424 
FLETCHER. 
Attempts have not been wanting to improve the melan¬ 
choly lay-figure of the studio. An ingenious method has 
lately been put forth by Dr. Eliza Mosher, which she calls a 
“posture model.” The vertebrae of an articulated skeleton 
are strung upon a lead pipe, through which runs a copper 
wire, to modify its flexibility. The spinal column thus pre¬ 
pared can be curved to represent any position of the body 
desired. 
It is told of a famous artist that upon entering his studio and 
finding his pupils busily engaged in drawing from an ecorche, 
he flung the plaster cast into the fireplace, saying, “ If you 
want to paint muscles, look at the living figure with the skin 
on! ” And yet the living model has its disappointments. 
How little there is of the heroic in the tired arm of the sup¬ 
posed warrior! Sir Charles Bell said that ropes are wanted 
to hold the model up while the picture is completed, and 
in Cheselden’s Anatomy there is a plate of an ecorche tied 
with ropes to the branches of a tree, to keep him in the po¬ 
sition needed to show his muscles. 
A subject in which anatomy is, to some extent, concerned 
is the much disputed one of idealism and transcendentalism 
in art. Cicero said that more beautiful images could be con¬ 
ceived in the mind than are seen by the eye, and a modern 
poet, in like vein, says: 
“No true painter ever set on canvas 
All the glorious visions he conceived.” 
But no painter’s pencil or poet’s thought can do more than 
combine the visible and the remembered. The poet invented 
and the artist painted centaurs, fauns, satyrs, mermaids, and 
other fantastic creatures, but they were only combinations 
of the human with animal form. Marvelous skill was shown 
in giving the expression of the animal to the partially hu¬ 
man face. It is not the pointed ears, the budding horns, and 
goat’s legs alone which make the sylvan deity, but the leer¬ 
ing sensuality of the goatish face, inimitable as it seems to 
be by modern art, is the characteristic of Pan and his cohort. 
