Perfected Thing: A Lay Figure by Paul Huot

Abstract

From the middle of the eighteenth century, French mechanical ingenuity applied itself in the service of art, and artists, as never before. Parisian makers cornered the niche market of mannequins d’artiste, or ‘lay figures’, full-scale articulated human surrogates that were standard pieces of workshop equipment from at least the Renaissance onwards. Intended primarily as a support for drapery or clothing, the inanimate figure allowed artists to create more naturalistic effects of the texture and fall of fabric over a notionally human form. Like the living model, the mannequin could be manipulated and posed at will, but with the supra-human ability, once keyed into position, to remain fixed and motionless for as long as the artist required.