10 MAY 1930, Page 3

The Royal Academy Banquet The customary speeches at the Royal

Academy Banquet last Saturday were enlivened by a daring sally. Lord Moynihan ingeniously traced the relations between painting and medical science. In such a gargoyle as that one on the church of San Maria Formosa in Venice, which Ruskin described with unnecessary horror, he saw merely a faithful representation of a particular form of nervous disease. As for the bust of "the dying Alexander" in the Uffizi Gallery in Florence, he said that the position of the head and the contortion of the muscles of the face and neck were all typical of cerebro-spinal meningitis. He gave many other examples. But iS the bust in the Uffizi Gallery really 'of Alexander the Great ? Surely that -belief depends upon a very slender tradition ; and if Alexander died of , " spotted fever it , is odd that the disease should have coincided with the excess of drink and food from which a firmer tradition says that he really did die. * * * *