The book is made up of 10 classical sculptures from the Hermitage Museum (mostly Roman and one or two Greek), removed from their plinths and repositioned to share a raised floor with the viewer; and 17 highly abstracted body-forms by Antony Gormley. The idea is to juxtapose ancient, idealized statues with Gormley s more disinterested sculptures and see whether, in Gormley s work, the abstract language of Euclidean geometry can make a shelter for feeling, and whether, in the case of the classical works, demounting and putting the viewer on the same level as their original makers can re-establish them as made things. The interaction of the public, captured in documentary photographs, is key to a project that aims to show how classical marbles, Gormley s own sculptures and the living human visitors inhabit the same space and can converse with each other. All Gormley s body works are the residue of an action or event of a real body that is absent translated into an abstract architectural language (which in the Hermitage is in acute contrast to the ornate interiors). His work takes the body as a  found object , something already made, as a reflexive object that engages the viewer less as a representation than an acknowledgement of its opposite: the  lost subject .