The author attempts at demonstrating how, during the Renaissance, the reconfiguration of the terms individual, and as legal artefacts, has made it possible to create a new way of grasping reality and transforming it. She begins by pointing out that the notions of personality we have nowadays, as well as the synonymic relationship between such phrases as being, subject of and conceals centuries of painstaking construction: semantic construction, because words are social artefacts, and legal construction, because legal concepts are the product of social meanings, as well as the producers thereof. The author attempts, thus, to retrieve from those subtle sliding movements in meaning, the threads that make up the warp and woof of a plot that has been woven since Aeschylus's Prometheus, which finds in the Renaissance a fundamental perspective. After examining, in the first part, the connections between the notions of person, subject, subjective rights, and personal dignity, the second part deals with the notion of and the assimilation of the concepts of individual and person. The act of looking up to the conceptual construction that took place during the Renaissance, still present within our legal and dogmatic tool set, allows us to keep the necessary distance to realise that, nowadays, the notion of human calls for new differentiating criteria for the categories of person and thing - much-needed principles, for example, in the 1 Este texto integra projeto de pesquisa Privado: um espaco de mentalidades desenvolvido pela autora no âmbito do Programa de Pos-Graduacao em Direito da UFRGS, area da Experiencia Juridica, tendo sido objeto de seminario na disciplina Fundamentos do Direito Privado no primeiro semestre de 2008.