includes nearly a superhuman union of powers. In whatever light we consider that astonishing work, whether as a series of the most sublime conceptions, regulated by an uniform comprehensive plan, or as a system of colours and tones, exalting the subject, and seconded by magic execution, whatever may be its Venetian or Flemish flaws of mythology and Christianity, ideal and contemporary costume promiscuously displayed, it leaves all plans of Venetian allegory far behind, and rivals all their execution; if it be not equal in simplicity, or emulate in characteristic dignity, the plans of Michelangelo and Raphael, it excels them in the display of that magnificence which no modern eye can separate from the idea of Majesty.

LECTURE X. THE METHOD OF FIXING A STANDARD AND DEFINING THE PROPORTIONS OF THE HUMAN FRAME, WITH

DIRECTIONS TO THE STUDENT IN COPYING THE LIFE.

THE methods of fixing a standard and defining the propor tions 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 "svelt," however small her head, has in length no more that 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

* This is a misconception: see note on Circumlitio, ante.

W.

This is a great mistake say 6 are equal to 65, it gives 15 for the length of the foot, or nearly one quarter of the whole height of the figure. The length of the foot of the Venus de' Medici is 93 inches, which, multiplied by 6, is 564 in., or 4 feet 8 in., while the whole height of the figure as it stands, and it has a slight stoop, is 4 feet 111⁄2 in. If standing erect, the whole height of the figure might be 5 feet 2 in. The Roman palm is 8.796 inches, or nearly 9 inches. Fuseli has, therefore, confounded a palm and half an inch with a palm and a half.

W.

with his commentators, and Leonardo da Vinci, to Albert Dürer, Lomazzo, and Jerome Cardan, from the corrected measurements of Du Fresnoy and De Piles, to Watelet, Winkelmann, 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 Dürer, 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-rilievoes; 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 Santo Bartoli, and imitated by Raphael 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. Raphael, 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 Raphael.

It is reasonable to suppose, that in endeavouring to form a

man.

standard or a canon of proportion for the human figure, the Greeks began with the head, its form, its position, the manner in which it is attached to the trunk. They found that man alone carries his head erect, and that thence he derives a face and a countenance. Of all the brute creation, what is called the head is only an extremity of the horizontal body, whose under parts are shoved forward to seek food or seize prey; front and upper part are driven back, are shortened, and, in more than one genus, hardly perceivable. The more the brute is raised before and erects the neck, the more it gains variety of aspect; still it hangs forward, an appendix to the trunk: it cannot be properly said to have a head; the etymology of the word implies an erect position. A head, strictly speaking, is the prerogative of a man, formed beneath a skull which rounds the forehead and determines the face. The more the front recedes and inclines to the horizontal, so much the nearer a head approaches the form of a brute; the more it inclines to the perpendicular, the more it gains of This observation has been demonstrated in the least fallible manner by Camper*, the anatomist, who, by a contrivance equally ingenious and unequivocal, appears to have ascertained, not only the difference of the faceal in animals, but that which discriminates nations. Placing the skull or head to be measured into a kind of sash or frame, pierced at equidistant intervals to admit the plummet and horizontal and perpendicular threads, he draws a straight line from the aperture of the ear to the under part of the nose, and another from the utmost projection of the frontal bone to the most prominent part of the upper jaw. The whole is divided into ninety, or even one hundred degrees, from the actual maximum and minimum of nature to those of art. Birds describe the smallest angles, which widen in proportion as the animal approaches the human form: the heads of apes reach from forty-two to fifty degrees, which last approaches. man. The Negro and Kalmuck reach seventy; the European eighty; the ancient Roman artists ascended to ninety-five; the Greeks raised the ideal from ninety to one hundred degrees. What goes beyond this line becomes portentous; the head appears misshapen, and assumes the appearance of a hydrocephalus. It is the limit set by art, and established Discours, &c. Utrecht, 1792.-W.

on this physical principle: that the more the form of the head reclines to the horizontal or overshoots the given perpendicular, the more the maxillæ are protruded or the more the front, the less it retains of the true human form, and degenerates into brute or monster.

From a head so determined, arose an harmonious system of features. Under a front as full as open, the frontal muscles assumed the seat of meaning; the cavity of the eyes became deeper, and took a regular and equal distance from the centre of the nose, a feature of which few of the moderns ever had a distinct idea; the mouth and lips were shaped for organs of command and persuasion, rather than appetite; and the apodosis of the whole, resolution and support, was given in the chin.

From a head so regulated, and placed on the most beautiful of all columns, the neck, the thinking artist could not fail to conclude to the rest of the body. As the under parts of the head were subordinate to the front, so was the lower part of the torso to the breast. The organs of mere nutrition, or appetite, and secretion, receded and were subjected to the nobler seats of action and vigour. Such harmony of system was not only the result of numeric proportion, of length and breadth of parts; it was the conception of one indivisibly connected whole, variously uniform-god, goddess, hero, heroine, male, female, infancy, youth, virility and age, majesty, energy, agility, beauty, character, and passions, directed the method of treatment, and formed STYLE.

The sculptured monuments left by the ancients, that have escaped the wreck of time, and compose the magnificent collections of the Academy and the Museum, amply prove that these assertions are not the visionary brood of fancy and sanguine wishes, whilst they offer to the student advantages which, perhaps, no ancient, certainly no modern schools ever could or can offer to theirs, not even that of formerly the real and still the nominal metropolis of art-Rome.

These monuments may be aptly divided into three classes1st. Imitations, not seldom transcripts of Essential Nature. 2nd. Homogeneous delineations of Character; and, 3rd. The highest and last-Ideal Figures.

The first shows to advantage what exists or existed; the second collects, in one individual, what is scattered in his