Etienne-Jules Marey

Etienne-Jules Marey

Born in 1830, the French physician and physiologist Etienne-Jules Marey became interested in movement at an early stage of his career: the movement of blood as it circulated, the movements which controlled the beating of the heart, then those of the muscles and nerves. To improve his studies, he developed more and more precise recording instruments. Once he had explained the internal movements of the body, Marey extended his investigations to the motion of the body as a whole: a walking human being, a flying dragonfly, a swimming ray, a falling cat...All these movements were described in space and time by his graphical method, and then by chronophotography, his invention which opened the way for the cinematograph which was to be "born" at the end of the nineteenth century.

In the image below, note the striking similarities between Marey's early motion studies of a figure descending an inclined plane and Marcel Duchamp's Nude Descending a Staircase.