The Body

About

The human body has been art's measure as well as its subject. Leonardo da Vinci's Vitruvian Man (c. 1490) fits a figure within a circle and a square, turning anatomy into proportion, and his dissection drawings mapped the body from within.

In the 20th century the body became a material and a site of action. Yves Klein directed models covered in blue paint to press themselves against paper in his Anthropometries (1960), and in Interior Scroll (1975) Carolee Schneemann read aloud a text she drew from her own body before an audience. Zhang Huan sat for an hour in a Beijing public latrine smeared with honey and fish oil, drawing swarms of flies, in 12 Square Meters (1994). Antony Gormley casts his own body in iron for figures that stand in fields, on rooftops and along the shore, and Jenny Saville paints enormous nudes whose flesh fills the canvas.