ANATOMY AND ART. 
413 
sword has pierced his chest, the lungs are filling with his 
life’s blood, and with shoulders drawn forward he leans upon 
his arm, gasping for breath. He may be thinking of “ his 
young barbarians,” and of u their Dacian mother,” far away, 
but his position in the death agony is strictly?' natural. 
There are those who regard with some degree of timid 
dread the introduction of science into art. Art, they affirm, 
is conventional and full of exaggerations, and has nothing 
in common with the precision of science. A great master 
who was not only painter, but sculptor, architect, engineer, 
Leonardo da Vinci, has clearly defined this matter. “ In a 
general way,” he says, “ it is the office of science to distin¬ 
guish what is impossible from w 7 hat is possible. Imagi¬ 
nation left to herself wmuld revel in unrealizable dreams. 
Science controls her by showing what cannot be. It does 
not follow that science includes the principle of art, but that 
we must study science either before or at the same time with 
art to learn in what limits the latter is to be confined.” 
No doubt a knowledge of anatomy cannot make the 
artist, any more than study and training can make the 
poet—the divine vocation must be there—but spontaneity 
in either is a mere euphemism for indolence, and the world 
is very likely to pass by such work. Art is serious, and is 
not to be regarded as a pastime merely. 
The critic in art would, in like manner, be somewhat 
assisted by a knowledge of anatomy, for patient study must 
be his dependence, and not a mere reliance on taste. A 
susceptibility of pleasure at sight of a work of art, consti¬ 
tuting taste, is popularly supposed to be a sixth sense, and 
it has been satirically said that every man believes himself 
to be possessed of it. This, after all, is not surprising. A 
man will readily acknowledge ignorance of what it obvi¬ 
ously requires time and labor to acquire, but not to possess 
an inborn sense of taste would be to renounce a birthright 
and to take rank with the outcasts of Nature! Vanity is 
perhaps at the bottom of it all: 
“ Some demon whispers ‘ Strephon, have a taste.’ ” 
