Banksy’s iiismaland:
The Portrait
A portrait is a painting, photograph, sculpture, or other artistic representation of a person, in which the face and its expression is predominant. The intent is to display the likeness, personality, and even the mood of the person. For this reason, in photography a portrait is generally not a snapshot, but a composed image of a person in a still position. A portrait often shows a person looking directly at the painter or photographer, in order to most successfully engage the subject with the viewer.
The Bust
A bust is a sculpted or cast representation of the upper part of the human figure, depicting a person’s head and neck, as well as a variable portion of the chest and shoulders.
The piece is normally supported by a plinth.
These forms recreate the likeness of an individual. These may be of any medium used for sculpture, such as marble, bronze, terracotta or wood.
A parallel term, aust, is a representation of the upper part of an animal or mythical creature.
Sculptural portrait heads from classical antiquity are sometimes displayed as busts. However, these are often fragments from full-body statues, or were originally created to be inserted into a pre-existing body.
Functions/Uses:
The head was the chief symbolic part of the body for Western culture in the Middle Ages, from the waning days of the Roman empire to the Renaissance. Since antiquity it signified not only the intellect, the center of power, but was also regarded as the seat of the soul.
The face is not only central to identity, but is also the primary vehicle for human expression, emotion, and character.
As such, the depiction of the head becomes a true test of the quality of the artist and a telling indicator of style.
Sculptured heads in museums have lost their original context, whether by violent breaking from their bodies and from the monuments they once adorned, or simply by being removed and placed in a museum. By focusing on this one genre of object, the Middle Ages can be seen in a new light.
Portraiture: Sculpting Identity
By the fourteenth century, verist (extremely or strictly naturalistic) portraiture reemerged as a supplement to symbolic representations of identity, especially in the main European capitals—Paris, London, Prague—and usually in royal funerary or commemorative images. By the late medieval period, we once again find ourselves face to face with individuals with whom we can sympathize and identify
The Dying Gaul, or The Capitoline Gaul
Roman marble copy of a Hellenistic work of the late 3rd century BCE
Sculpture is the branch of the visual arts that operates in three dimensions. It is one of the plastic arts.
Plastic arts are art forms which involve physical manipulation of a plastic medium by moulding or modeling such as sculpture or ceramics. The term has also been applied more broadly to all the visual arts (such as painting, sculpture, film and photography).
Materials for use in the plastic arts, in the narrower definition, include those that can be carved or shaped, such as stone or wood, concrete, or metal. “Plastics” meaning certain synthetic organic resins have been used ever since they were invented, but the term “plastic arts” long preceded them.
The term should not be confused with Piet Mondrian’s concept of “Neoplasticism” – the style of abstract painting evolved by Mondrian and the Dutch de Stijl movement, characterized by the use of horizontal and vertical lines and planes and by black, white, grey, and primary colours.
Durable sculptural processes originally used carving (the removal of material) and modelling (the addition of material, as clay), in stone, metal, ceramics, wood and other materials but, since Modernism, there has been an almost complete freedom of materials and process. A wide variety of materials may be worked by removal such as carving, assembled by welding or modelling, or molded, or cast.
Sculpture in stone survives far better than works of art in perishable materials, and often represents the majority of the surviving works (other than pottery) from ancient cultures, though conversely traditions of sculpture in wood may have vanished almost entirely. However, most ancient sculpture was brightly painted, and this has been lost.
Sculpture has been central in religious devotion in many cultures, and until recent centuries large sculptures, too expensive for private individuals to create, were usually an expression of religion or politics. Those cultures whose sculptures have survived in quantities include the cultures of the ancient Mediterranean, India and China, as well as many in South America and Africa.
The Western tradition of sculpture began in ancient Greece, and Greece is widely seen as producing great masterpieces in the classical period.
During the Middle Ages, Gothic sculpture represented the agonies and passions of the Christian faith. The revival of classical models in the Renaissance produced famous sculptures such as Michelangelo’s David.
Modernist sculpture moved away from traditional processes and the emphasis on the depiction of the human body, with the making of constructed sculpture, and the presentation of found objects as finished art works.
Types of sculpture
A basic distinction is between sculpture in the round, free-standing sculpture, such as
- statues, not attached (except possibly at the base) to any other surface,
- the various types of relief, which are at least partly attached to a background surface.
Relief is often classified by the degree of projection from the wall into low or bas-relief, high relief, and sometimes an intermediate mid-relief.
Sunk-relief is a technique restricted to ancient Egypt. Relief is the usual sculptural medium for large figure groups and narrative subjects, which are difficult to accomplish in the round, and is the typical technique used both for architectural sculpture, which is attached to buildings, and for small-scale sculpture decorating other objects, as in much pottery, metalwork and jewellery.
Relief sculpture may also decorate steles, upright slabs, usually of stone, often also containing inscriptions.
Another basic distinction is between
- subtractive carving techniques, which remove material from an existing block or lump, for example of stone or wood
- modelling techniques which shape or build up the work from the material. Techniques such as casting, stamping and moulding use an intermediate matrix containing the design to produce the work; many of these allow the production of several copies.
The smallest forms of life-size portrait sculpture are the “head”, showing just that, or the bust, a representation of a person from the chest up.
Small forms of sculpture include the figurine, normally a statue that is no more than 18 inches tall, and for reliefs the plaquette, medal or coin.
Modern and contemporary art have added a number of non-traditional forms of sculpture, including sound sculpture, light sculpture, environmental art, environmental sculpture, street art sculpture, kinetic sculpture (involving aspects of physical motion), land art, and site-specific art. Sculpture is an important form of public art.
Purposes and subjects
Association with religion.
Cult images are common in many cultures, though they are often not the colossal statues of deities which characterized ancient Greek art.
In archaeology and art history the appearance, and sometimes disappearance, of large or monumental sculpture in a culture is regarded as of great significance, though tracing the emergence is often complicated by the presumed existence of sculpture in wood and other perishable materials of which no record remains;
The totem pole is an example of a tradition of monumental sculpture in wood that would leave no traces for archaeology.
Collections:
The collecting of sculpture, including that of earlier periods, goes back some 2,000 years in Greece, China and Mesoamerica, and many collections were available on semi-public display long before the modern museum was invented.
From the 20th century the relatively restricted range of subjects found in large sculpture expanded greatly, with abstract subjects and the use or representation of any type of subject now common.
Materials and Techniques
The materials used in sculpture are diverse, changing throughout history.
The classic materials, with outstanding durability, are metal, especially bronze, stone and pottery, with wood, bone and antler less durable but cheaper options.
Precious materials such as gold, silver, jade, and ivory are often used for small luxury works, and sometimes in larger ones, as in chryselephantine statues.
More common and less expensive materials were used for sculpture for wider consumption, including hardwoods (such as oak, box/boxwood, and lime/linden); terracotta and other ceramics, wax (a very common material for models for casting, and receiving the impressions of cylinder seals and engraved gems), and cast metals such as pewter and zinc (spelter).
But a vast number of other materials have been used as part of sculptures, in ethnographic and ancient works as much as modern ones.
Sculptures are often painted, but commonly lose their paint to time, or restorers. Many different painting techniques have been used in making sculpture, including tempera, oil painting, gilding, house paint, aerosol, enamel and sandblasting.
Many sculptors seek new ways and materials to make art.
One of Pablo Picasso’s most famous sculptures included bicycle parts.
Bulls Head (BicycleHandles)
Alexander Calder and other modernists made spectacular use of painted steel.
Snow Flurry I, 1948
“Model for Rosenhof,” 1952, painted steel sheet, wire
Since the 1960s, acrylics and other plastics have been used as well.
Andy Goldsworthy makes his unusually ephemeral sculptures from almost entirely natural materials in natural settings.
Stone
Stone sculpture is an ancient activity where pieces of rough natural stone are shaped by the controlled removal of stone.
Owing to the permanence of the material, evidence can be found that even the earliest societies indulged in some form of stone work, though not all areas of the world have such abundance of good stone for carving as Egypt, Greece, India and most of Europe.
Petroglyphs (also called rock engravings) are perhaps the earliest form: images created by removing part of a rock surface which remains in situ, by incising, pecking, carving, and abrading.
Monumental sculpture covers large works, and architectural sculpture, which is attached to buildings.
Hardstone carving is the carving for artistic purposes of semi-precious stones such as jade, agate, onyx, rock crystal, sard or carnelian, and a general term for an object made in this way.
Alabaster or mineral gypsum is a soft mineral that is easy to carve for smaller works and still relatively durable.
Engraved gems are small carved gems, including cameos, originally used as seal rings.
The copying of an original statue in stone, which was very important for ancient Greek statues, which are nearly all known from copies, was traditionally achieved by “pointing”, along with more freehand methods.
Pointing involved setting up a grid of string squares on a wooden frame surrounding the original, and then measuring the position on the grid and the distance between grid and statue of a series of individual points, and then using this information to carve into the block from which the copy is made.
A pointing machine is a measuring tool used by stone sculptors and woodcarvers to accurately copy plaster, clay or wax sculpture models into wood or stone.
In essence the device is a pointing needle that can be set to any position and then fixed.
It further consists of brass or stainless steelrods and joints which can be placed into any position and then tightened. It is not actually a machine; its name is derived from the Italian macchinetta di punta.
Metal
Bronze and related copper alloys are the oldest and still the most popular metals for cast metal sculptures; a cast bronze sculpture is often called simply a “bronze”.
Common bronze alloys have the unusual and desirable property of expanding slightly just before they set, thus filling the finest details of a mold. Their strength and lack of brittleness (ductility) is an advantage when figures in action are to be created, especially when compared to various ceramic or stone materials.
Casting is a group of manufacturing processes by which a liquid material (bronze, copper, glass, aluminum, iron) is (usually) poured into a mold, which contains a hollow cavity of the desired shape, and then allowed to solidify.
The solid casting is then ejected or broken out to complete the process, although a final stage of “cold work” may follow on the finished cast.
Casting may be used to form hot liquid metals or various materials that cold set after mixing of components (such as epoxies, concrete, plaster and clay).
Casting is most often used for making complex shapes that would be otherwise difficult or uneconomical to make by other methods.
Glass
Glass may be used for sculpture through a wide range of working techniques, though the use of it for large works is a recent development.
It can be carved, with considerable difficulty
Hot casting can be done by ladling molten glass into molds that have been created by pressing shapes into sand, carved graphite or detailed plaster/silica molds. Kiln casting glass involves heating chunks of glass in a kiln until they are liquid and flow into a waiting mold below it in the kiln. Glass can also be blown and/or hot sculpted with hand tools either as a solid mass or as part of a blown object.
Wood carving
Wood carving has been extremely widely practiced, but survives much less well than the other main materials, being vulnerable to decay, insect damage, and fire.
It therefore forms an important hidden element in the art history of many cultures.
Wood is light, so suitable for masks and other sculpture intended to be carried, and can take very fine detail. It is also much easier to work than stone. It has been very often painted after carving, but the paint wears less well than the wood, and is often missing in surviving pieces.
Painted wood is often technically described as “wood and polychrome”. Typically a layer of gesso or plaster is applied to the wood, and then the paint is applied to that.
Social status of sculptors
Worldwide, sculptors have usually been tradesmen whose work is unsigned; in some traditions, for example China, where sculpture did not share the prestige of literati painting (brush painting), this has affected the status of sculpture itself. Even in ancient Greece, where sculptors became famous, they appear to have retained much the same social status as other artisans, and perhaps not much greater financial rewards, although some signed their works.
In the Middle Ages artists sometimes signed their work, and were sought after by different cities.
Many sculptors also practised in other arts; Some sculptors maintained large workshops. Even in the Renaissance the physical nature of the work was perceived by Leonardo da Vinci and others as pulling down the status of sculpture in the arts, though the reputation of Michelangelo perhaps put this long-held idea to rest.
From the High Renaissance artists such as Michelangelo, Leone Leoni and Giambologna could become wealthy, and ennobled, and enter the circle of princes, after a period of sharp argument over the relative status of sculpture and painting.
Much decorative sculpture on buildings remained a trade, but sculptors producing individual pieces were recognised on a level with painters.
From the 18th century or earlier sculpture also attracted middle-class students, although it was slower to do so than painting. Women sculptors took longer to appear than women painters, and were less prominent until the 20th century.
Anti-sculpture movements
Aniconism (Aniconism is the absence of material representations of the natural and supernatural world) remained restricted to Judaism, which did not accept figurative sculpture until the 19th century, Zoroastrian and some other religions, before expanding to Early Buddhism and Early Christianity, neither of which initially accepted large sculptures.
In both Christianity and Buddhism these early views were later reversed, and sculpture became very significant, especially in Buddhism. Christian Eastern Orthodoxy has never accepted monumental sculpture, and Islam has consistently rejected nearly all figurative sculpture, except for very small figures in reliefs and some animal figures that fulfill a useful function.
History of sculpture
Europe/Ancient Greece
They seem to have served a number of functions, perhaps sometimes representing deities and sometimes the person buried in a grave, as with the Kroisos Kouros. They are clearly influenced by Egyptian and Syrian styles, but the Greek artists were much more ready to experiment within the style.
During the 6th century Greek sculpture developed rapidly, becoming more naturalistic, and with much more active and varied figure poses in narrative scenes, though still within idealized conventions.
Classical
There are fewer original remains from the first phase of the Classical period, often called the Severe style; free-standing statues were now mostly made in bronze, which always had value as scrap
- It marks the breakdown of the canonical forms of archaic art and the transition to the greatly expanded vocabulary and expression of the classical moment of the late 5th century. It was an international style found at many cities in the Hellenic world and in a variety of media including: bronze sculpture in the round, stelae, and architectural relief. The style perhaps realized its greatest fulfillment in the metopes of the Temple of Zeus, Olympia.
The relatively rigid poses of figures relaxed, and asymmetrical turning positions and oblique views became common, and deliberately sought. This was combined with a better understanding of anatomy and the harmonious structure of sculpted figures, and the pursuit of naturalistic representation as an aim, which had not been present before.
The “High Classical” period lasted only a few decades from about 450 to 400, but has had a momentous influence on art, and retains a special prestige, despite a very restricted number of original survivals.
The High Classical style continued to develop realism and sophistication in the human figure, and improved the depiction of drapery (clothes), using it to add to the impact of active poses. Facial expressions were usually very restrained, even in combat scenes.
The composition of groups of figures in reliefs and on pediments combined complexity and harmony in a way that had a permanent influence on Western art.
Relief could be very high indeed, as in the Parthenon illustration below, where most of the leg of the warrior is completely detached from the background, as were the missing parts; relief this high made sculptures more subject to damage.
The Late Classical style developed the free-standing female nude statue, supposedly an innovation of Praxiteles, and developed increasingly complex and subtle poses that were interesting when viewed from a number of angles, as well as more expressive faces; both trends were to be taken much further in the Hellenistic period.
Hellenistic
The Hellenistic period is conventionally much longer than the previous periods, and includes at least two major phases: a “Pergamene” style of experimentation, exuberance and some sentimentality and vulgarity, and in the 2nd century BC a classicising return to a more austere simplicity and elegance.
The initial Pergamene style was not especially associated with Pergamon, from which it takes its name, but the very wealthy kings of that state were among the first to collect and also copy Classical sculpture, and also commissioned much new work,
Hellenistic sculpture greatly expanded the range of subjects represented, partly as a result of greater general prosperity, and the emergence of a very wealthy class who had large houses decorated with sculpture, although we know that some examples of subjects that seem best suited to the home, such as children with animals, were in fact placed in temples or other public places. For a much more popular home decoration market there were Tanagra figurines, and those from other centres where small pottery figures were produced on an industrial scale, some religious but others showing animals and elegantly dressed ladies.
Sculptors became more technically skilled in representing facial expressions conveying a wide variety of emotions and the portraiture of individuals, as well representing different ages and races. The reliefs from the Mausoleum are rather atypical in that respect; most work was free-standing, and group compositions with several figures to be seen in the round, like the Laocoon and the Pergamon group celebrating victory over the Gauls became popular, having been rare before. The Barberini Faun, showing a satyr sprawled asleep, presumably after drink, is an example of the moral relaxation of the period, and the readiness to create large and expensive sculptures of subjects that fall short of the heroic.
Hellenistic art, and artists, spread very widely, and was especially influential in the expanding Roman Republic and when it encountered Buddhism in the easternmost extensions of the Hellenistic area.
The wealth of the period led to a greatly increased production of luxury forms of small sculpture, including engraved gems and cameos, jewellery, and gold and silverware.
Gothic
The Gothic period is essentially defined by Gothic architecture, and does not entirely fit with the development of style in sculpture in either its start or finish. The facades of large churches, especially around doors, continued to have large typanums, but also rows of sculpted figures spreading around them. The statues on the Western (Royal) Portal at Chartres Cathedral (c. 1145) show an elegant but exaggerated columnar elongation, but those on the south transept portal, from 1215 to 1220, show a more naturalistic style and increasing detachment from the wall behind, and some awareness of the classical tradition.
In Italy Nicola Pisano (1258–78) and his son Giovanni developed a style that is often called Proto-Renaissance, with unmistakable influence from Roman sarcophagi and sophisticated and crowded compositions, including a sympathetic handling of nudity, in relief panels.
Another revival of classical style is seen in the International Gothic work of Claus Sluter which are marked with very large wooden sculpted altarpieces with increasingly virtuoso carving and large numbers agitated expressive figures.
Renaissance
The period was marked by a great increase in patronage of sculpture by the state for public art and by the wealthy for their homes; especially in Italy, public sculpture remains a crucial element in the appearance of historic city centres.
Church sculpture mostly moved inside just as outside public monuments became common.
Portrait sculpture, usually in busts, became popular in Italy around 1450, with the Neapolitan Francesco Laurana specializing in young women in meditative poses, while Antonio Rossellino and others more often depicted knobbly-faced men of affairs, but also young children.
The portrait medal invented by Pisanello also often depicted women; relief plaquettes were another new small form of sculpture in cast metal.
Michelangelo was an active sculptor from about 1500 to 1520, and his great masterpieces including his David, Pietà, Moses, and pieces for the Tomb of Pope Julius II and Medici Chapel could not be ignored by subsequent sculptors. His iconic David (1504) has a contrapposto pose
-
an asymmetrical arrangement of the human figure in which the line of the arms and shoulders contrasts with, while balancing, those of the hips and legs.)
…borrowed from classical sculpture.
It differs from previous representations of the subject in that David is depicted before his battle with Goliath and not after the giant’s defeat. Instead of being shown victorious, as Donatello and Verocchio had done, David looks tense and battle ready.
Mannerist
As in painting, early Italian Mannerist sculpture was very largely an attempt to find an original style that would top the achievement of the High Renaissance, which in sculpture essentially meant Michelangelo.
Like other works of his and other Mannerists it removes far more of the original block than Michelangelo would have done.
Cellini’s bronze Perseus with the head of Medusa is certainly a masterpiece, designed with eight angles of view, another Mannerist characteristic, but is indeed mannered compared to the Davids of Michelangelo and Donatello.
Originally a goldsmith, his famous gold and enamel Salt Cellar (1543) was his first sculpture, and shows his talent at its best.
As these examples show, the period extended the range of secular subjects for large works beyond portraits, with mythological figures especially favoured; previously these had mostly been found in small works.
Neo-Classical
The Neoclassical style that arrived in the late 18th century gave great emphasis to sculpture. Jean-Antoine Houdon exemplifies the penetrating portrait sculpture the style could produce, and Antonio Canova’s nudes the idealist aspect of the movement.
The Neoclassical period was one of the great ages of public sculpture, though its “classical” prototypes were more likely to be Roman copies of Hellenistic sculptures.
In sculpture, the most familiar representatives are the Italian Antonio Canova, the Englishman John Flaxman and the Dane Bertel Thorvaldsen.
Voltaire (François Marie Arouet de Voltaire) (1696–1778)
Antonio Canova’s nudes
Modernism
Modernist sculpture movements include Cubism, Geometric abstraction, De Stijl, Suprematism, Constructivism, Dadaism, Surrealism, Futurism, Formalism Abstract expressionism, Pop-Art, Minimalism, Land art, and Installation art among others.
Similarly, the work of Constantin Brâncuși at the beginning of the century paved the way for later abstract sculpture. In revolt against the naturalism of Rodin and his late-19th-century contemporaries, Brâncuși distilled subjects down to their essences as illustrated by the elegantly refined forms of his Bird in Space series (1924).
Brâncuși’s impact, with his vocabulary of reduction and abstraction, is seen throughout the 1930s and 1940s, and exemplified by artists such as Gaston Lachaise, Sir Jacob Epstein, Henry Moore, Alberto Giacometti, Joan Miró, Julio González, Pablo Serrano, Jacques Lipchitz and by the 1940s abstract sculpture was impacted and expanded by Alexander Calder, Len Lye, Jean Tinguely, and Frederick Kiesler who were pioneers of Kinetic art.
Chicago Picasso (1967)
His design was ambiguous and somewhat controversial, and what the figure represents is not clear; it could be a bird, a horse, a woman or a totally abstract shape.
During the late 1950s and the 1960s abstract sculptors began experimenting with a wide array of new materials and different approaches to creating their work.
Surrealist imagery, anthropomorphic abstraction, new materials and combinations of new energy sources and varied surfaces and objects became characteristic of much new modernist sculpture.
Collaborative projects with landscape designers, architects, and landscape architects expanded the outdoor site and contextual integration.
Artists such as Isamu Noguchi, David Smith, Alexander Calder, Jean Tinguely, Richard Lippold, George Rickey, Louise Bourgeois, and Louise Nevelson came to characterize the look of modern sculpture.
By the 1960s Abstract expressionism, Geometric abstraction and Minimalism, which reduces sculpture to its most essential and fundamental features, predominated.
Some works of the period are: the Cubi works of David Smith (above), and the welded steel works of Sir Anthony Caro, as well as welded sculpture by a large variety of sculptors, the large-scale work of John Chamberlain, and environmental installation scale works by Mark di Suvero.
Other Minimalists include Tony Smith, Donald Judd, Robert Morris, Anne Truitt, Giacomo Benevelli, Arnaldo Pomodoro, Richard Serra, Dan Flavin, Carl Andre, and John Safer who added motion and monumentality to the theme of purity of line.
During the 1960s and 1970s figurative sculpture by modernist artists in stylized forms was made by artists such as Leonard Baskin, Ernest Trova, George Segal, Marisol Escobar, Paul Thek, Robert Graham in a classic articulated style, and Fernando Botero bringing his painting’s ‘oversized figures’ into monumental sculptures.