Muscles by Masters

Most artists like live models, but there was a time when painters preferred dead ones. Florence's great master Antonio Pollaiuolo (1429-98) carefully studied a corpse with its skin peeled away for his Battle of the Nudes, Pollaiuolo had just discovered muscles. As a result, his Nudes bulged with biceps like characters from one of Bernarr Macfadden's "beefcake" magazines. Pollaiuolo was the first artist to make a first-hand study of what lay under the skin, and he touched off an artistic revolution. How far that revolution carried was shown last week by Manhattan's Metropolitan Museum of Art in an exhibit of Art and Anatomy.

Dissection in Secret. Curator A. (for Alpheus) Hyatt Mayor chose 100-odd prints and paintings calculated to fascinate both students and medical men. Until Pollaiuolo, the only artists who seriously studied anatomy were the Greeks. Since dissection was forbidden by their religion, they carefully watched athletes in the gymnasia. Medieval art was less concerned with reproducing correct anatomical detail than with expressing the subject's inner light. Dissection was still frowned upon in those days (though doctors often carried it on in secret).

With the Renaissance, artists returned to anatomy and, after Pollaiuolo, went in for it in a big way. Leonardo Da Vinci learned through dissection (by the end of the 15th century the church had approved the practice), did countless sketches and cross sections, working to get just the right swell of a bicep, the right organ in the right place. The Metropolitan shows a precise study by Leonardo of a baby in a womb. Raphael spent long hours dissecting; Curator Mayor shows how his later figures lose their smooth look and take on bone structure and strong, adult muscles. Not until 1543, when the Belgian Anatomist Andreas Vesalius published his book of superb anatomical drawings, did artists have a text to go by.

Pinups in Palaces. Among the most notable items in the show: a heroic Judith and Holofernes by Rubens, a precise and touching portrait of a half-nude woman by Rembrandt, a vicious Hogarth called The Reward of Cruelty, which shows the dissection of a murderer's corpse in gruesome detail. The exhibit also shows that, once they had learned their anatomy, many artists proceeded to paint the human form not as it was but as they thought it ought to be. The Fontainebleau school (started in the 16th century) created elegant cheesecake pinups of an elongated grace, their charms carefully exaggerated in some places, to which polite French art has remained faithful to this day. ("They change the hairdo," says Curator Mayor, "but never the girl.")

The U.S.'s Thomas Eakins, who died in 1916, was the last of the great painters who wielded both brush and scalpel. Today, dissection is virtually unknown among painters. But, even though modern artists have done their best to distort and destroy the human form in their work, they still cannot get away from anatomy. Draftsmen like Dali and Tchelitchew go back to the medical books, delight in drawing bloodshot eyes and weird faces with veins and sinews outlined through glassy skin. Even Picasso and Matisse (some of whose drawings are in the exhibit) owe a debt to the Renaissance's Antonio Pollaiuolo and the dissectionists. With a few deft strokes of their pens, the two great moderns suggest, with pride and perfection, a woman kneeling or a languid nude.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.