The anatomical
album from which the twelve drawings are taken contains
an autograph note on a loose sheet attached to the
pad, bearing the words: Anatomical and Artological
Drawings / produced in my early years, namely when
I was 15. 16. 17 years of age. And in winter alone./
Drawings of Bones are in Five Plates/ and Anatomical
Drawings number Thirty-eight. (The term "artological"
stands for "artrological", or relating
to the study of articulations, because some of the
plates addressed the main articulations in the human
body).
Vincenzo
Camuccini, a pupil of Corvi, was one of
the greatest exponents of Neo-Classical painting
in Rome, where he was born in 1771. In the early
years of the 19th century he was to become one of
the most authoritative painters not only in cultural
circles in Rome but in the art world in Italy as
a whole. From his early youth he took an interest
not only in painting but also in drawing, both from
a strictly educational point of view and in terms
of the production of sketches and models for his
paintings. He maintained a constant distance from
the pre-Romantic approach that was gaining a foothold
in Rome at the time, choosing instead to pursue
the path of Classicism; and then, not following
in the footsteps of Batoni but preferring a more
orthodox kind of Classicism that was more interested
in the systematic study of Classical antiquity and
of the Cinquecento.
The twelve Anatomical
Drawings from Life published here are unquestionably
an important instance of the artist's very early
graphic work as well as offering an interesting
example of the history of anatomical drawing tout
court. The twelve sheets are part of an album containing
anatomical (osteological and myological) studies
of skinned bodies, preserved by the artist's heirs
after his death. As Paola Salvi has pointed out
(Salvi, 2001, p. 103), this corpus of drawings was
collected and collated in the album by Camuccini
himself, a suggestion confirmed in an inventory
dated 1824 and in the above-mentioned autograph
noted attached to the album. The volume, measuring
698 x 530 mm, is bound in full skin and the sheets
are applied to the centre of the right-hand pages
only; the spine bears the abbreviation: Disegni
D’Anatom presso il vero. [Anatom. Drawings
from Life].
An article by Hiesigner tells us that the plates
were produced in the artist's formative years between
1786 and 1788, when the artist was aged between
15 and 17, while he took an interest in the study
of Classical antiquity and the Old Masters between
the ages of 16 and 18. In this connection Hiesinger
writes:
After leaving Corvi’s studio, Camuccini resumed
an independent program of training under the supervision
of his older brother Pietro. It was at this time
that he began to find permanent direction through
a scrupulous study of antique sculpture and Old
Master paintings. By his own account, Camuccini
spent three years, from 1787 to 1789, studying the
Vatican frescoes of Michelangelo and Raphael. This
he supplemented by practice in drawing from life,
and between 1786 and 1788 by visiting the hospital
of S. Spirito to study anatomy from cadavers. (Hiesinger,
1978, p. 301)
As Hiesinger points out, in the later 1780s the
painter was wont to visit the hospital of Santo
Spirito in order to study anatomy from real corpses
(so to call them "from life" is perhaps
somewhat inappropriate) and thus to practise drawing
the human body. In academic terms, the drawing of
anatomy was considered a prerequisite for everything
else, a crucial stage in one's studies that preceded
any further artistic approach to the human figure;
indeed so much so that Camuccini's biographer Carlo
Falconieri, writing in 1875, stresses the point
that:
[…] recognising that, without the study of
anatomy, there can be no skill in drawing for use
in the creation of works of art, [Camuccini] took
care to mete out his time to the second so that
he could devote several hours each day to going
to the hospital of Santo Spirito in order to draw
there the body prepared by the surgeon's knife;
without which training the painter and sculptor
would produce weak figures, like a building without
foundations. He first went to osteology, and thence
to myology, so as to discover not only the shape
of muscles but the reason underlying the movement,
action and rest of the muscles, tendons and the
more vivid display of veins. (Falconieri, 1875,
p. 18).
The importance of these sheets in the history of
anatomical drawing is pointed up by Salvi when she
states, in her study, that despite the fact that
the practice of the study of anatomy in the Neo-Classical
period is known primarily thanks to the series of
Antonio Canova and to Giuseppe Bossi's Corso miologico
[Course in Myology], Camuccini's work, by comparison
with that of Canova and Bossi, "is more obviously
designed for the study of movement, and offers a
more targeted identification of the changes that
occur in the modelling as the body assumes different
attitudes" (Salvi, p. 106). This approach produces
an extremely plastic depiction typically inspired
by the work of Michelangelo, as Mellini points out
in connection with the artist's later work (see
Mellini, 1998, pp. 500–505). Bossi's Corso
miologico adopts a more analytical criterion in
its execution, thus more in the style of Andreas
Vesalius and closer to the system of depiction regulating
drawing for more properly scientific purposes, thus
distant from any specifically artistic inclination.
In Camuccini's anatomical work, on the other hand,
it is immediately clear that the artist is interested
in the possibilities offered by movement, especially
in the later sheets where his research into the
different positions of his figure is characterised
by a strong plastic approach, often accentuated
by emphasising the poses and imbuing them with expressive
intentionality.
The drawings had originally been ordered in the
album by similarity of subject, regardless of when
they were drawn, but their chronology emerges fairly
clearly from the use of sanguines of different texture
(which can be distinguished by their colour) and
from the change in style, moving from less complex
to more complex compositions. The views of the hand
(fig. 2) seem to belong to a very early period,
whereas those of the foot and leg (fig. 7), while
still descriptive by comparison with the final sheets,
seem to betray a more marked desire to study movement.
It is only in the final drawings, however, that
the artist's purpose seems to be aimed more clearly
towards a syntaxis of movement and the potential
morphological changes that it causes. Starting with
the sheets showing the upper limb in various positions,
although always static (figs. 2–3), the artist
subsequently moves towards increasingly complex
poses, until he reaches the point of outright flexion
and contortion, as in figure 7 which, as Salvi points
out, echoes a similar study by Michelangelo for
the left arm of Night now in the British Museum
in London (see Salvi, p. 109). Lastly, figures 10
and 12 belong to the series of drawings devoted
to the trunk which, in terms of their execution,
are unquestionably the most complex and indeed also
the latest in chronological order. This last group
is the group that most closely echoes Michelangelo's
manner of depicting the human figure, a characteristic
that was to return with some frequency throughout
Camuccini's subsequent artistic career.
