ANATOMY AND ART. 
423 
This fantastic taste was common in the period of what 
has been called the paganism of the Italian Renaissance. 
Everything was paganized. Christian names were con¬ 
verted into Latin. God, Christ, the Virgin, the angels, were 
described in the writings of the day under names which 
had belonged to the “kind old gods” of Olympus. Sanaz- 
zaro in his poem De partu Virginis not only invokes the 
muses of Helicon to celebrate the birth of Christ, but intro¬ 
duces the old pagan river-god Proteus, who announces the 
forthcoming event to the river-god of Jordan. 
In the quaint compositions known as the Dance of Death 
this peculiar humor, always associated with the moral lesson 
of the uncertainty of life, is curiously exhibited. There is 
a charming composition of Le Sueur which embodies the 
same moral. A young Epicurean, richly dressed, crowned 
with flowers, and brilliant with health, promenading through 
a delicious landscape, sees a tomb on which is the inscrip¬ 
tion Ipse Epicurus obiit —even Epicurus died. 
The attempt to teach artistic anatomy by models began 
at a very earty period. The most usual form was a figure 
from which the entire skin and underlying cellular tissue 
had been removed, so as to exhibit all the superficial mus¬ 
cles of the body. It was carved in marble or molded in 
plaster. We have no English word for it except the clumsy 
term of “flayed figure,” so we still use the French w T ord 
ecorche. These figures generally suggest the flaccid muscles 
of the dissecting table. Ecorches were made by Bandinelli, 
a contemporary of Michelangelo, by Tortebat, Bouchardon, 
Houdon, Salvage, and others. The figure most commonly 
seen in studios is the composition of Houdon. Alphonse 
Lami, a French statuary, about forty years since produced 
a new and very admirable one. It was a life-size figure 
known as Le becheur, and represented a man digging with 
a long-handled spade. Lami’s theory was to represent “a 
living man without his skin in a given action.” Another 
very excellent ecorche was made later by a young artist 
named Eugene Caudron. 
