The text discusses the challenges in defining and maintaining rules for drawing human figures, emphasizing the importance of understanding natural variability over strict mathematical proportions. It highlights the influence of artists like Albert Dürer in illustrating countless human positions and movements. The author warns against trying to fit diverse human forms into rigid molds, suggesting that such attempts lead to errors in art and creative stagnation.
On the Human Figures.
The importance and great changes in behavior become evident as follows. This section on human studies is judged more with scientific understanding than with precise mathematical ratios. Who can establish so many rules or remember them when there are countless postures, movements, and actions that can be conceived in the different languages of the human body? The thoughts of artists can be bypassed by endless circumstances, just like countless examples given by Albert Dürer. There can be as many incidental positions and perspectives of a hand or finger as rules could be provided in this book. Any effort made for what cannot be maintained is pointless. Experience has taught perceptive ones that to regulate all figures by a specific measure without considering the abundance of nature (which produces many varieties such as short thick, long thin, long thick, or robust people, each with their own proportionality) is as useless as casting all fine figures in a single mold. This results not only in an error in painting but leaves such masters often lamenting and falling into a shapeless poverty of art, not knowing from which source they should draw the rich variety required. They often feel their figures are not working well.
Translation Notes:
- "Mensch-kunde" is translated as "human studies" rather than anthropology.