Human Figure

The human body as art's most constant subject, and the changing systems cultures have used to depict it.

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The human figure is art's most constant subject, and each culture that depicts it builds its own system. The ivory Venus of Hohle Fels from south-western Germany is at least 35,000 years old. Egyptian artists laid out figures on a proportional grid for millennia, while the Nok culture of present-day Nigeria modelled terracotta heads and bodies more than two thousand years ago.

In Europe the Renaissance tied the body to measurement and the divine: Leonardo da Vinci's drawing Vitruvian Man (c. 1490) fits a man into a circle and a square. Auguste Rodin's The Age of Bronze (1877) looked so lifelike that critics accused him of casting from a model, and Pablo Picasso broke the figure into angular planes in Les Demoiselles d'Avignon (1907). Antony Gormley works from casts of his own body; for Another Place (1997) a hundred iron figures stand facing the sea.