Bodies, Bodies Everywhere

Bodies, Bodies Everywhere
(how studying art history turned me into a thriller writer)
by Laura Leffler

As a student of art history, I was taught to ignore the bodies—the many, many bodies, mostly female and mostly nude—strewn through textbooks and set on pedestals and hung from gallery walls. In art history, you see, bodies are not really bodies; they are vessels. A body is form. It is light and shadow and line and curve. It is a shape in space, a means to an end. Something to be used—to be handled—by the master. 

Such so-called masters don’t even have to be male—at least, not after a certain point in history. For centuries, women were not allowed to be students or apprentices (just as they were kept from most every other profitable employ—thus beholden to the men in their lives). They were excluded from studios and workshops, where their male counterparts studied anatomy and learned how to make pigments and source materials. Indeed for most of human history, women were not given the chance to master art, or anything else. But after the proliferation of mirrors during the Renaissance, we start to see a shift: the most precocious (and privileged) female artists realized that, with a mirror, they had a constant subject available to them—themselves.

Read more on Vol. 1 Brooklyn: https://www.vol1brooklyn.com/2025/06/18/bodies-bodies-everywhere/