The Secret of Life Book

2020-11 - The Analysis of Beauty. William Hogarth (Author). 1753. 138 Pages

A classic book famous for its advocacy of the serpentine line as the key to visual appeal and beauty. The text is wordy and requires some effort to read. The book delves deep into; architecture, the natural world, painting technique, anatomy, English Country Dancing. There is a section on painting that completely captivated me. The author was describing how to painting human skin … how the technique is different depending where on the body the skin is. He described the knowledge of blood vessel and veins and their color properties below the skin. How the artist needed to replicate that and build up the skin color from below the dermis to the surface in order to achieve life like results. Wow! On the whole I was already familiar with his notion of the serpentine and the oval from my reading other books and my experience with English Country Dancing. In some ways this is a niche book for artists but it also offers fantastic insight into beauty norms of a given era. What they held as beauty and how to achieve that. I am sure I will never look at a piece of art, or structure, or dancing figures in quite the same way again … I will likely be trying to see the serpentine ….