SCIENCE AND FINE ART. 19 



their greatest strain: we see their muscles swell and contract, 

 while at last the missile still appears in the picture after it has 

 been thrown ; for it can not move faster than the hand at the mo- 

 ment it leaves it. Equally useful are the instantaneous photo- 

 graphs of domestic and wild animals of all kinds which Herr 

 Anschutz has taken destined to be to the animal painter. 



Instantaneous photography has been applied with surprising 

 results, as every one knows, even to the surf in storms. But the 

 sea painter must not forget, in the use of such pictures, that our 

 eye can not see the waves as the quickly perceiving plate does, 

 and that one may therefore easily give us a picture of them as 

 incorrect in some respects as that of the stationary clock or of the 

 man stumbling over his feet. 



Finally, the former method of representing lightning as a fiery 

 zigzag is, as Mr. Shelf ord Bidwell has very recently shown by 

 the evidence of two hundred instantaneous photographs, quite as 

 false as were the old pictures of racing horses. Mr. Eric Stuart 

 Bruce has, indeed, tried to save the zigzag lightning of the artists 

 by seeing in it the reflection on the cumulus clouds ; but we can 

 not understand how an acute-angled zigzag can be produced in 

 that way.* 



Prof, von Brticke has in a special essay worked out the rule 

 for the representation of motion in art,f which, like the laws of 

 the combination of colors, has been unconsciously followed by the 

 masters. From photography in natural colors, of which artists 

 and laymen continue to dream and hope much, there is unhappily 

 not only for the immediate future, but, on theoretical grounds 

 which experience will hardly contradict, for all the future, little or 

 nothing to be expected. There is a question whether photography 

 will not have an unfavorable influence in the arts of reproduc- 

 tion, copper-engraving, lithography, and wood-engraving, whose 

 place it is taking to a widening extent. So faithful is it that it 

 even in a certain sense depreciates the original pictures of the old 

 masters by making them common property. 



Is it possible that it should not seem wholly superfluous to 

 speak here of the advantage which the study of anatomy affords 

 to the artist ? Has not the Borghese gladiator suggested the 

 conjecture of anatomical mysteries among the Grecian artists as 

 the only means by which they could achieve so perfect a repre- 

 sentation of the uncovered male body ? Did not Michael Angelo 

 acquire by long years of anatomical study the knowledge that 

 justified the unparalleled boldness of his attitudes and foreshort- 

 enings of the body, which have remained to this day the object 



* Nature, etc., No. 1076, vol. xlii, June 12, 1890, p. 151 ; No. 1078, June 26, p. 197. 

 f Deutsche Rundschau, 1881, Bd. xxvi, p. 9 et seq. 



