The Body in Motion

WRITTEN IN FRENCH

From recreational activities to competitions, sport in all its variations is a part of our Western societies. It is therefore not surprising that, as early as ancient times, artists have taken up this motif. Challenging the body to its physical limits, sport is also in its own way a visual challenge - oh so stimulating and fruitful. How to depict gestures that are both singular and multiple, to reproduce the dynamics of movements, to represent the tension of effort, the impetus of surpassing oneself... In the light of a vast chronological approach, from Antiquity to the present day, this richly illustrated collection envisages as much a study of the aesthetics aroused or summoned by sport as a cultural history of the practice of sport through its most famous images, but also under the light of a lesser-known iconography. From Athenian wrestlers to contemporary female sprinters - chivalry tournaments, hunting, ball games, fencing, horseback riding, archery, boxing, skating, tennis, cycling, football, swimming, mountaineering, cricket and motor racing - the reader is offered a new vision of sport.
A demonstration of prestige, long the prerogative of the elites, sporting activity has gradually spread to the working classes until it has become in the modern era a path of emancipation, associated with a broad movement of democratization, while competitive modalities (championships, competitions, Olympic games) and the ever more advanced search for performance are becoming clearer. From Greek statuary to manga, the artists bear witness to an ever-renewed inventiveness of more than two millennia of an exciting sporting epic.

French
380 pages / 330 illustrations

Éditions Citadelles & Mazenod