The Making of the Artist-Anthropologist

Abstract

The demand that art should be scientific and ethnographic, and the systematic pursuit of this aim in the Royal Academy Schools and the Ecole des Beaux-Arts, is evident in the manuals of artistic anatomy which were used in these official art schools and remain in their libraries.¹ The artists who attended these schools gained their anthropological knowledge from classes in anatomy. Artistic anatomy, sometimes referred to as art-anatomy (and in French, ‘anatomie artistique’ or ‘anatomie plastique’), had been part of the education of artists in both countries since the foundation of the official art schools.² As part of the Renaissance heritage which reintroduced humanism and positivism into European culture, postmediaeval art education was centred on the human body. As John Marshall put it in his manual of artistic anatomy: