The Sensorial Line: The Primacy of the Human Figure in World Art
The Sensorial Line: The Primacy of the Human Figure in World Art is a speculative essay concerning the human figure, embodied perception, draughtsmanship and the peculiar status of the figurative line within visual art.
Comments, questions and critical responses are very welcome at the foot of this post.
Beginning with Maurice Merleau-Ponty and the idea of the human body as the Sensorium, the essay develops the proposition that the human figure occupies a uniquely central position in art because human experience itself is necessarily embodied.
It then moves through Walter Benjamin’s concept of Reflection towards what the essay describes as a Promethean Moment in Renaissance drawing: the emergence of the great cartoons and preparatory drawings of Leonardo, Michelangelo and Raphael as works in which artistic thought itself appears to become visible.
Particular attention is given to an exceptionally rare “vibrant kineticism” in the figurative line — an almost vibratory or animated quality identified in the drawings of these masters, most especially Raphael, and encountered again with extraordinary force in Picasso.
The argument culminates in Cubism, understood not merely as a disruption of conventional representation but as an intrinsically Reflective form: multiple viewpoints coexist within a single image, corresponding to the shifting, comparative and multiperspectival character of human perception and thought.
The resulting idea is expressed in the essay’s central proposition:
The figurative line is the trace of the Sensorium Reflecting on itself.
The essay is also archived on Zenodo and listed on PhilPapers.
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