An Excitable Dog and an Irritable Dog

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More about Ears

The 14th-century Italian painter Giotto sometimes seems to avoid ears–he paints hats galore, and most of his Crucifixion scenes show Jesus’s hair falling into his face. When he does do ears, though, he often lavishes attention on them, as in this depiction of Pontius Pilate.

Giotto’s Pilate

Continued 11/7/07: I like to think that he gave this one a bit of a twist, portraying the ear in full profile view, while the head is at 45 degrees, so we can view the ear in all its glory. It’s got all the outer ear bits that anyone can come up with a Latin name for. I’ve labeled most but not all in the image below.

ear bits

I am enjoying all this auricular anatomy, but I also feel a bit disappointed to realize how similar one person’s ear is to another’s, when there are so many patterns of curves I can imagine within the confines of ear space. Form follows function, I suppose, and I’ll be drawing by-the-book ears for a while, but eventually my antihelixes will go back to taking the road less traveled.

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