The complete mobility of mannequins meant that they could be positioned naturally, allowing a convincing rendering of the body. Being merely studio apparatus, not surprisingly, artists only occasionally represented these mechanical assistants in drawings, paintings, or in scenes of the atelier-the latter, for example, depicted by Adriaen van Ostade (1610–1685) and Gustave Courbet (1819–1879). As is known from letters, memoirs, estate sales, and works of art, they were used by Rembrandt, Gainsborough, Thomas Sully, Sir Joshua Reynolds, and John Singleton Copley, among others, during the 17th and 18th centuries by Frederick Leighton and his contemporaries in the 19th century and by many modernist artists who had been trained in the academic tradition such as Courbet, Degas, and even Cézanne. Purportedly first used in Western art by Fra Bartolomeo, the workshops of such notable artists as Leonardo da Vinci, Correggio, and Luca de Cambiaso also employed mannequins.
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Such books and manuals explain how to pose these realistically proportioned models for use in drawing, painting, and sculpture, and many offer instructions for constructing them in wax, cork, wood, or as figures stuffed with horsehair and hemp with papier maché heads. Many treatises attest to the important role these proxy humans played for artists for their own work and as teaching tools the earliest mention is by Filarette in his Treatise on Architecture (1461–64), with descriptions continuing beyond Denis Diderot's Encyclopédie (1763) and throughout the 19th century. Our example, long ago given the moniker Ottakar, came to us from a New York portrait artist who acquired it from his teacher, to whom it had been given many years earlier, dating our current history of the figure to about 1900. Many were passed down from master to student, or changed hands by sale, gift, or inheritance, and by the 19th century they could be rented from colormen-merchants of artists' supplies-or purchased second hand. Always specially commissioned, each is believed to be the work of several artisans, but little is known about who made these highly individualized models. Mannequins of this quality took about a year to craft and were extremely costly, but were in great demand from the late 18th to the mid-19th century.
To gain a better understanding of how this figure was so successfully engineered, conservators plan to x-ray it in the near future. The artist could further stabilize the mannequin to defy gravity and allow it to hold its pose by dampening its mechanical joints to swell the wood. This remarkable agility was made possible by an intricate system of rotating wood ball-and-socket joints, numerous dowels, and an elaborate internal mechanism: a wood-and-metal armature, or "skeleton," that holds its parts in place. The flexibility of its shoulders and arms, hips and legs, wrists and ankles allows it to be configured into any position possible of the human body even each finger is easily manipulated to individually open and close. Unlike conventional sculpture that is carved and painted, or mannequins made for medical or fashion purposes, this avatar is fully articulated. Its blank stare, heavily lidded eyes, and enigmatic expression place it in an eerie space between human and nonhuman. Its abstracted androgynous geometric form is imbued with a lifelike appearance evoked by its large scale (five feet, three inches), its skin-toned gesso surface, sharply honed face, torso, limbs, and wasp waist, and, not least, the fine bones of its feet and the creviced palms of its hands. Ours is a type known as mannequin perfectionée, a term denoting its elaborate internal structure and naturalistic finish.
Intended as a means of improving and refining the drawing or painting of figures, not as a substitute for working from the human model, mannequins were crafted to simulate muscle, flesh, and bone. Left: The Met's recently acquired 19th-century French mannequin. This highly complex object was made in France, the center of mannequin production, and was sculpted of hardwood in the first half of the 19th century. The mannequin pictured at left, a superb and rare surviving example, is a recent addition to The Met's study collection of historic artists' materials. Long since forgotten, mannequins-also known as laymen or lay figures-were among the most essential but little-acclaimed tools of the artist's workshop from the Renaissance to the early 20th century.
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