It will seldom happen that when you have to introduce a nude or semi-nude figure into your picture, you can copy the model exactly as you would in the Academy schools. There all you have to do is to copy what you see, but if you have to represent a Moses, a Prometheus, or an Andromeda, and your model has short legs and deformed feet, it will not do to be too literal in your copy of him.
Artists often say on these occasions that the model puts them out, and that they can get on better without nature. Of course, if they copy all the defects of their model they may, to a certain extent, be right in saying that they do better without nature; but even in this case I doubt it. Nature, though cramped and vulgarized, is better than feeble reminiscences of Michael Angelo or Carracci. An accomplished draughtsman will constantly refer to nature without servilely copying her. It is not possible that the great sculptors of antiquity found (even in Greece) such matchless specimens of humanity as the Theseus, the fighting gladiator, or the Milo Venus. It is still more incredible that they evolved these perfect forms out of their inner consciousness. No; they idealized and improved what they found, not so much by taking the head of one model and putting it on the shoulders of another, adding the arms of a third, as by the much more subtle process of keen and artistic observation of various types of beauty.
To descend from the time of Phidias to our own days, you must (if you wish to excel) pursue the same method. Do not copy all the defects of your model, but, on the other hand, do not fancy you can draw without a constant reference to nature. It is far from my intention to deprecate the study of anatomy, and particularly that kind of artistic anatomy which our Professor so ably teaches, but I am sure he would agree with me in saying that anatomy alone would only enable you to build up a coldly correct form of the human figure without either beauty or individuality.
Anatomy, and, I may add, academic studies generally, must be looked upon as the grammar of figure-painting, and we all know that however necessary it may be for a writer to be grammatical, grammar alone will not give him an elegant or even a clear style.
So it is in drawing and painting. The knowledge of anatomy and drawing which you acquire here is not the end of art, but only the beginning.
It would be out of place in this lecture to give you rules of proportion for the human figure. These rules you can learn (if you care about learning them) elsewhere, but it may be well for me to give you a few hints as to when and where it is right to depart from them. First, as to the size of the head. You probably all know that the head measures from one seventh to one eighth of the height of the figure. Seven and a half heads to the figure is a good average proportion. If, however, you have to draw figures of heroic size, you will have to make the head barely one eighth, and the larger the size of your figures the smaller ought to be the relative size of the head. Michael Angelo exceeded even these limits, and some of his imitators, who have always copied his defects rather than his good qualities, have caricatured him by giving their figures a height of ten or eleven heads. There is a point beyond which the sublime becomes the ridiculous.
Whilst on this subject, I would observe that these proportions can only be depended on when the head is neither inclined up nor down. An upturned head measured from the chin to the top of the head is always much shorter than one whose facial angle is vertical, and a head inclined downward and measured in the same way is considerably longer.
In colossal figures, the hands and feet should be in proportion to the head, and therefore rather small for the body and limbs.
It is generally advisable to make the leg, from the patella downward, somewhat longer than it is in nature. Length of leg gives style and elegance to a figure.