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Duval's artistic anatomy

Chapter 2: PREFACE TO THE REVISED EDITION
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About This Book

A concise, artist-focused manual distilled from lecture courses, presenting anatomy as a tool for drawing and modelling by beginning with the skeleton and explaining joint mechanics, muscular masses, and their effects on surface form and movement. It interleaves plates with explanatory text and urges hands-on study of bones, skeletons, casts, and living models to correlate deeper structures with visible contours. Practical demonstrations of motions such as forearm rotation illustrate underlying mechanisms. Short sections address facial angle and cranial form from an anthropological perspective. The aim is to sharpen observation and justify the why of visible forms.

PREFACE TO THE REVISED EDITION

Few words of preface are needed here. The preface of the original edition still holds good, and sufficiently defines the aims and scope of the book. The first object aimed at is to facilitate the study of artistic anatomy by the demonstration of the meaning of the appearances presented by the various parts of the body. Incidentally it is hoped that through close study the powers of observation will be quickened. By a simple narration of the structure of the body and its mechanism, particularly in relation to surface forms, it is hoped that the student of art may correctly and intelligently appreciate the why and wherefore of the parts which he is called upon to paint or model.

One would reiterate and emphasise the necessity of two additional aids to this end. In his studies the student should have and use the opportunity of seeing and handling the separate bones and also an articulated skeleton; and where possible, he should have access to a fully equipped anatomical museum. He should further take advantage of all means of studying on the living model—on himself, on other models—and in casts, the movements, attitudes, and gestures of the body, and the resulting surface forms. By these two studies it becomes possible to correlate properly the superficial appearances with the deeper structures, such as bones, joints, and muscles, which are mainly responsible for the characteristic features presented in the living state.

I have to express my indebtedness to my friend Dr. Thurstan Holland for the radiograph (Fig. 25, p. 80) specially prepared by him for this work; and to the publisher of Cunningham’s Text Book of Anatomy for permission to use the figure (p. 315) of the muscles of expression.

A. M. P.

Liverpool, July, 1905.