nts their
ribs! He neither knows nor cares how many ribs a skeleton has. There are
always enough to rattle.

Monstrous, you think, in impudence,--Holbein for his carelessness, and I
for defending him! Nay, I triumph in him; nothing has ever more pleased
me than this grand negligence. Nobody wants to know how many ribs a
skeleton has, any more than how many bars a gridiron has, so long as the
one can breathe, and the other broil; and still less, when the breath
and the fire are both out.

169. But is it only of the bones, think you, that Holbein is
careless?[AP] Nay, incredible though it may seem to you,--but, to me,
explanatory at once of much of his excellence,--he did not know anatomy
at all! I told you in my Preface,[AQ] already quoted, Holbein studies
the face first, the body secondarily; but I had no idea, myself, how
completely he had refused the venomous science of his day. I showed you
a dead Christ of his, long ago. Can you match it with your academy
drawings, think you? And yet he did not, and would not, know anatomy.
_He_ would not; but Duerer would, and did:--went hotly into it--wrote
books upon it, and upon 'proportions of the human body,' etc., etc., and
all your modern recipes for painting flesh. How did his studies prosper
his art?

People are always talking of his Knight and Death, and his Melancholia,
as if those were his principal works. They are his characteristic ones,
and show what he might have been _without_ his anatomy; but they were
mere by-play compared to his Greater Fortune, and Adam and Eve. Look at
these. Here is his full energy displayed; here are both male and female
forms drawn with perfect knowledge of their bones and muscles, and modes
of action and digestion,--and I hope you are pleased.

But it is not anatomy only that Master Albert studies. He has a taste
for optics also; and knows all about refraction and reflection. What
with his knowledge of the skull inside, and the vitreous lens outside,
if any man in the world is to draw an eye, here's the man to do it,
surely! With a hand which can give lessons to John Bellini, and a care
which would fain do all so that it can't be done better, and
acquaintance with every crack in the cranium, and every humor in the
lens,--if we can't draw an eye, we should just like to know who can!
thinks Albert.

So having to engrave the portrait of Melanchthon, instead of looking at
Melanchthon as ignorant Holbein would have been obliged to do,--wi