Speculative Taxidermy

124DIORAMAS

Although Leonardo dissected and recorded what he learned in his private
notebooks, when it came to painting, the lifelike quality his figures em-
bodied was also the result of a careful study of surfaces.^57 Browne claimed
that knowledge of animal skeletons may not be relevant, but that knowl-
edge of the muscular structure is.

Twenty years have now rolled away since I first began to examine the

specimens of zoology in our museums. As the system of preparation is

founded in error, nothing but deformity, distortion, and dispropor-

tion, will be the result of the best intentions and utmost exertions of

the workman. Canova’s education, taste, and genius enabled him to pres-

ent to the world statues so correct and beautiful that they are worthy of

universal admiration.^58

Browne was correct in using Canova as an example to support his ar-
gument as the artist keenly studied anatomy and also dissected human
bodies.^59 However, Browne made the mistake of conceiving realism as a
transparent, mimetic representational device based on optical registers
alone. Browne failed to acknowledge that Canova was in his time the
most prominent exponent of the neoclassical style, which in Europe
characterized the period between the mid-eighteenth century and the
end of the nineteenth century. As Johann Joachim Winckelmann tell-
ingly wrote in 1755, “the only way for us to become great or, if this is possible,
inimitable, is to imitate the ancients.”^60 This return to classical art was not
a simple revival of aesthetic norms, but it more specifically entailed the
reemergence of discourses and practices of classical culture. The rhe-
torical realism of classical art embodied an ethical-epistemological con-
dition that stood in stark opposition to the ethical-epistemic mechanical
objectivity of science, for the artist here had to comply with a deliberately
restricted optic filtered by moral and ethical precepts.^61
Winckelmann argued that “the general and most distinctive charac-
teristics of the Greek masterpieces are, finally, a noble simplicity and quiet
grandeur, both in posture and expression.”^62 However, to understand
these aesthetic qualities as natural would require a gross miscalculation of
the power of realistic representation to effortlessly convey meaning, val-
ues, and ideals through a ventriloquization of human and animal bodies
alike. Unknowingly, Browne’s realistic conception of lifelike taxidermy
implicitly advocated the implementation of the strict selectivity and highly