Love's Meinie: Three Lectures on Greek and English Birds

by John Ruskin

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76. And now, if you will yourselves watch a few birds in flight, or opening and closing their wings to prune them, you will soon know as much as is needful for our art purposes; and, which is far more desirable, feel how very little we know, to any purpose, of even the familiar creatures that are our companions.

Even what we have seen to-day[16] ] is more than appears to have been noticed by the most careful painters of the great schools; and you will continually fancy that I am inconsistent with myself in pressing you to learn, better than they, the anatomy of birds, while I violently and constantly urge you to refuse the knowledge of the anatomy of men. But you will find, as my system develops itself, that it is absolutely consistent throughout. I don't mean, by telling you not to study human anatomy, that you are not to know how many fingers and toes you have, nor how you can grasp and walk with them; and, similarly, when you look at a bird, I wish you to know how many claws and wing-feathers it has, and how it grips and flies with them. Of the bones, in either, I shall show you little; and of the muscles, nothing but what can be seen in the living creature, nor, often, even so much.

77. And accordingly, when I now show you this sketch of my favorite Holbein, and tell you that it is entirely disgraceful he should not know what a wing was, better, I don't mean that it is disgraceful he should not know the anatomy of it, but that he should never have looked at it to see how the feathers lie.

Now Holbein paints men gloriously, but never looks at birds; Gibbons, the wood-cutter, carves birds, but can't men;—of the two faults the last is the worst; but the right is in looking at the whole of nature in due comparison, and with universal candor and tenderness.

78. At the whole of nature, I say, not at super-nature—at what you suppose to be above the visible nature about you. If you are not inclined to look at the wings of birds, which God has given you to handle and to see, much less are you to contemplate, or draw imaginations of, the wings of angels, which you can't see. Know your own world first—not denying any other, but being quite sure that the place in which you are now put is the place with which you are now concerned; and that it will be wiser in you to think the gods themselves may appear in the form of a dove, or a swallow, than that, by false theft from the form of dove or swallow, you can represent the aspect of gods.