The Anatomist - Bill Hayes [65]
I pull out my copy of Gray’s and look for a good example of this melding and find one in Carter’s illustration of the fifth cranial nerve, taken from Arnold’s paired illustration of the same subject. Here, the artistic and the diagrammatic combine seamlessly, with Carter’s added innovation of the anatomical names appearing on the parts themselves. Seeing the versions side by side also helps clear up a bit of confusion I had been carrying with me. In his characteristically meticulous way, Carter identified three degrees of borrowing in the list of illustrations, noting that drawings were either directly copied from another source, “Altered from,” or “After,” distinctions that sounded to me like shades of gray on the same cloud. But I finally understand what he meant. Carter categorized this particular piece, for instance, as “After Arnold,” which sounds right. It is not a line-for-line copy, nor is it altered from the original to, say, highlight a different anatomical feature or aspect of a dissection. No, instead, it is a tribute to a great German artist-anatomist. It is an homage.
Ms. Wheat, in her mysterious librarian stealth mode, has quietly come and gone, leaving behind a neat stack of three: Quain’s Anatomy. The work of English anatomist Jones Quain (1796—1865), this was Carter’s second highest source for borrowed images. I approach it with trepidation—no, make that fear. To my dismay, I had discovered that one of my favorite H. V. Carter drawings, the glorious full-page engraving of the muscles of the back (reproduced in chapter 6), was not an original but copied from Quain. Was his version little more than a Victorian Xerox, or did he bring something of his own style to the reproduction? Did he make it his?
I find the answer in volume 3.
Except for being about 50 percent smaller, the engraving at first glance looks almost identical to Carter’s. But something is different, too, something it takes me a moment to appreciate. Simply put, Carter’s drawing, by comparison, seems to lift off the page. He employed every tool at his command to create three-dimensionality, from a greater variation in line width to an off-center light source. Rather than each layer of the dissection’s looking uniform, as in Quain’s, Carter “lit” his version to create a subtle play of shadows across the subject’s back. Also, Carter had taken Quain’s original squat figure and stretched it, making the torso taller and slimmer, thereby accentuating the illusion of depth. In spite of these adjustments, he indicated that this drawing was “directly copied from” Quain, but in the copying, the twenty-five-year-old still brought his own aesthetic to the piece.
Comparing other Quain drawings to Carter’s, I find the same pattern again and again. It’s as though Jones Quain created a first draft of each, which H. V. Carter then polished and perfected.
I tell Ms. Wheat that her seemingly magical ability to retreat through the rear door of the Rare Books Room and return with the most esoteric of tomes makes me wonder if she could produce the impossible: the greatest anatomy book never published. What I’m referring to is a legendary nonbook by none other than Leonardo da Vinci (1452—1519). As the story—a true one—goes, Leonardo first began giving serious thought to producing a book on human anatomy while in his midthirties. He thought he would call it On the Human Figure. Along with the title, Leonardo jotted down a rough outline and did some early sketches. Frankly, though, this was a pretty big idea for someone whose knowledge of human anatomy was quite small. At this point in his life, Leonardo’s anatomical education had come chiefly from reading outdated texts, such as the works of Galen, Mondino, and Avicenna, and from the observation of surface anatomy in living models. His exposure to human dissection was limited to being a spectator