I did not find the arm sketches in my last post satisfactory, which happens often enough in a sketchbook. So I did some more work. This time, I studied one of my da Vinci anatomy folios (not the original!!!) and got back to Burne Hogarth. Although those two brilliantly approach the same material, da Vinci was more concerned with using anatomy to support his artwork, whereas Hogarth uses artwork to support anatomy. Well, that was lame. What I think is that Hogarth's anatomy is a lot more idealized. He teaches pose drawing through imaginative technique, which is really hard to do very well, by the way. da Vinci I believe had more interest in documenting his human dissections than in speculative art.
I don't find Hogarth's over-muscled models realistic. On the other hand, da Vinci had limited access to heavily muscular cadavers, so his anatomical drawings are generally of the thinner elderly and infirm. Either way, ectomorphic montrosity or a dead senior flayed open, I feel these artists occupy an extreme poles of a continuum where I would be comfortable somewhere in the middle.
I used a pose from da Vinci's 1 Folio for the bone anatomy, and the musculature comes courtesy of looking at some Hogarth books.
Interesting trivia:
The radius and ulna are the two curved bones that make up the human forearm. They are curved, twisted, and muscled so that the wrist can rotate along the long axis of the arm. Leonardo reasoned that a person's arm would get shorter as a result of the twist getting tighter when the palm of the hand faces down. The twist loosens when the palm of the hand faces up, making the arm go longer.
I verified this by sitting at a table and leaning as far forward as my shoulder would allow. With my hand on the table and my shoulder locked in place, I twisted my palm facing up and down. Sure enough, my arm changed length by maybe a millimeter or two.
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