentioned several times by Rabelais, and always in his mocking manner.

Quintessence is mentioned at the very beginning of the first book, as, instead of giving his own name, Rabelais styles himself Master Alcofribas Nasier, Abstractor of the Quintessence, and he again alludes to himself as M. Abstractor, on whom Panurge calls for aid in the great storm at sea. Again, in the exquisite bargaining between Panurge and Dindenault in the matter of sheep, Dindenault in enumerating the excellencies of his sheep, says that the

1 Rabelais: "Pantagruel," Book IV, Chap. XX.

quintessentials, meaning the alchemists, extracted from their urine the finest saltpeter in the world.2

3

Later in the fifth book, Pantagruel and his companion skirt along on the edge of the whirlwind, and finally land in the kingdom of Quintessence or Entelechy, and enjoy an entertaining visit with the queen of that country, who has a wonderful organ. By playing a tune upon it all sorts of diseases were cured, and even the dead brought back to life. The pipes of the organ were of cassia, the sounding board of guaicum, the stops of rhubarb, the pedals of turbith and the keyboard of scammony. Scammony itself is a most entertaining drug, and it is only right and proper, seeing what its root can do, that its flower should be a morningglory. Those who were diseased received a great deal of attention in this august court; and were introduced with much ceremony by a corps of officials, chief among whom were abstractors and spodisators. Abstractors we are already acquainted with, spodisators were also a kind of alchemists; they were those who calcined or reduced to ashes metallic substances. For them Rabelais seems to have had a special contempt, as he called Quaresmeprenant a calineur de cendres, a calciner of ashes, a useless doer of things. This reminds us that chemistry in the olden times was not what it is to-day. Chemical substances were then divided into three classes:

1. The mercuries were those substances which on being heated deposited themselves again, and could therefore be recovered.

2. The sulphurs were those which burnt, 2 Rabelais: "Pantagruel," Book IV, Chap. VII. Rabelais: "Pantagruel," Book V, Chap. XIX. Rabelais: "Pantagruel," Book IV, Chap. XXIX.