TENTH LECTURE.
THE METHOD OF FIXING A STANDARD AND DEFINING THE PROPORTIONS
OF THE HUMAN FRAME,WITH DIRECTIONS TO THE STUDENT IN COPYING THE LIFE.
TENTH LECTURE.
The methods of fixing a standard and defining the proportions of the human frame, are either analytic or synthetic, from the whole to the parts, or from the parts to the whole, and have been promiscuously adopted. The human is the measure of perfection in Vitruvius; he applies its rules to architecture, and indeed to every object of taste.
The length of human proportion in Vitruvius, measured by a perpendicular, or a horizontal, from the middle finger points of both arms extended, is ten heads, the head measured from the chin to the hair-roots of the front; and eight if the head be measured from the extremity of the chin to the vertex of the crown. Three is the favourite number by which the theorists of proportion have divided the human structure, as containing a beginning, a middle, and an end; and Pliny observes that we attain the half of our growth in the third year. The body, as well as all its members, consists of three main parts, which correspond with each other, in the same proportion as the parts of the subordinate members among themselves: the head and body are in the same unison of measure with the thighs and legs, as the thighs with the legs and feet, or the upper part of the arm to the elbow and the hand. Thus the face is divided into three parts, or three times the length of the nose: never into four, as some have imagined; for the upper part of the head, from the hair-roots on the front to the top, measured perpendicularly, has only three-fourths of the nose length, or is in proportion to the nose as nine to twelve.
The rules of proportion originated, probably, with sculpture, but in the progress of art received their final determination from the painter: this is the praise of Parrhasius, and Praxiteles applied to Nicias for the ultimate decision and refinement of his forms. The foot was the main medium of ancient measurement; and six feet, according to Vitruvius, became the measured length of proportion for their statues. Measure is the method of ascertaining an unknown quantity from a known one; and the proportion of the foot is subject to less variation than the head or face. Lomazzo, when he makes the foot of Hercules the seventh part of his length, and fixes ten faces as the standard of ancient proportion for a Venus, nine for a Juno, and eight for Neptune, talked from fancy, and relied on the credulity of his reader.
This relation of the foot to the whole fabric, as established by Nature, the ancients regulated according to ideal or divine, and human or characteristic proportions. Of the Apollo, whose height is somewhat more than seven heads, the standing foot is three inches of a Roman palm longer than the head. The Medicean Venus, however 'suelt,' however small her head, has in length no more than seven heads and a half; and yet her foot measures a palm and a half, and the whole height of the figure six palms and a half.
Of such observations on proportion it would be easier to continue a long series than to make them intelligible or useful without actual demonstration or figures. From Vitruvius with his commentators, and Lionardo da Vinci, to Albert Durer, Lomazzo, and Jerome Cardan, from the corrected measurements of Du Fresnoy and De Piles, to Watelet, Winkelman, and Lavater, it would be easy to show that the mass of variance, peculiarity, and contradiction, greatly overbalances the coincidence of experiment and measure. "The descriptions of the proportions of the human frame," says Mengs, "are infinite, but seldom agree among themselves. Some are too obscure to give the artist a clear idea; some have too much limited the combinations which might produce, or are capable of, proportions homogeneously uniform: others, on the contrary, have, like Albert Durer, displayed a great quantity and variety of proportions, to little purpose for any one who should not choose to imitate his taste. The ordinary method is that of dividing the figure into a fixed number of heads or faces; but this division is of more use to the sculptor than the painter, who never can see the just size of the head, because perspective hides at least a third of the upper fourth; nor does the breadth of the limbs, in painting, admit of sculpture measure, as they would appear meagre and scanty on a flat surface, in comparison of the mass they circumscribe in perspective; because the habit of looking at objects with both eyes swells their mass beyond its just diameter, in reality as well as in sculpture. This difference of limbs the ancients observed in their best basso-relievoes; they exceed in volume the limbs of their statues. Such are the forms of the sacrificing group in the gardens of the Medicean Villa at Rome, represented in the Admiranda of Santes Bartoli, and imitated by Raffaello in the Cartoon of the Sacrifice at Lystra."
The painter is infinitely more in want of variety than the sculptor, and consequently cannot submit to the same restriction of rule. Raffaello, who in a certain sense did no more than multiply the antique style of the second order, uniting it with a certain air of truth not within the reach of sculpture, whether from rule or taste, made use of every kind of proportion without a seeming predilection for any. There are figures of his which have little more than six heads and a half: such as the St. Peter in the Cartoon of the Temple Gate; a proportion insufferable in any other painter but Raffaello.