Introduction. Les figurines animalières : l'animal a portée de la main

When dealing with a figurine, one notes that the animal can be handled in several converging manners 1) through contact with the substance, where due to modelling, the sense of touch not only gives shape, but enables one to find in the shifts and folds of the clay, some of the emotional motion brought on by kinaesthetic meaning, 2) through the size of these small works, tuned to the size of the hand, a phenomenon with which one understands real animals in their various statures and sizes, 3) through the faculty these works have to be borne, and so to recover the autonomy in mouvement, and of mouvement, which is especially noticeable in toys, 4) and lastly, through their cabability to be hand-held, to be contained in the manual sphere, a small theatre within that of nature's.