Books like Spectacular bodies by Martin Kemp

Artistic Anatomy, first published in 1889 and later expanded by Robert Beverly Hale for English readers, offers timeless guidance on human figure proportion and drawing for artists across generations.

An outstanding work of interdisciplinary scholarship and a fascinating read, The Body Emblazoned is a study of the Renaissance culture of dissection which informed intellectual enquiry in Europe for nearly two hundred years. Though the dazzling displays, in Renaissance art and literature, of the exterior of the body have long been a subject of enquiry, Jonathan Sawday considers in detail the interior of the body, and what it meant to men and women in early modern culture. Sawday links the frequently illicit activities of the great anatomists of the period, to whose labours we are indebted for so much of our understanding of the structure and operation of the human body, to a wider cultural discourse which embraces not only the great monuments of Renaissance art, but the very foundation of a modern idea of knowledge. A richly interdisciplinary work, The Body Emblazoned reassesses modern understanding not only of the literature and culture of the Renaissance, but of the modern organization of knowledge which is now so familiar that it is only rarely questioned.

Lucian Freud is often described as Britain's greatest living figurative painter. This publication concentrates on Freud's lasting preoccupation: a concern for the individual and the particular. The book includes many of his newest pieces.

A celebration of visual culture as well as a contribution to the history of the human body. It aims to explore the strategies developed in the 18th century for making visible the unseeable aspects of the world. In the process it uncovers and analyzes a set of body metaphors.