153. Now the exquisiteness with which the painter has applied all his skill in composition, all his dexterity in touch of pencil, and all his experience of the sources of expression, to complete the rendering of his comparison, cannot, in any of the finest subtleties of it, be explained; but the first steps of its science may be easily traced; and with little pains you may see how a simple and large mass of white is opposed to a rugged one of grey; how the child’s face is put in front light, that no shadow may detract from the brightness which makes her, as in Arabian legends, “a princess like to the full moon”—how, in this halo, the lips and eyes are brought out in deep and rich colour, while scarcely a gleam of reflection is allowed to disturb the quietness of the eyes;—(the terrier’s, you feel, would glitter enough, if you could see them, and flash back in shallow fire; but the princess’s eyes are thinking, and do not flash;)—how the quaint cap surrounds, with its not wholly painless formalism, the courtly and patient face, opposed to the rugged and undressed wild one; and how the easy grace of soft limb and rounded neck is cast, in repose, against the uneasily gathered up crouching of the short legs, and petulant shrug of the eager shoulders, in the ignobler creature.
154. Now, in his doing of all this, Sir Joshua was thinking of, and seeing, whatever was best in the creatures, within and without. Whatever was most perfectly doggish—perfectly childish—in soul and body. The absolute truth of outer aspect, and of inner mind, he seizes infallibly; but there is one part of the creatures which he never, for an instant, thinks of, or cares for,—their bones. Do you suppose that, from first to last, in painting such a picture, it would ever enter Sir Joshua’s mind to think what a dog’s skull would look like, beside a baby’s? The quite essential facts to him are those of which the skull gives no information—that the baby has a flattish pink nose, and the dog a bossy black one. You might dissect all the dead dogs in the water supply of London without finding out, what, as a painter, it is here your only business precisely to know,—what sort of shininess there is on the end of a terrier’s nose; and for the position and action of the creatures, all the four doctors together, who set Bustle’s leg for him the other day, when he jumped out of a two-pair-of-stairs window to bark at the volunteers, could not have told Sir Joshua how to make his crouching terrier look ready to snap, nor how to throw the child’s arm over its neck in complete, yet not languid, rest.
155. Sir Joshua, then, does not think of, or care for, anatomy, in this picture; but if he had, would it have done him harm? You may easily see that the child’s limbs are not drawn with the precision that Mantegna, Dürer, or Michael Angelo would have given them. Would some of their science not have bettered the picture?
I can show you exactly the sort of influence their science would have had.
In your Rudimentary Series, I have placed in sequence two of Dürer’s most celebrated plates (R. 65, R. 66), the coat of arms with the skull, and the Madonna crowned by angels; and that you may see precisely what qualities are, and are not, in this last, I have enlarged the head by photography, and placed it in your Reference Series (117). You will find the skull is perfectly understood, and exquisitely engraved, but the face, imperfectly understood and coarsely engraved. No man who has studied the skull as carefully as Dürer did, ever could engrave a face beautifully, for the perception of the bones continually thrusts itself upon him in wrong places, and in trying to conquer or modify it, he distorts the flesh. Where the features are marked, and full of character, he can quit himself of the impression; but in the rounded contour of women’s faces he is always forced to think of the skull; and even in his ordinary work often draws more of bones and hair, than face.
156. I could easily give you more definite, but very disagreeable, proofs of the evil of knowing the anatomy of the human face too intimately: but will rather give you further evidence by examining the skull and face of the creature who has taught us so much already,—the eagle.
Here is a slight sketch of the skull of the golden eagle. It may be interesting to you sometimes to make such drawings roughly for the sake of the points of mechanical arrangement—as here in the circular bones of the eye-socket; but don’t suppose that drawing these a million of times over will ever help you in the least to draw an eagle itself. On the contrary, it would almost to a certainty hinder you from noticing the essential point in an eagle’s head—the projection of the brow. All the main work of the eagle’s eye is, as we saw, in looking down. To keep the sunshine above from teasing it, the eye is put under a triangular penthouse, which is precisely the most characteristic thing in the bird’s whole aspect. Its hooked beak does not materially distinguish it from a cockatoo, but its hooded eye does. But that projection is not accounted for in the skull; and so little does the anatomist care about it, that you may hunt through the best modern works on ornithology, and you will find eagles drawn with all manner of dissections of skulls, claws, clavicles, sternums, and gizzards; but you won’t find so much as one poor falcon drawn with a falcon’s eye.
157. But there is another quite essential point in an eagle’s head, in comprehending which, again, the skull will not help us. The skull in the human creature fails in three essential points. It is eyeless, noseless, and lipless. It fails only in an eagle in the two points of eye and lip; for an eagle has no nose worth mentioning; his beak is only a prolongation of his jaws. But he has lips very much worth mentioning, and of which his skull gives no account. One misses them much from a human skull:—“Here hung those lips that I have kissed, I know not how oft,”—but from an eagle’s you miss them more, for he is distinct from other birds in having with his own eagle’s eye, a dog’s lips, or very nearly such; an entirely fleshy and ringent mouth, bluish pink, with a perpetual grin upon it.
So that if you look, not at his skull, but at him, attentively enough, you will precisely get Æschylus’s notion of him, essential in the Greek mind—πτηνὸς κύων δαφοινὸς αἰετός—and then, if you want to see the use of his beak or bill, as distinguished from a dog’s teeth, take a drawing from the falconry of the Middle Ages, and you will see how a piece of flesh becomes a rag to him, a thing to tear up,—διαρταμήσει σώματος μέγα ῥάκος. There you have it precisely, in a falcon I got out of Mr. Coxe’s favourite fourteenth century missal.
Now look through your natural history books from end to end; see if you can find one drawing, with all their anatomy, which shows you either the eagle’s eye, his lips, or this essential use of his beak, so as to enable you thoroughly to understand those two lines of Æschylus: then, look at this Greek eagle on a coin of Elis, R. 50, and this Pisan one, in marble, Edu. 131, and you will not doubt any more that it is better to look at the living birds, than to cut them to pieces.