A Gift from the Past

Drawing Lesson Draws from the Past, Science and Academia

Reviewed by Carolyn Howard-Johnson, award-winning author of This is the Place, Harkening: A Collection of Stories Remembered and The Frugal Book Promoter: How to do What Your Publisher Won’t and The Frugal Editor: Put Your Best Book Forward to Avoid Humiliation and Ensure Success

Artistic Anatomy published by Watson-Guptill is a new-millennium Renaissance book. It is a combination art and reference book. It will certainly be useful for artists but might also be useful for a writer looking for the precise term for the part of the ear that looks like a shell--which, it turns out, is called the "concha." Even a romance writer might learn something from an illustration on page 101. "He moistened his finger and traced the demicircular line where, he knew, his child might one day grow." Sorry, I couldn't resist. But it illustrates how a book like this might also inspire more than the visual artist.

Artistic Anatomy, might also be a teaching tool for a parent intense about showing her child the beauty of the body, how it relates to art, or the scientific-minded parent eager to have her child exposed to the science of anatomy in a softer way that most biology texts approach the subject.

The credentials that went into the making of this 35th anniversary volume are impressive. The French author, Dr. Paul Richer (1849-1933), was Professor of Creative Anatomy at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts in Paris. The book is translated and edited by Robert Beverly Hale, also deceased. He was Curator Emeritus of the American Painting and Sculpture Department at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. He was also Adjunct Professor of Drawing at Columbia University, and this is but a brief list of their credentials.

Writers, educators and others will recognize the sheer volume of careful research that went into this book by the contents pages. It is as extensive as some indexes. The index is comprehensive enough to serve the needs of anyone researching anatomy including morphology, myology, oseology and arthrolgy but a writer can easily find a page with the intricate parts of the torso pointed to and labeled.

Only an exquisite hardcover with Leonardo and Michelangelo flyleaf designs could have made this book better. And then only for the collector. This huge paperback--256 nine by twelve pages and 150 drawings -- is perfect just as it is for practical use.

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Carolyn Howard-Johnson is the award-winning author of This Is the Place, Harkening: A Collection of Stories Remembered and books of poetry including Tracings and Cherished Pulse. Her poems and short stories appear frequently in literary journals and anthologies. More on her award-winning The Frugal Book Promoter: How to Do What Your Publisher Won’t and her soon-to-be-released The Frugal Editor: Put Your Best Book Forward to Avoid Humiliation and Ensure Success may be found at her extensive site for writers, www.HowToDoItFrugally.com.