ABSTRACT
George Stubbs’s work is a notable example of interdisciplinary endeavour ranging from anatomical dissection, scientific illustration and technological innovation to painting and the visual arts (portraiture, animal art and engraving). His atlas, The Anatomy of the Horse, is an intriguing work which exemplifies Stubbs’s versatility and has rightly acquired an almost legendary status in the history of art, anatomical illustration and medical science. Such multiplicity, and the problems of historical and conceptual specificity that it brings with it, has posed strong challenges of interpretation to scholars from different disciplines, and of various intellectual traditions and languages. It has traditionally led historians to put Stubbs’s work to the procrustean table of a kind of ‘scientific’ or ‘classical Enlightenment’, which is underpinned by obsolete notions of the Enlightenment as the ‘Age of Reason’ and ‘frigid intellectualism’. In art history, such interpretations of the Enlightenment continue to resonate in the rashness with which Stubbs’s visual language is disproportionately seen to draw on neoclassical repertoires of abstraction, beauty and harmony, while the artist is hailed as ‘the greatest classical English painter of the age of Enlightenment’. 1 The tendency to over-emphasize the qualities of quiet poise, static monumentality and order seems to dominate even those otherwise sophisticated accounts of Stubbs’s art. 2
