Anatomy and Expression

A skeleton with hands clasped in supplication, back hunched, gaze fixed on the ground, and a muscular man running, his face raised to the heavens as if seeking a deity. At first glance, this double-sided sheet appears to have little in common with the draughtsman’s work of the most significant painter of Hamburg’s early Romantic period. And yet it is a drawing by Philipp Otto Runge, confirmed by provenance and written sources (Traeger 1975, Cat. 86b). The figures, drawn in grey with pen and brush, were created at a crucial juncture in Runge’s artistic training, in the autumn of 1799, shortly before his departure for the Royal Academy in Copenhagen. At that time, Runge was receiving private drawing lessons in Hamburg from Gerdt Hardorff the Elder, a pupil of Giovanni Battista Casanova. Here he learnt the basics of human anatomy using copperplate engravings from the works of Johann Daniel Preissler, "Die durch Theorie erfundene Practic" (1721–25), and Andreas Vesalius, "De humani corporis fabrica" (1543), in a 1725 edition (Traeger 1975, cat. 86; Stolzenburg 2010, pp. 76 ff.). The method practised at the academies to depict the entire human body by drawing individual body parts, as advocated by Preissler, met with increasing resistance from Runge. He would later contrast this fragmentation of the body with his holistic conception of art. This sheet demonstrates Runge’s masterful command of human anatomy. Unlike Johann Stephan von Calcar’s original illustrations, Runge omits the reference numbers inscribed into the body’s structure, which served as captions in Vesalius’s "Fabrica". Runge also dispenses with the framing landscapes of ruins in which Vesalius embedded the anatomical figures. In doing so, he lends the anatomical depictions a striking individuality and places the effect of the ‘man of bones and muscles’ at the forefront of his studies. Prof. Iris Wenderholm