iSculpt.org

Old books on figure drawing often contain very useful information. After all, it's something people have been doing for a long time. These old books can often give some interesting insight into times past, as well. Here are a couple I found at the Internet Archive that I thought I'd share.

The Human Figure: its Beauties and Defects by Ernst Willhelm von Brücke published in 1891 is one worth checking out. This book is text heavy and light on illustrations, but if you want to know what what was considered "beautiful" at the end of the nineteenth century, here's one place you can look.

I find this page (click to see a larger, readable version):

which is part of a longer discussion on drawing female breasts, to be particularly humorous. Although the female breast is one of my favorite topics, and one that most art anatomy books spend too little time on, I still couldn't help but snigger at some of the things in this book. I can almost picture the author sitting in his library with a smoking jacket, puffing a pipe, and expounding on what constitutes "good" breasts. Needless to say, being a fan of diversity and the value of representing a variety of body types, I found his perception of beauty to be rather narrow and unrealistic. In fact, I think it would take a thirteen year old with breast implants or a world without gravity to meet this guys standard of mammary beauty (mammarrian beauty?).

But, despite the humor value and the fact that it's a little verbose and hard to read, there really is some good anatomical information in this book. There is an attention to detail you don't find in most modern anatomy books. The discussion linked above is part of a twenty page chapter discussing how to represent the female breast and how it's been represented in different art throughout history. Yeah, it's chock full o' nineteenth century values and perceptions of beauty and is unintentionally both humorous and sexist at times, but it's still interesting and worth a read if you have the time.

Studies of the Human Figure: with some notes on drawing and anatomy by Montague G. Ellwood is another interesting one. This one is more image-heavy, and a tad more modern, being from just after World War 1. The twenty years between the publication of these two books was a period of great technological advancement in the publishing world, and this may be one of the earliest treatises on figure drawing that actually used photographs instead of just engravings. Some of the illustrations in the book are still quite useful today, such as this lovely skeleton illustration:

The thing that struck me as most interesting about this particular work is it shows just how much societal views of nudity have changed. In this book, all the images of adult nudity have the genitals and pubic hair airbrushed out, however the images of children are published unretouched. Today, adult nudity rarely raises an eyebrow in an anatomy book, but few American publishers would dare use nude photographs of children today outside of, perhaps, a medical textbook. I've seen books published as late as the 1950s that followed the same pattern as this book - adult nudity airbrushed, but child nudity used unaltered. I think, up until fairly recently, child nudity was thought of as innocent, and was often used to represent innocence in art. Now, however, with mass media trying to convince us that there's an online predator under every rock, well... times change.