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| THE FIVE SENSES, BY HANS MAKART - While
Bouguereau has founded his school and still lives, the earliest great
admirer and collaborator in that field of art has come and gone these
many years. The five-paneled oil painting which is portrayed above
was, on account of the notoriety of its author, one of the chief
attractions of the Austrian galleries in the Art Palace. It was a study in the nude,
showing five different views of an ideal female human form. The
senses of Smelling, Seeing, Hearing, Feeling and Tasting are
represented as in action, and in Tasting, Eve plucks the fruit from
that forbidden tree "whose mortal taste brought death into the world,
and all our woe with loss of Eden." The sense of Feeling, on the
other hand, flatters woman with a recognition of her principal
attraction, the love of the young and the joy that comes with its
touch. Hans Makart, the sensational Austrian painter, was born in
1840 and died in Venice in 1884; but when his painting, "The Entry of
Charles V into Antwerp," fell under the proscription of Anthony
Comstock, the bold painter's fame was secured in America, for twenty
years at least. The people desired at once to see what Mr. Comstock
was persecuting, so they could tell whether he was acting correctly
or in error. It is perhaps always the case that a painter who can
limn the body cannot catch the true beauty in the face, yet the art
and charm of these figures is freely acknowledged by the intellectual
world. |
