Sculpture

• 1. Introduction

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  Sculpture is the branch of the visual arts that works in three dimensions, in height, width and depth. The largest one ever recorded rises 182 metres into the sky. That is the Statue of Unity, finished in India in 2018, and it sits at the far end of a tradition that stretches back to a lion-headed figure carved from mammoth ivory tens of thousands of years ago. Between those two points lies almost the entire human story told in solid material. Why did so many cultures pour their heaviest stone, their most precious gold, and their full-time labour into shaping figures? Why did some great civilizations make colossal statues while others, equally advanced, made almost none? And how did the people who carved these things go from being unnamed tradesmen to celebrated artists who could be ennobled and welcomed into the circle of princes? The answers run through temples, tombs, palaces, and the workshops of a few people whose names we still remember.

• 2. The Weight Of Survival

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  Stone sculpture survives far better than works made of perishable material, so it often makes up the majority of what we have left from ancient cultures, apart from pottery. This creates a quiet distortion. Traditions of sculpture in wood may have vanished almost entirely, and outdoor wood does not last long in most parts of the world. We have little idea how the totem pole tradition developed, because such monumental wood would leave no traces for archaeology. Most ancient sculpture was also painted, and that paint has nearly always been lost to time or stripped away by restorers. The Greek statues we know are mostly known only from later copies, since free-standing figures were made in bronze, which always had value as scrap and was melted down. Egypt is one of the few places where the climate lets wood survive over millennia, which is why we have a good number of less conventionalized wooden statues of well-off administrators and their wives. The mismatch between what was made and what remains shapes everything we think we know. When ancient Chinese Bronze Age figures more than twice human size were unexpectedly found at Sanxingdui, they disturbed many long-held ideas about early Chinese civilization, since only much smaller bronzes had been known before.

• 3. Power Cast In Bronze

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  The use of very large sculpture as public art, especially to impress the viewer with the power of a ruler, goes back at least to the Great Sphinx of some 4,500 years ago. The ability to summon the resources for monumental sculpture is treated as a mark of an advanced culture. Transporting very heavy materials and paying full-time sculptors signals real social organization. Some undoubtedly advanced cultures, such as the Indus Valley civilization, appear to have had no monumental sculpture at all, though they produced very sophisticated figurines and seals. The Mississippian culture seems to have been progressing toward monumental sculpture, making small stone figures, when it collapsed. By contrast, ancient Egypt and the Easter Island culture devoted enormous resources to very large-scale work from a very early stage. Bronze sits at the centre of this story. It is the oldest and still the most popular metal for cast sculpture, and a cast bronze figure is often called simply a bronze. Common bronze alloys have an unusual and desirable property: they expand slightly just before they set, filling the finest details of a mould. Their strength and lack of brittleness is an advantage when figures in action are to be created, which marble and stone cannot match. The oldest surviving casting is a copper Mesopotamian frog from 3200 BCE.

• 4. Faces Worth Keeping

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  Portrait sculpture began in Egypt, where the Narmer Palette shows a ruler of the 32nd century BCE, and in Mesopotamia, where 27 statues survive of Gudea, who ruled Lagash around 2144 to 2124 BCE. In ancient Greece and Rome, the erection of a portrait statue in a public place was almost the highest mark of honour, and the ambition of the elite, who might also be depicted on a coin. Egypt and the Near East worked differently. There, public statues were almost exclusively the preserve of the ruler, and other wealthy people were only portrayed in their tombs. Rulers are typically the only people given portraits in Pre-Columbian cultures, a practice that begins with the Olmec colossal heads of about 3,000 years ago. East Asian portrait sculpture took yet another path. It was entirely religious, commemorating leading clergy and the founders of monasteries with statues, but never rulers or ancestors. Portraiture is arguably the main strength of Roman sculpture, seen in tomb monuments featuring portrait busts of prosperous middle-class Romans. There are no survivals from the tradition of ancestral masks worn in processions at the funerals of great families. The Mediterranean tradition of personal portraiture revived in the Middle Ages, at first only for tomb effigies and coins, then expanded greatly in the Renaissance, which invented the personal portrait medal.

• 5. The Greek Leap

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  The kouros developed in the Archaic period from around 650 BCE, a large standing statue of a naked youth, with the clothed female kore as its equivalent. Both wear the so-called archaic smile, and both were clearly influenced by Egyptian and Syrian styles. The difference was attitude. Greek artists were much more ready to experiment within the inherited style. During the 6th century, sculpture grew rapidly more naturalistic, with active and varied poses in narrative scenes. The High Classical period lasted only a few decades, from about 450 to 400 BCE, but its influence has been momentous. The best known works are the Parthenon Marbles, traditionally executed by a team led by Phidias, the most famous ancient Greek sculptor. In his own day Phidias was more famous for his colossal chryselephantine Statue of Zeus at Olympia, one of the Seven Wonders of the Ancient World, and for the Athena Parthenos, the cult image of the Parthenon. All of these are lost and known only from later representations. The Late Classical style developed the free-standing female nude, supposedly an innovation of Praxiteles. The Hellenistic period that followed expanded the range of subjects enormously. The Barberini Faun shows a satyr sprawled asleep, presumably after drink, an example of the moral relaxation of the period and a readiness to make large, expensive sculptures of subjects that fall short of the heroic.

• 6. The Makers Rise

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  Worldwide, sculptors have usually been tradespeople whose work is unsigned. In China, where sculpture did not share the prestige of literati painting, this lowered the status of sculpture itself. Even in ancient Greece, where a sculptor like Phidias became famous, sculptors seem to have kept much the same social status as other artisans, with perhaps not much greater financial reward, though some signed their works. Goldsmiths and jewellers held a different rank. Dealing in precious materials and often doubling as bankers, they belonged to powerful guilds, had considerable status, and often held civic office. Many sculptors worked across several arts. Andrea del Verrocchio also painted, and Giovanni Pisano, Michelangelo, and Jacopo Sansovino were architects. Leonardo da Vinci and others felt the physical labour of carving pulled down the status of sculpture among the arts, an old idea that the reputation of Michelangelo perhaps put to rest. From the High Renaissance, artists such as Michelangelo, Leone Leoni, and Giambologna could become wealthy and ennobled, entering the circle of princes. Women sculptors took longer to appear than women painters, and were less prominent until the 20th century.

• 7. When Sculpture Was Forbidden

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  Aniconism originated with Judaism, which did not accept figurative sculpture until the 19th century. The idea then expanded into Christianity, which initially accepted large sculptures, and where sculpture later became very significant alongside Buddhism. Eastern Orthodoxy has never accepted monumental sculpture. Islam has consistently rejected nearly all figurative sculpture, with rare exceptions such as small figures in reliefs and useful animal forms like the lions supporting a fountain in the Alhambra. Many forms of Protestantism also do not approve of religious sculpture, and the Protestant Reformation brought an almost total stop to religious sculpture in much of Northern Europe. The hostility sometimes turned violent. There has been much iconoclasm of sculpture for religious motives, running from the Early Christians and the Beeldenstorm of the Reformation to the 2001 destruction of the Buddhas of Bamyan by the Taliban. The same religious force that commissioned the greatest works could also smash them, and the Dutch Golden Age, for all its painting, has no significant sculptural component outside goldsmithing.

• 8. The Modern Break

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  One of Pablo Picasso's most famous sculptures included bicycle parts. That single choice marks how far the field had moved from carving stone and casting bronze. Since Modernism, there has been almost complete freedom of materials and process. Alexander Calder and other modernists made spectacular use of painted steel, and since the 1960s acrylics and other plastics have been used as well. Modern and contemporary art added forms that earlier ages would not have recognised as sculpture at all. Sound sculpture, light sculpture, kinetic sculpture involving physical motion, land art, and site-specific art all entered the field. Some of it is deliberately short-lived, including ice sculpture, sand sculpture, and gas sculpture. Andy Goldsworthy makes his unusually ephemeral works from almost entirely natural materials in natural settings. Soft sculpture arrived too, made from cloth, fur, plastics, rubber, and nylon that can be stuffed, sewn, hung, draped, or woven, with creators including Claes Oldenburg, Yayoi Kusama, Eva Hesse, Sarah Lucas, and Magdalena Abakanowicz. Much sculpture is now made for intermittent display in galleries and museums, and the ability to transport and store increasingly large works has itself become a factor in how they are built.