Saturday, February 16, 2013

The Beauty of the Human Body

The Sphenoid Bone as Drawn by Henry Carter
1.      I don't think it counts as found art, because it is clearly art created by a great artist. But it is art whose purpose was not to impress a patron, nor gull some poor alleged philistine, nor to take the mickey, and it wasn't created purely from a desire to demonstrate a technical skill or to give expressive vent to some observation or idea that had taken shape in the artist's mind. It is art that is primarily communication. It was meant to be understood, at least at one particular level. The artist has done his job singularly well, and he had also shown that he is genuinely an artist, not merely a draughtsman. Anyone who has not browsed the engravings from Gray's Anatomy (just about everyone, I imagine) has missed something worth seeing. It may not be true to say that the sphenoid is the most beautiful bone in the human body, but the artist apparently considered it to be, and it shows in his treatment of it.

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