Centuries ago, artists began creating guidelines for showing the human figure in their work. During the Italian Renaissance, artists observed human anatomy to learn how to accurately depict people. They created a set of rules called the canon of proportion, and artists still use them today. In John Singer Sargent’s Mr. and Mrs. I. N. Phelps Stokes, the artist paints upright figures in realistic proportion. In his series “Men in the Cities,” Robert Longo features correctly proportioned people in motion.