Abstract
This chapter investigates the arbitrary rules of the 8-head and 7½-head canons of human proportion that we often teach as inviolate truth. Using Andrew Loomis’s (Figure drawing for all it’s worth. New York: Viking Press, 1943) male and female manikins, this chapter deconstructs the numerous problems and inaccuracies with the 8-head canon of proportions by comparing the “ideal” to the “dumpy” academic canon and the measurements of real people. This chapter explores the origins of these schemata as examples of divine mathematics from ancient Sumer, through Vitruvius and Leonardo to the thin-hipped, heel-wearing women of Andrew Loomis. Describing a pedagogy of comparative analysis in which students arrive at an understanding of proportions through empirical observation and critical awareness, this chapter describes a cognitivist alternative to rote learning. This chapter also provides an embodied alternative: utilizing the life-drawing paradigm, coupled with movement exercises and practical anatomy, to develop a holistic awareness of body and an appreciation for the diversity of forms present in the world.
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Notes
- 1.
Good poets also have a natural sense of rhythm that means they don’t have to.
- 2.
Good poets don’t have to rely on form if they don’t want to.
- 3.
Yes, it’s not all art teachers all of the time. It’s bad enough even if it’s only some teachers some of the time.
- 4.
More commonly: a whole packet of worksheets.
- 5.
It is almost invariably the teacher who decides.
- 6.
This also tends to vary with teachers’ and students’ comfort with depicting the human form. It’s difficult to overcome student giggles when the teacher can’t stop blushing.
- 7.
And progressively have to unlearn.
- 8.
The mean.
- 9.
The median.
- 10.
The mode.
- 11.
We’ll get to that shortly.
- 12.
Instagram has made it vital that we think about how we curate our images and what mechanism we us to disseminate them.
- 13.
At least in one arm. Like Michelangelo’s David, he is both oddly proportioned and lopsided.
- 14.
On the plus side, if we made statues out of her, we could use them as tent pegs.
- 15.
Although we tend to think of symmetry as a correspondence between left and right halves, the Ancient Greek concept of symmetry is the correspondence between reality and the ideal that we describe as “being in proportion.”
- 16.
Sumerian scribes were apparently uninterested in codifying the methods of artists and craftspeople.
- 17.
Who controlled the region after the fall of the Old Babylonian Empire.
- 18.
This canon can be seen in the statue of Darius I and the relief of Artaxerxes I at Naqsh-e-Rustam.
- 19.
Thus, the Sumerian craftspeople were apparently more interested in creating figures that reflected aesthetic and ethical ideas than, for example, the way the Sumerian people actual looked.
- 20.
Unless, of course, we suspect that the enemies of Egypt were comically short-statured.
- 21.
And that’s without ever dealing with the Amarna period and the problem of human depiction under Akhenaten and Nefertiti.
- 22.
Sorry, I had to.
- 23.
If we’re going to encode the trauma of a too-literal contagion, can we call it Pre-Smallpox or at least Pre-Colonial instead?
- 24.
I have no doubt it would invariably be a man.
- 25.
Where each successive body part is roughly 1.4142 times the length of the preceding section and is laid out one after another.
- 26.
Where each increase in span is measured from the top of the head.
- 27.
Where distances are measured from the chin.
- 28.
Φ, also called the Golden Section.
- 29.
Which is essentially phi for lazy people and was discovered 1600 years too late for Polykleitos.
- 30.
Only three of which Polykleitos might have known.
- 31.
By reputation and from the more-or-less faithful Roman copies of his more significant works.
- 32.
Yes, it was invariably men.
- 33.
While also being on the cutting edge of artistic development.
- 34.
If we assume that there is only one true canon, we might as well believe that artistic excellence requires the wearing of a chiton or toga and increases with geographical proximity to the Aegean Sea.
- 35.
Where “real” is actually the average and “ideal” is actually very nearly impossible.
- 36.
Internalizing a litany or proportions that students can recite back to the teacher.
- 37.
Having students draw the figure on a teacher-provided Loomis-type framework already labeled with corresponding parts of the body is an example of the rote-inference approach.
- 38.
It is almost always understood as the canon.
- 39.
Rather than the far more inconvenient habit of using real people.
- 40.
Weather forecasts also demonstrate how often “the math” is either inapplicable to or can be disproven by lived experience.
- 41.
This necessary sensitivity may go some way to explaining the persistence of Greco-Roman cultural products in our schools: it’s easy to think of the earnest beliefs of ancient and primitive people as just so much superstition. Our ideas, on the other hand, are rooted in faith and in millennia-old traditions and are therefore entirely different, right?
- 42.
To emphasize being out of touch with the fashions of the day.
- 43.
To stress braininess.
- 44.
Be mindful that even Cuthbert’s figure shows an aggregated average rather than a real person. It’s just that Cuthbert is much closer to reality than Loomis.
- 45.
To be impactful, it would need to be analyses , plural.
- 46.
We could also expand beyond humanity to include other species.
- 47.
Here is a good example of how art can impact and expand the study of science. Students usually understand simple machines as simple machines and not as principles that impact how they move through the world.
- 48.
I can recommend a book chapter you might want to use.
- 49.
While a good idea, having a bevy of bodies sounds somehow dirty and not-to-be-allowed, especially in a public-school environment.
- 50.
Yes, mobile devices can flip the image horizontally so that our t-shirt logos read correctly left-to-right when we take a selfie, but they usually passively interfere with the captured and not the live image. When we select, modify, curate, and share images of ourselves, however, we tend to use our tech to actively interfere with our visible reality.
- 51.
To be a responsible and responsive teacher, we should also use the established methods as scaffolding for those who need or prefer them.
- 52.
Both are coercive, if not directly authoritative, practices that still insist that the mind is more important and separate from the body.
- 53.
Or, weather and administrators permitting, find space outside of it.
- 54.
Making changes can be intimidating for less-practiced artists. Having to “redraw” a figure can be less intimidating but is also potentially tedious for more experienced artists. The balance of skills in your room will go a long way in determining which approach you use.
- 55.
A worthwhile challenge for advanced students.
- 56.
Except not nude, please. This is school we’re talking about.
- 57.
This is especially useful for those who have not enjoyed a wealth of arts experiences in their education.
- 58.
This remains true even if they have little knowledge of it in the cognitivist sense of being able to name and categorize what they see according to an expected canon.
- 59.
Isn’t that a beautifully appropriate word?
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Babulski, T. (2019). A Monstrous, Misshapen Ideal. In: What Art Teaches Us. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-27768-0_4
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