Gérard Audran

Gérard Audran’s book The Proportions of the Human Body reveals the ongoing reverence for classical sculpture, which competed with live models for the attention of art students. While working with a live model allowed an endless variety of poses, famous statues like the Apollo Belvedere, the Laocoön, and the Medici Venus (seen here) offered examples of bodily perfection deemed worthy of admiration by centuries of artists and aesthetes. Audran traveled to Italy and visited the Vatican
and Capitoline Museums in Rome, creating this book to make those collections more accessible to other artists and students. In each case, he provided engraved views of the work from several angles, allowing readers to “turn” the model and study its measurements from all sides.