Human Figure, The

The human figure has been the principal subject of Western art since the Renaissance. However, each appearance of a human figure in art and as a representation of metaphorical understandings of personal and sociocultural identity must therein be distinguished from the flesh-and-blood body it is intended to imitate. Representations of the human figure are part of a network of symbols in the visual arts and cultural studies, imitations of life through which we define and locate personal and public identities, reminders of who we think we are. Most significantly, Western art has long sought the perfect method of representing the human body, from Leonardo da Vinci's Mona Lisa (c. 1503–1506) to Marcel Duchamp's Nude Descending a Staircase, No. 2 (1912), idealizing the body through corporealized constructs organizing an iconography of norms and resolving the disconcerting mutability of flesh and blood. In this way, the imperfect human body is overridden by a plenitude of representations.

According to art historian Nicholas Mirzoeff, art history is predicated partly on the assumption that each perfectly expressive form—in this case, a human figure—acts as a signifier exactly expressing its signified, without excess or the need for explanation and with complete aesthetic realization.

Feminist scholar Elizabeth Grosz advances a theory of figuration as a remedy for our organic/biological/natural incompleteness, an expansion of Freud's notion that one of the primary causations of human unhappiness is our inability to master our own bodies, a condition that renders a conception of our bodies as transient structures with a limited capacity for adaptation and achievement. [Page 332]Grosz writes that we understand our bodies as a unified and cohesively organized structure only through their physical and social inscription. Material renderings of the human figure allow us to manage and administrate our embodied experience of the indeterminate, amorphous, and rather uncoordinated potentialities of having a flesh-and-blood body. Renderings of the figure thus become social triggers signaling eventualities. When we see what we are supposed to look like, our potential becomes that much more definable; the unknown metastases of the flesh-and-blood body that occur over the course of human development are thus mitigated as a constant source of unease.