Throughout history the human figure has been central to art making, and three dimensional sculpture has played a particularly dramatic role. Sculpture, more than the other arts, may claim to represent reality, as myths about speaking statues and romances between sculptor and artwork attest. In our own time the image of the body has become a battleground of opinions about the purposes and value of art.

Now Tom Flynn confronts this fascinating and difficult topic directly, surveying the human body in Western sculpture from prehistory to the present. He focuses on the ways representation of the human body has changed in style, in meaning, in function. Examining religious and secular, nude and clothed, radical and conservative artworks.

Among the many issues he explores are the differences between three-dimensional and two-dimensional representations of the body; the beautiful and the distorted body; the body in fragments and the whole figure; the body in performance and sacred ritual; and issues of sexuality and obscenity.

From the Willendorf Woman to Degas's Little Dancer, from ancient Greece's celebration of the male nude to living sculptures in the streets of the modern city, from idol to waxwork to doll to death mask, Flynn explores what it means to construct a fictive body in three dimensions.