Western sculpture

Western sculpture

▪ art
Introduction

      three-dimensional artistic forms produced in what is now Europe and later in non-European areas dominated by European culture (such as North America) from the Metal Ages (Europe, history of) to the present.

      Like painting, Western sculpture has tended to be humanistic and naturalistic, concentrating upon the human figure and human action studied from nature. Early in the history of the art there developed two general types: statuary, in which figures are shown in the round, and relief, in which figures project from a ground.

      Western sculpture in the ancient world of Greece and Rome and from the late Middle Ages to the end of the 19th century twice underwent a progressive development, from archaic stylization to realism; the term progressive here means that the stylistic sequence was determined by what was previously known about the representation of the human figure, each step depending upon a prior one, and not that there was an aesthetic progression or improvement. Modern criticism has sometimes claimed that much was lost in the change. In any event, the sculptors of the West closely observed the human body in action, at first attempting to find its ideal aspect and proportions and later aiming for dramatic effects, the heroic and the tragic; still later they favoured less significant sentiments, or at least more familiar and mundane subjects.

      The pre-Hellenic, early Christian, Byzantine, and early medieval periods contradicted the humanist-naturalist bias of Greece and Rome and the Renaissance; in the 20th century that contradiction has been even more emphatic. The 20th century has seen the move away from humanistic naturalism to experimentation with new materials and techniques and new and complex imagery. With the advent of abstract art, the concept of the figure has come to encompass a wide range of nonliteral representation; the notion of statuary has been superseded by the more inclusive category of freestanding sculpture; and, further, two new types have appeared: kinetic sculpture, in which actual movement of parts or of the whole sculpture is considered an element of design; and environmental sculpture, in which the artist either alters a given environment as if it were a kind of medium or provides in the sculpture itself an environment for the viewer to enter.

European Metal Age cultures

Aegean and Eastern Mediterranean
      Aegean civilization (Aegean civilizations) is a general term for the prehistoric Bronze Age cultures of the area around the Aegean Sea covering the period from c. 3000 BC to c. 1100 BC, when iron began to come into general use throughout the area. From the earliest times these cultures fall into three main groups: (1) the Minoan culture (after the legendary king Minos) of Crete, (2) the Cycladic culture of the Cyclades islands, and (3) the Helladic culture of mainland Greece (Hellas). For convenience, the three cultures are each divided into three phases, Early, Middle, and Late, in accordance with the phases of the Bronze Age. The culture of Cyprus in the eastern Mediterranean, although it commenced somewhat later than those of the Aegean, came to parallel them by the Middle Bronze Age. The Late Bronze Age phase of the mainland is usually called Mycenaean after Mycenae, the chief Late Bronze Age site in mainland Greece.

      The first centre of high civilization in the Aegean area, with great cities and palaces, a highly developed art, extended trade, writing, and use of seal stones, was Crete. Here from the end of the 3rd millennium BC onward a very distinctive civilization, owing much to the older civilizations of Egypt and the Middle East but original in its character, came into being.

      The Cretan (Minoan) civilization (Minoan civilization) had begun to spread by the end of the Early Bronze Age across the Aegean to the islands and to the mainland of Greece. During the Late Bronze Age, from the middle of the 16th century onward, a civilization more or less uniform superficially but showing local divergences is found throughout the Aegean area. Eventually people bearing this civilization spread colonies eastward to Cyprus and elsewhere on the southern and western coasts of Asia Minor as far as Syria, also westward to Tarentum in southern Italy and even perhaps to Sicily. In the latter part of this period, after about 1400 BC, the centre of political and economic power, if not of artistic achievement, appears to have shifted from Knossos in Crete to Mycenae on the Greek mainland.

Ed.

The Early Bronze Age (3000–2000 BC)

Early Minoan
      The early Minoan period saw a thousand years of peaceful development, which eventually gave place to the full flowering of the Minoan spirit, the Middle Minoan period. Pottery was preeminent among the Early Minoan arts.

Early Cycladic
      The Early Cycladic culture developed on parallel lines to the Early Minoan. Thanks to obsidian from Melos, marble from many islands, and local sources of gold, silver, and copper, the Cycladic islanders rapidly became prosperous. As in Crete, the Early Bronze Age merged without incident into the Middle Bronze Age.

  The Early Cycladic period is celebrated principally for its statuettes and vases carved from the brilliant coarse-crystalled marble of these islands. The statuettes, mostly of goddesses, are among the finest products of the Greek Bronze Age. They owe their charm to the extreme simplification of bodily forms. The typical “Cycladic idol” is a naked female, lying with her head back, her arms crossed over her breasts. These figures vary in size from a few inches to more than six feet in length.

Early Helladic and Early Cypriot
      Mainland Greece probably received its Bronze Age settlers from the Cyclades, but the two cultures soon diverged. A prosperous era arose about 2500 BC and lasted until about 2200. Sculpture was overshadowed by pottery, metalwork, and architecture among the Early Helladic arts. In the Early Cypriot (Cyprus), the only surviving sculptures are a series of steatite cruciform figures of a mother goddess (3000–2500 BC) stylized in much the same way as contemporary Cycladic idols, from which they may have been derived.

The Middle Bronze Age (2000–1600 BC)

Middle Minoan
 The Middle Minoan period differs principally from the Early Minoan in the creation of palaces and a palatial life and art. Large-scale sculpture seems not to have found much favour in Crete, although fragments of life-size figures from this period were discovered in the Cyclades in the late 20th century. Miniature sculpture of the highest quality, some of it of fired sand and clay, was produced from at least as early as 1600 BC. Good examples are two female figures (called “Snake Goddesses”) from Knossos, dated about 1700 BC (Archaeological Museum, Iráklion, Crete). These women stand with their arms in front of them, holding sacred snakes; they wear a flounced skirt and tight belt, and their breasts are bare.

Middle Cycladic, Middle Helladic, and Middle Cypriot
      During the Middle Cycladic period, the Cyclades suffered a diminution in prosperity and seem to have become politically subordinate to Crete. Two waves of Indo-European peoples seem to have descended on the Greek mainland, one about 2200 BC and the other about 2000 BC. They destroyed much and for long contributed little to Greece's artistic heritage. The pottery of this period, however, is of high quality. The Middle Cypriot period was a development of the Early Cypriot. As on the mainland, no important art apart from pottery has survived.

The Late Bronze Age (1600–1100 BC)

Late Minoan
      Prosperity and artistic achievement remained at a high level until about 1450 BC, when all the great centres of Cretan culture were destroyed by earthquakes (probably connected with a cataclysmic eruption of the volcanic island of Thera). After these disasters, only the palace at Knossos was restored for occupation. About 1375 BC, however, the palace at Knossos was destroyed by fire. Thereafter Crete was a second-class power and became somewhat of a cultural backwater. Miniature sculpture was still popular. No longer in faience, figures were increasingly made of bronze, ivory, and terra-cotta. Some of the bronzes, cast solid by the “lost wax” process (using a wax model), are very fine, the earliest being the best. The subjects include male worshippers wearing boots, tight belt, and kilt; women (perhaps goddesses) dressed like the faience snake goddesses of the Middle Minoan period; and animals, especially bulls.

      Carved-stone vases were made between 1600 and 1450 BC. Elegant vessels were carved from such diverse materials as marble, obsidian, and steatite. Others, of soft stone, were made in the shape of bulls' heads, astonishingly true to life, or were carved in relief, with religious or court ritual scenes, and covered with gold leaf.

 The art of the seal engraver flourished until 1375 BC. Religious subjects, scenes of the bullring, and depictions of animals in their natural setting were popular. Even the exaggerations of the style reflect careful observation of the movements of the animals and their idiosyncratic anatomy, but they also relate the forms depicted to the shape of the stone—the curve of a bull's back or horns to that of the edge, for instance.

      Mainland Greece enjoyed renewed contacts with Crete c. 1600 BC, and a rich culture, based on the Late Minoan, rapidly came into being. The Mycenaeans gained control of Crete c. 1450 BC, and between 1375 and 1200 BC they became masters of an empire that stretched from Sicily and southern Italy in the west to Asia Minor and the Levant coast in the east. About 1200 BC, however, many of the Mycenaean strongholds were destroyed by fire. There were signs of a renaissance, but the end of Mycenaean civilization came c. 1100 BC.

 The Mycenaeans seem to have had more of a taste for monumental sculpture than had their Minoan mentors. Of the few surviving examples, the best known is a relief over the Lion Gate at Mycenae (c. 1250 BC), in which two lions confront each other across an architectural column. Probably heraldic in concept, this design is comparable with those on tiny seals and ivories of Cretan inspiration. Sculpture on a small scale, in ivory, bronze, and terra-cotta, generally Minoan in character, remained popular.

Late Cypriot
      Cyprus reached its highest degree of prosperity in the Late Cypriot period, due to increased exploitation of its copper mines. There were close commercial relations not only with the Levant coast, as before, but also with Egypt, Crete, and Mycenaean Greece (the latter being close from 1400 BC). About 1200 BC Mycenaean Greeks, refugees from their homeland, settled in Cyprus. They introduced their skills and produced many luxury articles in a mixed Mycenaean-Cypriot style. Cyprus escaped the invasions that finally destroyed Mycenaean and Minoan culture, but its own culture did not last much longer. By 1050 BC, for reasons that are not clear, it, too, had ceased to exist.

      As in Crete, large-scale sculpture was rejected in favour of small-scale work. A bronze figure of a horned god (shortly after 1200 BC) from Enkomi (Cyprus Museum, Nicosia) shows a successful blend of Mycenaean and Cypriot elements. A good example of these characteristics is a carved ivory gaming box (British Museum), also from Enkomi, whose style shows a blend of Mycenaean and Middle Eastern motifs.

Reynold Alleyne Higgins Ed.

Western Mediterranean
      Like central and northern Europe, although to a lesser degree, the western Mediterranean was considerably behind the eastern Mediterranean, where civilization, the arts, and writing were born much earlier. The development of the metallurgical industry did not occur simultaneously in the various regions of the western Mediterranean, but it did bring important innovations in the mode of living and, of course, in the arts.

      The Chalcolithic (Chalcolithic Age) (Copper-Stone) era began in Spain at the end of the 3rd millennium BC at Los Millares, near Almería, and in Italy at the beginning of the 2nd millennium with the Remedello civilization. Bronze appeared not long afterward, around 1800 BC, in Italy and Sardinia. The Bronze Age in Italy gave way to the Iron Age at the beginning of the 1st millennium BC, but elsewhere, as in Sardinia or Spain, it lasted longer. The Iron Age flourished on the Illyrian coasts and in Italy from 900 to 800 BC; it also lasted varying lengths of time according to locale. After this, one may speak of the civilizations of Magna Graecia, of Rome, or of Etruria.

 During the metal ages, popular migrations, commerce, and wars increased, which resulted in the rise of cities and of fortified works for their protection and defense, such as the talayots (round or quadrangular towers) of the Balearic Isles and the nuraghi (round towers) of Sardinia. With respect to the plastic arts, one particularly remarkable phenomenon was the birth and multiplication of megalithic human representations, which gained in number and importance from the 3rd to the 1st millennium BC. The Neolithic monuments, menhirs (menhir) (single, vertical megaliths) and dolmens (dolmen) (structures of two vertical stones capped by a horizontal one), which had arisen in the megalithic era, continued to appear in the Copper and Bronze Ages, but then—here and there in Spain, Sardinia, Corsica, Liguria, and in the south of France—stelae-menhirs (carved or inscribed stone slabs used for commemorative purposes), like the stammerings of Western figure sculpture, imitated the human form. They maintained certain stylistic relations with rock engravings of mountainous regions, such as the Val Camonica.

Bronze Age cultures

      The nuraghic civilization had an original sculpture expressed in a large production of bronze statuettes, about 500 of which have been found in nuraghi, temples, houses, and tombs. These figurines represent all classes of the proto-Sardinian populations—military chiefs, soldiers, priests, and women, as well as heroes and gods—in what seems to the modern viewer to be an engagingly direct but also sophisticated geometric style. The greatest number of these bronzes are today in the Museo Archeologico Nazionale in Cagliari, Sardinia. Some have been discovered in Etruscan tombs of Vetulonia and Vulci and have been dated to the period extending from the 9th to the 6th century BC.

      Corsican menhir, or stela, statuary constitutes a group of special interest. The stone is imbued with life by a sculptural art that involves roughing-in of the head, animation of the upper portion of the body, and placement of a few elements of ornamentation or weaponry (sculpted in relief or, more rarely, engraved) on the schematically anthropomorphic image. These primitive statues are masculine and, no doubt, represent family or tribal heads made heroic or divine. This megalithic stela statuary art appears not only on Corsica but also in various other countries and regions of the western Mediterranean, including Spain, Sardinia, Liguria, and, in southern France, Provence, Aveyron, Hérault, and Gard, though to a lesser degree. The advance of this type of megalithic sculptural art is difficult to follow, but it is clear that these different groups are related, with close affinities existing between the stelae-menhirs of Corsica and those of the Ligurian coast. Such art is everywhere the expression of a patriarchal society seeking to impose on men's vision, massively and not without grandeur, the image of the departed ancestors.

      From the Bronze Age of far northern Italy there survives an exceptional collection of rock engravings, a remarkable extension of an art that, in fact, had been represented in the prehistoric era and had not yet vanished completely. About 20,000 rock engravings have been found between altitudes of 5,000 and 5,600 feet (1,500 and 1,700 metres) in the Val Camonica, north of the town of Brescia. This art is found again further west, in the Maritime Alps of France on Monte Bego, between altitudes of 6,600 and 8,900 feet, and less remarkably elsewhere. What is exceptional about the carvings of the Val Camonica is that they represent a variety of subjects—rituals, battles, hunting, and daily labour—and that these were treated as compositions.

      Although engraving played a minor role in the case of the menhir statuary mentioned earlier, relations do exist between the sculpted works and the Camunian images of Monte Bego. The same representations of collar torques appear on the menhir statuary of Gard, Aveyron, and Tarn, on the one hand, and on certain monumental engravings of the Val Camonica, on the other. Some kind of relationship thus unites the arts of rock engraving and stela statuary in the Bronze Age.

Iron Age cultures

      The Italian peninsula, which in the Bronze Age had been only one among many centres of civilization, took on a special importance in the Iron Age. Widespread and powerful cultural and artistic centres grew up there, first in the Villanovan civilization and later in the Etruscan; their influence was disseminated into the surrounding areas.

      At the beginning of the 1st millennium BC there began to develop in the Po plain, in Tuscany, Latium, and some areas of Lucania, a new cremating civilization, which draws its name from that of the Villanova (Villanovan culture) necropolis, discovered near Bologna. It is obviously related to the so-called Urnfield (Urnfield culture) civilization that, at the end of the Bronze Age and beginning of the Iron Age, extended over central and eastern Europe and had developed a metal art with geometric and abstract ornamentation. The ashes of the dead were placed in urns thrust in level with the soil. From the Urnfield civilization arose two others: the Hallstatt civilization, which spread into the Balkans, northern and central Europe, and France, beyond the Pyrenees; and in Italy the Villanovan civilization and the civilizations that, to the east and west of the Po plain, were related to it, the so-called Golasecca civilization in the great lakes region and the Este civilization in the Venice area.

      These Italic civilizations of the Early Iron Age, which appeared at the beginning of the 1st millennium BC and lasted for varying lengths of time, multiplied the number of dwelling sites. Originating as outposts established on naturally strong positions, they began to resemble towns as population increased.

 The cinerary urn, which was made first of terra-cotta and later of bronze, assumes, by its form, a symbolic value. Biconical in form and covered with an overturned cup, later with a helmet, it schematically represents the appearance of the human body. Sometimes, as in examples from Latium and Tuscany, the funerary vessel is in the form of a hut or cabin—the house of the dead person whose remains it holds. The ornamentation, painted or engraved on the vases and engraved or in relief on metal objects, is in a geometric, nonfigurative style. Human or animal forms appear only rarely—in the decoration of small utilitarian objects such as vase handles and horse bits. It is a severe art, therefore, which essentially limits itself to linear exercises. Even motifs such as the disk, the solar boat, and the birds that encircle them, inherited from a more distant past and possessing primitively religious value, take on a stylized air and become abstract figures.

      A naturalistic note is provided by the imagery that decorates, in zones of superimposed relief, bronze vessels called situlae, a kind of pail found in Eastern countries and in the eastern Alps. These situlae were made in Venetian workshops in particular and were very popular in the neighbouring areas. They rapidly underwent an Etruscan influence, however, that tended to give prominence in the chased ornamentation to human figures at feasts, games, or funerals, as in the masterpiece known from the place of its discovery as the Certosa Situla (Museo Civico Archeologico, Bologna).

Raymond Bloch Ed.
      Etruria, Latium, and the Faliscan districts fall into three main areas of artistic production: northern, central, and southern, each centred upon cities with a distinctive artistic style. In the southern areas the chief centres were Caere and Veii, in which the Etruscan style most closely approached the Greek. In central Etruria, Vulci was evidently the leading art centre, although Tarquinia was unsurpassed in the beauty of its wall paintings. There were several potteries in Vulci, and the greater part of the central Etruscan bronzes, artistically the best, were produced there. The north was dominated by Clusium, although Perugia seems to have been important along with lesser centres at Volterra and Fiesole.

      The very earliest examples of Etruscan statuary are flat, rectilinear figurines from Vetulonia and Capodimonte di Bolsena. These figures occur in later contexts in the Regolini-Galassi and Bernardini tombs, both of which contain pieces in a more advanced style that cannot have developed much later. These are statuettes of women with pigtails and long skirts depicted in a manner that suggests a north Syria influence, although this female type, frequently copied in ivory and amber, is certainly of local origin.

      The earliest evidence of Greek influence is the presence of centaurs, perhaps transmitted on Corinthian vases. Their style in Etruria is Orientalizing, with a slim body and elongated legs, perhaps reflecting Cretan influence. These and other mythical creatures found great favour with the Vulci stonemasons. To archaic works of early Etruscan sculpture certain Greek parallels can be found in the late 7th and early 6th centuries, and in general characteristics the works still followed the Greek Archaic Daedalic tradition. The next change in style took place c. 550 BC, when art became distinctively Ionian. These new influences can be seen earliest in such pieces of bronze work as the Loeb Tripod from San Valentino near Perugia and the Monteleone chariot platings (in the Metropolitan Museum, New York City), but they soon become apparent also in the relief designs on bucchero pesante (heavily embossed black pottery) and in architectural reliefs like those from Tarquinia. By the end of the 6th century BC Veii possessed an excellent school of terra-cotta sculptures in Ionian styles. The statues of Apollo and of a votaress suckling a child are elaborately stylized in features, draperies, and muscles. Clay statuary, still retaining traces of former painting, was made in many Etruscan centres. Examples in the more mature classical style that began in the last quarter of the 5th century are the satyr-and-maiden groups from Satricum (modern Conca) in the Museo Nazionale di Villa Giulia, Rome, which contains a rich collection of architectural terra-cottas from Caere, Falerii, Veii, Satricum, and other sites.

 These pieces of statuary were designed to stand on temple roofs, and the socketed bases by which they were fixed have survived. Terra-cotta sculpture was also used for antefixes for these temples but above all for funerary sculpture. Sarcophagi (sarcophagus) with the sculptured figures of the husband and his wife reclining on the lids seem to have begun late in the 6th century, the date of the haunting sarcophagus from Caere (Villa Giulia, Rome).

      Bronze sculptures were also produced from the end of the 6th century, beginning with the famous She-Wolf, the symbol of modern Rome (Musei Capitolini, Rome), and the later Chimera from Arezzo (Museo Archeologico, Florence) or the so-called Mars of Todi (Vatican Museums) of the early 4th century BC.

      In spite of great achievements in sculpture in the round, most of what has survived is in low relief, and a series of fine 6th–5th-century relief sarcophagi from Clusium, depicting dances, funeral games and banquets, or the journey of the dead to the underworld, are a major source of information on Etruscan everyday life. Superbly carved gravestones of the late mid-6th century are known from Clusium and Settimello, but the disk- and horseshoe-shaped gravestones of the Bologna, Fiesole, and Populonia graves have crude reliefs.

William Culican Ed.
      Sculpture developed but did not seek, as in Greece, to represent the idealized body of athletes and gods, attempting instead to represent the figure and features of the deceased. There was a continuing taste for real or fantastic animals such as lions, panthers, and sphinxes, and the Etruscan imagination seems to have been haunted by these beasts and demons, the vigilant guardians of the tombs.

 Whether in the form of great statuary or small votive images, Iberian figurative art was essentially religious and intended to represent sacred animals, deities, and their worshippers. Although much influenced by Greek and other sources, these works are vigorous and original, as may be seen from “La dama de Elche” and “La dama de Cerro de los Santos” in the Museo Arqueológico Nacional at Madrid. In the latter, a hieratic visage, with a severity not unlike some of the ideal heads of classical Greece, is adorned with a superabundance of heavy Iberian jewels.

Raymond Bloch Ed.

Ancient Greek
      Greek art no doubt owed much indirectly to the Minoan-Mycenaean civilization (now known in its later stages to have been Greek), which disintegrated at the end of the 2nd millennium BC, partly under the impact of a series of invasions from the Balkans. The period covered by this section, however, begins about 900 BC with the kaleidoscopic rearrangement of invaders and earlier inhabitants into a new pattern, which was followed by a steady artistic development—continuing without interruption down to the conquest of Greece by Rome in 146 BC. Even this diverted, rather than interrupted, the flow, and Greek artists continued to be predominant under the Roman Empire and beyond that into the Byzantine. But after Greece had become a Roman province, Greek art fell increasingly under the patronage of Romans and was devoted either to expressing Roman ideals or to reproducing older works of art. It is therefore reasonable to regard the later years of the 1st century BC, when the Roman Empire was forming, as the later limit of the period.

      Within this period it is convenient to distinguish five stages of development. Their names are modern and arbitrary; the divisions between them are not equally sharp and do not apply equally to all parts of the Greek world, but they serve as a general guide to successive trends.

      The first is the Geometric period (so-called from the rectilinear character of its art) from about 900 to about 800 BC, when Greece was self-contained and contact with the outside world was rare.

      The second, the Orientalizing period, for about a century and a half from 800 BC, is one of contact with the East, a contact that had been broken by the upheavals at the end of the 2nd millennium.

      The third period, the Archaic, from about 650 to about 480 BC, is characterized by the gradual absorption of Oriental elements and the rise and development of archaic Greek art.

      The fourth period, from about 480 to about 330 BC, is known as the Classical; its beginning is marked by the rise of the sculptors Myron, Phidias, and Polyclitus and the painter Polygnotus, and its end, by the work of Scopas, Praxiteles, and Lysippus. (The word classical, which originally meant simply first-class, can also be used either in a narrower sense than this to denote only the Phidian age—i.e., 50 years in the middle of the 5th century BC—or in a broader sense to cover the whole of post-Mycenaean Greek art from Geometric to late Roman.)

      The fifth period is the Hellenistic, from about 330 BC, when the conquests of Alexander the Great opened new areas to the Greeks and the division of his kingdom among his Greek successors after his death in 323 diffused Greek art over the greater part of the known world, down to the late 1st century BC. Hellenistic symbolism and Hellenistic technical skill continued as living traditions under the Romans.

      Statues were of limestone, marble, bronze, gold and ivory, terra-cotta, and wood. After the Archaic period the use of wood and of limestone seems to have been rare, as was the use of terra-cotta for statues of large size, although it should be noted that sculpture in the first and last of these materials tended to be ephemeral. The group of Orpheus and the two harpies that was restored at the J. Paul Getty Museum, Malibu, California, in the 1980s is astonishing not only for its quality but also for its size, and yet many other such figures may have been produced. Full-size statues of gold and ivory were rare at all times because of their cost; statues with gilded wooden bodies and marble extremities were sometimes made instead. For statuettes, ivory and amber, limestone, marble, wood, gold, silver, bronze, and terra-cotta were used; of these, terra-cotta was by far the most common, bronze and marble less so, and the rest rare. Extremely valuable because they can often be dated with accuracy are the types of sculpture used for the decoration of buildings: acroteria (i.e., figures on the tops or ends of gables); figures in the low triangular field of the pediment under the gable (both of these are usually almost in the round); sculptured panels (metopes) of the Doric frieze, which are usually in high or very high relief; and the continuous Ionic frieze, which is usually in low relief.

      Of the many thousands of statues produced during the period in which Greek art flourished, not more than a few dozen survive, and those mostly mutilated. Knowledge of the history of Greek sculpture depends partly on these and partly on the architectural sculptures—both of high importance, since they are original. Much can also be learned about the general development of sculptural style from the small bronzes, often of very high quality, and from the terra-cottas. Of the small bronzes many, and of the terra-cottas very many, have survived, but they were made by independent artists and did not copy contemporary statues closely. The great bulk of evidence comes from copies made by Greeks, for Roman patrons, of originals now destroyed. Such evidence is invaluable but not entirely reliable. There is also literary evidence, but much of this is also second-hand or dates from long after the period in which the sculptures in question were made.

The Geometric (Geometric style) period
      In the 9th century BC Greece was settling down again after upheavals and migrations both into and out of the mainland. It seems that invaders from the north brought with them the germs of an artistic style that developed into the Greek Geometric tradition.

      In addition to the pottery, the Geometric period produced some terra-cottas and many small bronzes. The bronzes tended to be flat at first but became more solid and less angular as casting direct from wax models superseded cutting from bronze plates. Birds and other animals, especially horses, were popular and often admirably done; men, perhaps because their form commanded less imaginative interest, were not so successfully rendered; in the later stages of geometric art, groups of some complexity were attempted—a doe with her fawn, a man fighting (or greeting) a centaur, even a lion hunt complete with dogs.

Bernard Ashmole Ed.

The Orientalizing period
 Sculpture of the Orientalizing period was profoundly affected by technical and stylistic influences from the East. In about 700 BC, the Greeks learned from their Eastern neighbours how to use molds to mass-produce clay relief plaques. Widely adopted, this technique helped to establish in Greece a stereotyped convention for figure representation, even in freestanding, unmolded sculptures; and a strong Eastern stylistic influence ensured that the convention was Oriental in flavour—in most cases a frontal pose with stiff patterned hair and drapery rendered in a strictly decorative manner. The adoption of this convention, which has come to be known as Daedalic (Daedalic sculpture) style (after Daedalus, the legendary craftsman of Crete, where the style especially flourished), put an end to the development of naturalism and freedom in miniature sculptures that had shown promise in the Geometric period, and eventually became representative of even major Greek sculpture in the mid-7th century BC.

      In about 640 BC, however, a second Eastern influence began to be felt. As with the gigantic architecture of Egypt (art and architecture, Egyptian), the Greeks were impressed with the monumentality of Egyptian statuary, larger than life-size and executed in hard stone instead of the limestone, clay, or wood to which the Greeks had been accustomed. The Greeks learned the techniques of handling the harder stone in Egypt, and at home they turned to the fine white marble of the Cyclades islands (mainly Paros and Naxos) for their materials. It was at this time that the first truly monumental examples of Greek sculpture appeared. The idiom and proportions were at first still Daedalic.

 By about 630 BC, however, first in the islands and later in mainland Greece, they were carving freestanding figures of naked men that were copies of types formerly seen only in minor art and that owed something in proportion and details of pose to the common Egyptian standing figures. This new series of life-size or larger marble youths (kouroi (kouros)) reveals rapid developments in technique and style, notably a transition from the Daedalic past to greater naturalism through the new monumental manner. The earliest of these figures were, as might be expected, dedications in sanctuaries, especially on the island of Delos, but some were grave markers, as on another island, Thera. At the same time, the older style was used for relief decoration of temples in Crete and Greece, particularly at Mycenae.

 The kouroi, which had become standardized as freestanding statues of naked youths with hands to sides and one leg advanced, were the most representative examples of Archaic sculpture. At first their proportions were based on theory rather than observation; much the same was true of the anatomical details, which were treated as separate patterns applied to the figure with no proper understanding of their physiological relationships. Growing awareness of natural forms, although still without systematic study of the model, together with technical mastery, led to a realism that is striking in comparison with the Daedalic pieces of the Orientalizing period.

 Still, the overriding considerations of proportion and pattern were never subordinated to nature. Only in the years just before the Persian invasion of 480 BC did some sculptors recognize the organic structure of the body and succeed in showing a truly relaxed pose, with the weight shifted onto one leg and the hips and torso consequently tilted to break the rigid symmetry of the characteristic kouros of the Archaic period

 In the female counterpart of the kouros, the kore, Archaic sculptors were again preoccupied with proportion and pattern—the pattern of drapery rather than of anatomy Ionian (Chios, Samos) and island (Naxos) sculptors took the lead in developing decorative schemes for rendering the fall and splay of the folds of the loosely draped Ionic dress (chiton) and overmantle (himation). These patterns, like the anatomy of the kouroi, suggest nature rather than copy it; the strict logic of dressmaking is never observed by the sculptor, who uses the natural gesture of pulling a long skirt up and to one side first to produce a pleasing pattern of folds and only later to reveal the contours of the legs and body beneath. Most of the korai, like the kouroi, stood as dedications in sanctuaries, the richest series being from the Acropolis at Athens (these were overthrown by the Persians and then piously buried by the returning Athenians). Few of these statues were grave markers.

 In the addition of sculpture to architecture, the determining factor was usually its position on the building. On a Doric (Doric order) temple, for instance, the metope frieze offered a series of rectangular plaques for reliefs that could accommodate two or three figures. There was a tendency in the Archaic period to let the action run on from one metope to the next, regardless of the intervening triglyph, a practice that was later abandoned. Above the frieze, the pediments (pediment) formed by the gabled roof provided an awkward field—a long, low triangle. The sculptors of early temple pediments met the problem by depicting separate groups of different sizes, as at Corcyra (Archaeological Museum, Kérkira, Greece), or by devising monster bodies to fill the shallow corners, as in Athens (Acropolis Museum, Athens). Later, the advantages of using fighting groups with falling and fallen bodies were discovered; this type is represented at Athens and Aegina (Munich). The later Archaic pedimental figures were executed virtually in the round, standing against or just free from the background of the gable. Because these figures, unlike the kouroi and korai, were often in violent action, it may have been through meeting the problems of architectural sculpture that the artist arrived at a better understanding of the dynamics of the human body.

      Work in relief also was used on gravestones, chiefly in Athens, for decorative bases of columns and for the frieze decoration on Ionic (Ionic order) buildings, of which the best examples are from the Siphnian Treasury at Delphi (Archaeological Museum, Delphi), constructed shortly before 525 BC. The shallow relief on these works is little more than drawing rendered partly in the round; but the sculptor soon learned how, even in the shallowest relief, to indicate depth by overlapping figures and by bringing details up into the front plane. A dark-painted background helped the illusion; but the effect of the lavish use of colour on flesh, drapery, and backgrounds cannot now be readily appreciated since so little of it has survived in more than ghostly traces.

The Classical period
Early Classical (c. 500–450 BC)
      This brief period is more than a mere transition from Archaic to Classical; in the figurative arts a distinctive style developed, in some respects representing as much of a contrast with what came afterward as with what went before. Its name—Severe style—is in part an indication that the “prettiness” of Archaic art, with its patterns of drapery and its decisive action, has been replaced by calm and balance. In vase painting and in sculpture, this new tone is evident in the composition of scenes and in details such as drapery, where the fussy pleats of the Archaic chiton give place to the heavy, straight fall of an outer robe called the peplos. The finest artists transformed the verve of the late Archaic style into more delicate expressions of emotion, and some were clearly checking their work more deliberately against the living model.

 The early Classical period saw an impressive series of sculptural works that were excellent in their own right and significant in the continuing development of technical expressive skill and naturalism such as the relief carvings of the so-called Ludovisi Throne. Moreover, for the first time individual artists—and their contributions to technical and stylistic development—can in some cases be positively identified through Roman copies and written descriptions of their works.

 The finest examples of early Classical architectural sculpture are the works of the Olympia Master, an unidentified artist who decorated the pediments and frieze (Archaeological Museum, Olympia) of the Temple of Zeus at Olympia. In the east pediment, which shows men and women preparing for a chariot race, his figures display the sobriety and calm characteristic of the early Classical period. The men stand in the new, relaxed pose (the weight of the body being carried mainly by one leg) that was to be used by most sculptors throughout the period; and the women wear the peplos, its broad, heavy folds lending severity to the static composition. The west pediment, with a scene of struggling men and centaurs, has something of the rigid formality of the Archaic spirit, but here—and in the metopes that show the labours of Heracles—the artist has acutely observed differences of age in the human bodies and differences of expression—pain, fear, despair, disgust—in the faces. This was something new in Greek sculpture, and, in fact, cannot be readily matched in other works of this period.

 In freestanding sculpture—at this time, more commonly bronze than marble—the works of Myron (of Eleutherae, in Attica), identified through copies, were among the most celebrated of the period. Myron's most famous work is the “Discobolos” (discus thrower), of which a Roman copy (Museo Nazionale Romano) survives. Another of Myron's works surviving in copy is a sculpture of Athena with the satyr Marsyas (Athena in Städtische Galerie, Frankfurt am Main; Marsyas in Lateran Museums, Rome). The interplay of mood and action between the figures in this freestanding group is new, foreshadowed only by the now lost group of the Tyrantslayers erected in Athens at the end of the 6th century.

  Because bronze was often looted and corrodes easily, the majority of freestanding sculptures from this period have been lost. Some, however, have been rediscovered in the 20th century, the “Poseidon” (National Archaeological Museum, Athens) and the “Charioteer” from Delphi (Archaeological Museum, Delphi), for instance, although they have been eclipsed in fame by the still more remarkable pair of warriors dredged from the sea in 1972 and displayed in the Museo Nazionale, Reggio di Calabria. The finer of these latter bronzes, although it probably represents a mortal, has a supernatural glamour and a ferocity quite unlike the calm solemnity conventionally admired in Classical works. This derives partly from the glowing surface of the swelling musculature and the use of inlay for eyes, teeth, and lips.

High Classical period (c. 450–400 BC)
      Since Roman times, Greek art of the second half of the 5th century BC has been generally regarded as the high point in the development of the Classical tradition. It was the most refined expression of the Greek view of their gods as men and of their men as partaking of the divine. The aesthetic result of this concept was that the bestial or supernatural was abjured in representations of the divine; thus, even a Greek monster, such as the centaur, seems plausible as an image combining humanity and divinity. To some degree, the idealization of human figures was facilitated by the Greeks' traditional concern with proportion and pattern. As a result of the value placed on the ideal image, the representation of extremes (of age or youth, for example, or of deep emotion) and of individuality was ignored or little practiced. Even figures engaged in violent or painful action have a calm, detached expression that modern observers may find chilly and unfeeling. Another reflection of the value placed on the ideal image is an increasing preoccupation with the “heroic nude.” From an early phase of Greek art, the artist had shown his interest in man as man rather than as individual. In the Archaic period, the artist studied the visual pattern of the naked male body. When anatomical competence was complete, it was still the abstraction, the pattern, that dictated that his subjects be nude; for it is certain that the average Greek dressed for everyday life and for battle and that only in the exercise ground or the racetrack was the naked body freely revealed.

      During the high Classical period, Athens resumed a position of importance as an artistic centre of the Greek world after years of inactivity. Once most of the Greek homelands were secure from the Persian threat, the funds that had been provided to Athens by the Greek states to lead their defense were turned by the statesman Pericles to the embellishment of Athens itself, and a program of rebuilding temples in the city and countryside was begun. This task attracted sculptors, masons, and other artists to Athens from all over the Greek world. It is largely the work of these artists, under the guidance of Athenian masters, that determined what is now recognized as the high Classical style.

      Of the several types of sculpture that flourished during the high Classical period, major statuary is least represented in surviving examples. Phidias, the most influential sculptor of the period, made two huge cult images plated with gold and ivory, the statue of Athena for the Parthenon and a seated statue of Zeus for the temple at Olympia that was one of the seven wonders of the ancient world. These works amazed and overawed viewers through all antiquity, but no adequate copies survive.

 Another important sculptor of the period, whose work can be seen through copies, was Polyclitus, from Argos. Polyclitus embodied his views on proportion in his “Doryphoros” (“Spear Bearer”), called “The Canon” because of its “correct” proportions of one ideal male form.

 Unlike freestanding statues, architectural sculpture from the high Classical period has survived in abundance. The Parthenon sculptures must have been executed by many different hands, but, because the overall design was by Phidias, the composition and details undoubtedly reflect his style and instructions. The pedimental figures and frieze, especially, display the Classical qualities of idealization. These allow an approximate assessment of Phidias' style and the importance of his contribution to the establishment of the Classical idiom. About the time that full employment for sculptors in Athens on the Parthenon came to an end, there began a distinguished series of carved relief gravestones for Athenian cemeteries. The general type had been familiar in Archaic Athens, and the practice continued in other parts of Greece through the early Classical period, mainly in the islands and in Boeotia. The new Attic series, with calm and dignified groups of figures in generalized settings of domesticity or leave-taking, exploited effectively the rather impersonal calm in figure and features of the Classical conventions.

  The other important class of sculpture, much of which has survived in the original, is the dedicatory—votive reliefs or major works like the “Nike” (“Victory”) found at Olympia, made by Paeonius. This work, and others that belong to the last years of the century, such as the frieze from the balustrade of the temple of Athena Nike on the Acropolis at Athens, give a clear indication of progress and change in sculptural style. In the representation of the female body, never before a subject of particular interest to the sculptor (with the distinguished exception of the Olympia Master), true femininity was at last achieved through observation; in these works the figures are no longer like male bodies with the more obvious female characteristics added, which had generally been true of earlier works. Drapery, which had for its patterns been an important element of female figures in the Archaic period, has a heaviness, almost a life of its own in the Parthenon sculptures. By the end of the century, in the Nike balustrade, it is shown pressed tight against the body revealing the forms of the limbs and torso clearly beneath, with brittle, dramatic folds standing clear of the surface. This last style, together with the new approach to the rendering of women's bodies, led quickly to a deliberately sensual effect in statuary and hastened the decline of the unemotional Classical conventions.

Late Classical period (c. 400–323 BC)
      The 4th century saw a dramatic increase of wealth in Greece but less in the hands of the warring states of the 5th century and more concentrated on the periphery of the Greek world—with the western colonies, the eastern Greeks, who continued in close touch with the friendlier Persian provinces, and the increasingly powerful Macedonian (Macedonia) kingdom in the north. Macedonian power, culminating in Alexander the Great's annexation of the whole Persian Empire in the third quarter of the 4th century, was to transform Greek art as effectively as it did Greek life and politics. Even before Alexander's accession, however, the seeds of change were sown. The many new centres and patrons for artists may have made it easier for them to break with Classical conventions established in 5th-century Athens or by dominant 5th-century artists like Polyclitus. The trend was toward greater individuality of expression, of emotion, and of identity, leading eventually to true portraiture. The last was encouraged by the ambitions and pride of rulers such as the Macedonian kings or by the royal houses of Hellenized provinces in the western Persian Empire. To the same sources can be traced the new interest in monumental tomb construction. Men were aspiring more openly to divinity, and Greek art was no barrier to its explicit expression. It is clear, however, that artists were conscious of the values that were set in the 5th century, and by no means did they act as revolutionaries in styles or techniques. The development of Greek art was swift but smooth, and personalities lent impetus to the development rather than changing its flow dramatically.

 Three names dominate 4th-century sculpture, Praxiteles, Scopas, and Lysippus. Each can be appreciated only through ancient descriptions and copies, but each clearly contributed to the rapid transition in sculpture from Classical idealism to Hellenistic realism. Praxiteles, an Athenian, demonstrated a total command of technique and anatomy in a series of sinuously relaxed figures that, for the first time in Greek sculpture, fully exploited the sensual possibilities of carved marble. His Aphrodite (several copies are known), made for the east Greek town of Cnidus, was totally naked, a novelty in Greek art, and its erotic appeal was famous in antiquity. The “Hermes Carrying the Infant Dionysus” (Archaeological Museum, Olympia) at Olympia, which may be an original from his hand, gives an idea of how effectively a master could make flesh of marble.

 The reputation of Scopas, from the island of Paros, came from the intensity of expression with which he imbued his figures. Fragments of his work at Tegea (National Archaeological Museum, Athens) show his technique in the deep-sunk eye sockets that characterize his faces and that transform the hitherto passionless features of Classical sculpture into studies of intense emotion. Praxiteles and Scopas seem to typify the new spirit that can readily be discerned in surviving original sculptures. The “Demeter of Cnidus” (British Museum, London; perhaps by the Athenian sculptor Leochares) is Classical in mood, but the features are Praxitelean; and in the reliefs on the Mausoleum (British Museum, London) at Halicarnassus (Halicarnassus, Mausoleum of) (on which both Scopas and Leochares are said to have worked), the vigour of the battle scenes is heightened by both the intensity of the features and a new, rather flamboyant use of drapery. On Athenian grave reliefs the Classical calm gave place to expressions of controlled but deep emotion. These are styles that can be recognized in places far from Greek soil, as in the relief sarcophagi fashioned by the Greeks for the kings of Sidon in Phoenicia.

  Lysippus, from Sicyon in the northern Peloponnese, was Alexander's favourite sculptor. He was true to the Classical tradition in demonstrating his views on proportion by sculpturing athlete figures in different poses, although his types have heavier bodies and smaller heads than those of the Classical standard set down by Polyclitus. But he adds something to these single figure studies; for the first time they are composed in such a way that the viewer is invited to move around them, and they are not tied to a single optimum viewpoint, as even Praxiteles' figures had been. This was an important innovation in the history of sculpture.

      Another innovation, in the development of which Lysippus must also have played a vital part, is portraiture; he carved likenesses of Alexander. Nevertheless, portraits of contemporaries were still exceptional, and many early portraits are semi-idealized studies of the great philosophers, statesmen, or poets of the Classical period. And yet, it is clear that by now the use of live models was commonplace, as can be judged from the works or copies that survive and from stories of Praxiteles' use of his mistress Phryne as a model or of Lysippus' brother taking casts from life. By the time of Alexander most of the important problems in the realistic or dramatic treatment of features, pose, and drapery had been solved, leaving to later generations an opportunity only to exaggerate anatomy or expression or to devise sculptural groups of yet greater complexity. Fourth-century sculptors, led by Praxiteles, Scopas, and Lysippus, gathered and expressed the best of what had been learned before of anatomy, pattern, and composition; by adding emotional appeal they can be said to have achieved the logical culmination of the Classical tradition, in which Phidian sculpture in the 5th century was but one brilliant and influential episode.

   Styles of Hellenistic sculpture were determined by places and schools rather than by great names. Pergamene (Pergamum) sculpture is exemplified by the great reliefs from the altar of Zeus, now in East Berlin, and copies of dedicatory statues showing defeated Gauls—>. These, like the well-known “Nike of Samothrace”, are masterful displays of vigorous action and emotion—triumph, fury, despair—and the effect is achieved by exaggeration of anatomical detail and features and by a shrewd use of the rendering of hair and drapery to heighten the mood.

  The “Laocoon” group (Vatican Museums), a famous sculpture of the Trojan priest and his two sons struggling with a huge serpent, probably made by Rhodian artists in the 1st century AD but derived from examples of suffering figures carved in the 1st century BC, is a good example of this applied to a freestanding group; and the “Belvedere Torso” (Belvedere Torso) (Vatican Museums), much admired in Renaissance Italy, of the effective emphasis of anatomy.

 In vivid contrast, a fully sensual treatment of the female nude was achieved by careful surface working of the marble, and the accentuation of femininity by the incorporation of sloping shoulders, tiny breasts, and high full hips. It is the Hellenistic Aphrodite, such as the “Venus de Milo”, (Venus de Milo) who proliferates in Roman copies. The sculptural groups such as Laocoon were novel, demanding a palatial or sanctuary setting and far removed from earlier two-figure groups or the more nearly comparable but one-view pedimental compositions. The new realism extended to the portrayal of old age, decrepitude, disease, low life, and even the grotesque. Alexandria, in its major and minor (clay) works of sculpture, seems to have been one of the important schools in this genre. For the first time in Greek art, babies were rendered as other than reduced adults. In portraiture, the idealizing tendencies of the 4th century were still strong, and portraits of kings or poets were overlaid by conceptions of kingship or artistry. It was to take Roman patronage to enforce a more brutal realism in portraiture of contemporaries.

      Two of the most significant developments in Hellenistic sculpture, however, had nothing to do with the evolution of new styles or types of compositions. The first was the production of accurate copies of earlier works, which began by about 100 BC, in part occasioned by the demand from the Roman West. This production stimulated interest in the styles of the great Classical sculptors and helped to determine the decidedly Classical atmosphere of early imperial art. The second, related development is the creation of original works deliberately in the style of the late Archaic, early Classical, or full Classical periods. This archaizing can be seen as both a reaction against the more exuberant Hellenistic sculptural styles and a response to the new interest in the Classical past.

      It was Hellenistic art that the great Roman Republic (ancient Rome) and its early empire came to know and to covet. It was already to some degree familiar to them from the work of the western Greeks in Italy and Sicily, and the Romans formed a closer acquaintance with it in the court of Alexandria and from the profits of their diplomacy and warfare. The flow of works of art and artists to the west began, and the classical styles of early imperial Rome are exactly those of the late Hellenistic Greek world, in many instances executed by the same artists. Thus, in the early empire the majority of known artists' signatures are those of Greeks. The adoption of Greek art by the Roman Empire ensured its continuity in the Western tradition and its eventual transmission, through the Renaissance revival, to the modern world.

Sir John Boardman Ed.

Roman and Early Christian
      There are many ways in which the term ancient Roman art can be defined, but here, as commonly elsewhere, it is used generally to describe what was produced throughout the part of the world ruled or dominated by Rome until around AD 500, including Jewish and Christian work that is similar in style to the pagan work of the same period.

 The Romans were always conscious of the superiority of the artistic traditions of their neighbours. Such works of art as were made in or imported into Rome during the periods of the monarchy and the early republic were produced almost certainly by Greek and Hellenized Etruscan artists or by their imitators from the cities of central Latium; and throughout the later republican and the imperial epochs many of the leading artists, architects, and craftsmen had Greek names and were Greek, or at any rate Greek-speaking. References in ancient literature and signatures of artists preserved in inscriptions leave no doubt on this point. According to tradition, the earliest image of a god made in Rome dated from the 6th century BC period of Etruscan domination and was the work of Vulca of Veii. A magnificent terra-cotta statue of Apollo found at Veii may give some notion of its character. In the 5th, 4th, and 3rd centuries BC, when Etruscan influence on Rome was declining and Rome's dominion was spreading through the Italian peninsula, contacts with Greek art were no longer chiefly mediated via Etruria but, instead, were made directly through Campania and Magna Graecia; paintings and “idealizing” statues of gods and worthies mentioned in literature as executed in the capital during this period were clearly the works of visiting or immigrant Greek artists. The plundering of Syracuse and Tarentum at the end of the 3rd century BC marked the beginning of a flow of Greek art treasures into Rome that continued for several centuries and played a leading role in the aesthetic education of the citizens.

      Literature shows that by the middle of the 2nd century BC the Roman forum was thronged with honorific statues of Roman magistrates, which, although none of them has survived, may be assumed to have been carved or cast by Greeks because no native Roman school of sculptors of that time is known. And it is significant that the earliest account of Roman realistic portraits of private individuals is contained in the Greek historian Polybius' (Polybius) description of ancestral imagines (“masks”) displayed and worn at patrician funerals—a description written about the middle of the 2nd century BC, when the tide of Greek artistic influence was sweeping into Rome and Italy from countries east of the Adriatic, where a highly realistic late-Hellenistic portrait art, which sometimes depicted Roman or Italian subjects, had already blossomed.

      The first appearance of three art forms that expressed the Roman spirit most eloquently in sculpture can be traced to the Hellenistic Age. These forms are realistic portraiture showing a preference for the ordinary over the heroic or legendary, in which every line, crease, wrinkle, and even blemish was ruthlessly recorded; a continuous style in narrative art of all types; and a three-dimensional rendering of atmosphere, depth, and perspective in relief work and painting. Of these three art forms there is no evidence in the early art of pre-Hellenistic central Italy; and it would be safe to guess that, if Rome had not met them in the homelands of Greek art, it would never have evolved them in its great art of imperial times. But Rome's own contributions to art, if of a different order, were vitally important. Its historical aims and achievements furnished late Hellenistic artists with a new setting and centre, new subjects, new stimuli, a new purpose, and a new dignity. Rome provided the external circumstances that enabled architects, sculptors, painters, and other craftsmen to exploit on a much more extensive scale than before artistic movements initiated in the Hellenistic world, and Rome became a great new patron of art and a great new wellspring of inspiration and ideas.

The last century of the Republic
 Ancestral imagines, or funerary masks, made of wax or terra-cotta, had become extremely individualized and realistic by the middle of the 2nd century BC. The source of this realism is in the impact on Rome of late-Hellenistic iconography; although this use of masks was rooted in ancient Roman social and religious practice, there is no basis for a belief that the Romans and Etruscans had, from early times, been in the habit of producing death masks (death mask) proper, cast directly from the features of the dead. It was undoubtedly their funerary customs that predisposed the Romans to a taste for portraits; but it was not until around 100 BC that realistic portraiture, as an art in its own right, appeared in Rome as a sudden flowering, and to that time belong the beginnings of the highly realistic heads, busts, and statues of contemporary Romans—in marble, stone, or bronze—that have actually survived. coin portraits of public personages, whose names and dates are recorded, greatly assist in determining a chronological sequence of the large-scale likenesses, the earliest of which can be attributed to the period of Sulla (82–79 BC). The style reached its climax in a stark, dry, linear iconographic manner that prevailed around 75–65 BC and that expressed to perfection current notions of traditional Roman virtues; of this manner, a marble head of an elderly veiled man in the Vatican is an outstanding illustration.

  Shortly thereafter, an admiration for earlier phases of Greek art came into fashion in the West, and verism was toned down at the higher social levels by a revival of mid-Hellenistic pathos and even by a classicizing trend that was to stamp itself upon Augustan portraits. Meantime, in sepulchral custom, the ancestral bust had become an alternative to the ancestral mask, a development exemplified in a marble statue of a man wearing a toga and carrying two such busts in the Capitoline Museums at Rome; and portrait busts and figures carved on numerous stone and marble grave stelae (slabs or pillars used for commemorative purposes), characteristic of the late republican epoch, suggest the persistence of a preference for severe pose in middle-class and humbler circles. Furthermore, there are some 1st-century-BC portraits that suggest that the making of death masks proper (arguably a sophisticated idea) was occasionally practiced at this time. None of the vivid Etruscan portraits, such as a bronze orator popularly called the “Arringatore” (Museo Archeologico) at Florence and a terra-cotta married pair on the lid of a cinerary chest (for ashes of the dead) in the Museo Etrusco Guarnacci, at Volterra, is earlier than c. 100 BC; works of that type may be reckoned as provincial imitations of the new metropolitan, 1st-century-BC portrait style.

      There are no narrative reliefs from Rome that can confidently be assigned to a date before 100 BC. The only definitely dated 2nd-century-BC relief depicting an episode from contemporary Roman history, a frieze with the Battle of Pydna (Pydna, Battle of) on Lucius Aemilius Paulus' victory monument at Delphi, was worked in 168 BC in Greece. The most familiar republican example of this form of art as practiced in the West is frieze decoration (partly in the Louvre, and partly in the Glyptothek at Munich) from the so-called Altar of Ahenobarbus, which has been shown to have no sure connection either with an altar or with any of the Ahenobarbi. In these, prosaic documentation of Roman census procedure is juxtaposed with depictions of Greek sea nymphs, a conjunction of literalism and borrowed poetry typical of subsequent Roman art.

      Funerary narrative sculpture of the late republic is exemplified in a monument of the Julii, at Saint-Rémy (Glanum), France. The base of this structure carries four great reliefs with battle and hunt scenes that allude not only to the mundane prowess of the family but also to the otherworldly victory of the souls of the departed over death and evil, since figures of the deceased, accompanied by personifications of death and victory, merge into one of the battle scenes. It is possible that these highly pictorial reliefs were partly based on lost Hellenistic monumental paintings, for southern Gaul had direct connections with Greek lands east of the Adriatic.

The Empire
 The hallmark of portraits of Augustus is a naturalistic classicism. The rendering of his features and the forking of his hair (hairdressing) above the brow is individual. But the Emperor is consistently idealized and never shown as elderly or aging. A marble statue from Livia's Villa at Prima Porta (in the Vatican), which presents him as addressing, as it were, the whole empire, is the work of a fine Greek artist who, while adopting the pose and proportions of a classical Hellenic statue, perfectly understood how to adopt these to the image that Augustus cultivated as emperor. On his ornate cuirass (armour protecting the chest and back), Augustus' aims and achievements are recorded symbolically in a series of figure groups. A marble portrait statue found on the Via Labicana (Museo Nazionale Romano) represents the Emperor as heavily draped and veiled during the act of sacrificing as pontifex maximus (“chief priest”); and a bronze head from Meroe in The Sudan (British Museum), the work of a Greco-Egyptian portraitist, depicts him as a Hellenistic king. Of the female portraits of the period, one of the most charming is a green basalt head (Louvre) of the Emperor's sister, Octavia, with the hair dressed in a puff above the brow and gathered into a bun behind—a popular coiffure in early Augustan times.

  In many respects, the noblest of all Roman public monuments that were adorned with sculpture is the Ara Pacis Augustae (“Augustus' Altar of Peace”), founded in 13 BC and dedicated four years later. It stood in the Campus Martius and has been restored, with different orientation, not far from its original site. On its reliefs—significantly of Luna marble, a white marble quarried in Italy and not, as had earlier been the case, imported from Greece—it set a standard of distinction surpassed by no later work, with the harmonious blending of contemporary history, legend, and personification, of figure scenes and decorative floral motifs. The altar proper was contained within a walled enclosure, measuring about 38 by 34 feet (11 1/2 by 10 1/2 metres), with entrances on east and west. On the upper part of the external faces of the south and north precinct walls ran a frieze representing the actual procession (of Augustus, members of his family, officers, priests, magistrates, and the Roman people) to the altar's chosen site on its foundation day (July 4, 13 BC), when sacrifice was offered in thanksgiving for the Emperor's recent return to Rome from the provinces. On either side of the western entrance was a depiction of Augustus' prototype Aeneas sacrificing on his homecoming to the promised land of Italy, and, since Augustus was also hailed as Rome's second founder, a depiction of the suckling of the twins, Romulus and Remus, by the she-wolf. The eastern entrance was flanked by personifications of Roma and of Mother Earth with children on her knees flanked by figures symbolizing air and water (see the figure, bottom—>). On the exterior of the walls, beneath all these figure scenes, was a magnificent dado filled with a naturalistic pattern of acanthus, vine, and ivy, perhaps a translation into marble of a gorgeous carpet or tapestry used in the ceremony. Swags of fruit and flowers that decked the interior faces of the precinct walls may represent real swags that were hung on the temporary wooden altar erected for the foundation sacrifice. The procession was continued in a much smaller frieze on the inner altar, from which figures of Vestal Virgins and of sacrificial victims and their attendants have been preserved. Delightful studies of imperial and other children and such homely incidents as conversations between persons taking part in the procession introduce an element of intimacy, informality, and even humour into this solemn act of public worship. The Ara Pacis, in fact, sums up all that was best in the new Augustan order—peace, serenity, dignity without pompousness, moderation and absence of ostentation, love of children, and delight in nature. The style of the altar's floral decoration strongly suggests that the sculptors who carved it were Greeks from Pergamum.

Julio-Claudian (Julio-Claudian dynasty) period
      The imperial portraiture of Tiberius and Caligula was generally precise but academic work, but some of the female court portraits reflect not only the fashions for elegant simplicity and extreme elaboration in female coiffure but also a subtle poetry. Two possible extremes of tone are clearly marked by the contrasting busts of Claudius and Nero, the former uncomfortably uncompromising, the latter flatteringly Hellenic. In the relatively few public monuments dating from this period to include sculpture, none reveals any novel development.

Flavian (Flavian dynasty) period
      In the emperor Vespasian's (Vespasian) portraits, something of the old, dry style returned. This can be observed in his striking likeness on one of two historical reliefs (Vatican Museums) that were unearthed in Rome near the Palazzo della Cancelleria. A similarly sketchy and impressionistic handling of the hair is found on the emperor Titus' (Titus) portraits, whereas the third Flavian emperor, Domitian, affected a more pictorial hairdo in imitation of the coiffure introduced by Nero. Still more picturesque are the female hair styles of the time, which display piles of corkscrew ringlets or tight, round curls. The Cancelleria reliefs date from the close of Domitian's reign and depict, respectively, Vespasian's triumphal entry and reception in Rome in AD 70 and Domitian's profectio (“setting out”), under the aegis of Mars, Minerva, and Virtus, for one of his northern wars. They are worked in a two-dimensional, academic, classicizing style that is in marked contrast with the vivid, three-dimensional rendering of space and depth, with brilliant interplay of light and shade, on the panels of the Arch of Titus in the Roman Forum. The latter reliefs, which present two excerpts from Titus' triumph in Palestine, were carved in the early 80s. The late Domitianic classicizing manner appears again in the frieze of the Forum Transitorium, which the emperor Nerva completed. This conflict of relief styles within the Flavian period is but one illustration of the ceaseless, unpredictable ebb and flow of different aesthetic principles throughout the history of imperial art.

Age of Trajan
      In portraits of Trajan, a deepening of the bust, which was already seen in the later Flavian period, was carried a stage further; there is a new fluidity in the molding of the face; in the hair, which is plastered down across the brow, there is a partial revival of the late republican linear style. Aesthetically, one of the finest known likenesses of the Emperor is a marble head from Ostia (Ostia Museum). On his monumental column there is a series of less idealized and probably more faithful renderings of his features. The coiffures of Trajanic ladies are, if anything, even more elaborate and extravagant than those of their Flavian predecessors.

 The reliefs of Trajan's Column, illustrating the two Dacian campaigns of 101–102 and 105–106 and winding up the shaft in a spiral band of Parian marble three feet (one metre) wide, are generally recognized to be the classic example of the continuous method of narration in Roman art. The episodes merge into one another without any punctuation, apart from an occasional tree; Trajan appears again and again in different situations, activities, and costumes. A statuesque figure of Victory separates the histories of the two wars. There are 23 spirals and about 2,500 figures. A high level of technical accomplishment is maintained throughout, and the interest and excitement of the theme never flag. Since the figures of men and animals had to be distinguished from a distance, they are inevitably overlarge in proportion to their landscape and architectural settings; and in order to avoid awkward empty spaces along the upper edges of the band and to preserve an allover, even, tapestry-like effect, background figures in the scenes are reared in bird's-eye-view perspective above the heads of those in the foreground. These carvings must be visualized as once brightly painted, with weapons and horse trappings added in metal. The sources of the scenes were possibly wartime sketches made by army draftsmen at the front, but the fusing together of those isolated pictures into a single scroll was the work of a single master artist, perhaps Apollodorus of Damascus, who designed the whole complex of Trajan's forum, basilica, and column.

 The column (the interior of which contains a spiral staircase) had first been intended primarily as a lookout post for viewing Trajan's architectural achievements—his forum and its adjacent markets, to accommodate which he sliced away the slope of the Quirinal Hill. By the time of its dedication in 113, when the relief bands had been added and an eagle planned for the top of the capital, it had become a war memorial. Finally, it became Trajan's future tomb, crowned by his statue (which was later replaced by that of St. Peter) and containing a funerary chamber for the urns holding his and his consort's ashes.

      To the last years of Trajan's reign or to the early years of that of his successor should be attributed four horizontal panels that adorn the main passageway and the attic ends of the Arch of Constantine (Constantine, Arch of) in Rome. If fitted together they would form a continuous frieze of three main scenes, which are, from left to right, an imperial triumphal entry, a battle, and the presentation to the Emperor of prisoners and the severed heads of captives by Roman soldiers. It seems clear that these sculptures were made between around 115 and 120, perhaps for the Temple of Divus Trajanus and Diva Plotina that was erected by Hadrian just to the north of the column. The presence on this frieze of chain-mail corselets, rarely seen on Trajan's Column, seems to indicate that that type of armour, so common under the Antonines, first came into general use in late Trajanic or early Hadrianic times. These reliefs do not depict realistic fighting, as do those of the column, but a kind of ideal or dramatized warfare, with the Emperor himself participating in the melee and the soldiers wearing plumed and richly embossed parade helmets; the scenes melt into one another with total disregard of spatial and temporal logic.

      A third example of Trajanic monumental sculpture is the relief decoration of the Arch of Trajan at Beneventum (Benevento), which is covered with pictorial slabs, the subjects of which are arranged to carry out a carefully balanced and nicely calculated order of ideas. Those on the side facing the city and on one wall of the passageway present themes from Trajan's policy and work for Rome and Italy; those on the side toward the country and on the other wall of the passageway allude to his achievements abroad. With two exceptions, where a pair of scenes forms a single picture, each panel is a self-contained unit. The reliefs already show something of the classicizing, two-dimensional character of Hadrianic work. Indeed, it seems likely that, although the arch itself was either decreed or dedicated in 114 or 115, some of the panels in which Hadrian is given a peculiar prominence were not carved until the early years of the latter's principate.

      The frieze of a great, circular Tropaeum Trajani, set up in the Dobruja (Romania) to commemorate victories over the Dacians, contains a series of metopes (a decoration in a Doric frieze) carved with figure scenes in a naïve, flat, linear style that suggests the hands of army artists of provincial origin.

Age of Hadrian
      In the iconography of the age of Hadrian, certain Hellenizing features—the wearing of a short Greek beard by the males and the adoption by the females of a simple, classicizing coiffure—are harmonized with new experiments. The depth of the bust increases, there is greater plasticity in the modelling of the face, the men's curly hair and beards are pictorially treated, and the irises and pupils of the eyes are marked in. Many marble portraits of the Emperor survive from all over the empire, but of his likenesses in bronze only one is extant—a colossal head recovered from the Thames River in London (British Museum), torn from a statue erected in the Roman city and probably the work of a good Gaulish sculptor. Portrait statues of Hadrian's Bithynian favourite, Antinoüs, reveal a conscious return in the pose and proportions of the body to Classical Greek standards, combined with a new emotionalism and sensuousness in the rendering of the head.

 The monumental reliefs of Hadrian's day cannot vie with those of his predecessors. The most interesting and perhaps the earliest of them are two horizontal slabs once exposed in the Roman Forum but later transported to the shelter of the Curia. Both carry on one side similar figures of victims for the Suovetaurilia sacrifice and on the other side different historical scenes: in the one case, Hadrian doling out the alimenta (“poor relief”) to Roman citizens, in the presence of a statuary group of Trajan and Italia with children; in the other case, the burning of debt registers. At one end of each of these scenes is carved a figure, on a base, of the legendary Greek musician Marsyas, whose statue in the Forum may once have been in part enclosed by the panels. In the background of both historical pictures are carved in low relief various buildings in the Roman Forum that can be identified. The two scenes display the characteristically Hadrianic two-dimensional style, as do three large panels (Palazzo dei Conservatori, Rome), with the Emperor's head restored and depicting an imperial triumphal entry, an adlocutio, and an apotheosis, respectively—somewhat rigid, academic works. Eight medallions gracing the Arch of Constantine give pleasantly composed and lively, if Hellenizing, pictures of sacrifice and hunting. Some of them depict Antinoüs accompanying the Emperor, whose portraits have been recut as likenesses of Constantine the Great and of his colleague Licinius. Finally, historical reliefs found at Ephesus (now in the Neue Hofburg, Vienna)—one of the very few examples of provincial state reliefs that have survived—may be claimed as late Hadrianic (not as of the period of Marcus Aurelius, to which many critics have assigned them).

      In Rome and Italy during the second quarter of the 2nd century, interment began to supersede cremation as a method of disposing of the dead, and Hadrian's reign saw the beginnings of a long line of carved sarcophagi that constituted the most significant class of minor sculptures down to the close of the ancient Greco-Roman world.

Antonine (Antonines) and Severan periods
 Portraits of Antonine imperial persons, of which a bronze equestrian figure of Marcus Aurelius on the Capitol and a great marble bust of Commodus as Hercules in the Palazzo dei Conservatori are perhaps the most arresting examples, display a treatment of hair and beard, deeply undercut and drilled, that grew ever more pictorial and baroque as the 2nd century advanced. This produced an impression of nervous restlessness that contrasts with the still, satin smoothness of the facial surfaces, particularly in the iconography of Commodus. To all this picturesqueness, Septimius Severus (Severus, Septimius) added yet another ornamental touch—the dangling, corkscrew forelocks of his patron deity, Sarapis. The female hairstyles of the time are characterized first by a coronal of plaits on top (Faustina the Elder), next by rippling side waves and a small, neat bun at the nape of the neck (Faustina the Younger, Lucilla), and then by stiff, artificial, “permanent” waving at the sides and a flat, spreading “pad” of hair behind (Crispina, Julia Domna).

      Of the state reliefs of this epoch, the earliest are on the base (in the Vatican) of a lost column set up in honour of Antoninus Pius and Faustina the Elder. The front bears a dignified, classicizing scene of apotheosis: a powerfully built winged figure lifts the Emperor and Empress aloft, while two personifications, Roma and Campus Martius, witness their departure. On each side is a decursio, or military parade, in which the riders farthest from the spectator appear not behind the foot soldiers but high above their heads—a remarkable instance of the bird's-eye-view perspective carried to its logical conclusions. All the figures in these side scenes are disposed on projecting ledges, a device employed again about 20 years later on Marcus Aurelius' Column. Eleven rectangular sculptured panels—similar to those on the Arch of Trajan at Beneventum but displaying greater crowding of figures, livelier movement, and a pronounced effect of atmosphere and depth—depict official occasions and ceremonies in the career of Marcus. Three of these are in the Palazzo dei Conservatori, Rome; the other eight are on the attics (low stories or walls above the cornice of the facade) of the Arch of Constantine. These two sets of panels represent two separate series and may have been carved for two (now lost) distinct triumphal arches. The contrast in style between the spiral reliefs of Marcus Aurelius' Column, put up under Commodus and depicting Marcus Aurelius' northern campaigns, with those of its Trajanic predecessor, is a measure of the change of mood that the Roman world experienced during the course of the 2nd century. The diminished proportions of the squat, doll-like figures, their herding together in closely packed, undifferentiated masses, their angular, agitated gestures, and the stress laid throughout on the horror and tragedy of war suggest that the empire is facing an unknown future with diminished security and that man is at the mercy of some unaccountable power, the supreme embodiment of which is an awe-inspiring winged, dripping figure, personifying the rainstorm that saved the Roman army from perishing from thirst. Again, in the imperial adlocutiones that punctuate this frieze, where the Emperor stands in a strictly frontal pose high above the heads of his audiences, can be seen a remarkable return (but probably not a conscious return) to the conventions employed in primitive art for expressing the concept of the ruler as transcendental being.

      The spirit of the times is reflected no less vividly in carved sarcophagi. Their themes—familiar myths, battles, hunts, marriages, and so on—allude allegorically to death and the destiny of the soul thereafter. The classicizing, statuesque tradition is also maintained in late 2nd- and early 3rd-century columned sarcophagi, originating in the workshops of Asia Minor but freely imported into, and sometimes imitated in, Rome and Italy. On such pieces single figures or small groups of figures occupy niches between colonnettes. Among the most impressive examples is a great sarcophagus at Melfi, in Puglia, Italy, with a couch-shaped lid, on which the figure of a girl lies prostrate in the sleep of death.

      The novel features that have been noted in the reliefs of Marcus Aurelius' Column were worked out more completely in those of the official monuments set up to honour Septimius Severus, both in Rome and abroad. In the arch erected in 203 at the northern end of the Roman Forum are found crowded masses of small figures in broad bands of relief, perhaps reflecting a style of documentary painting; in the smaller Porta Argentariorum in Rome, erected by bankers and cattle dealers in honour of the Emperor in the following year, there are stiff, hieratic, funeral poses; and above all in the still more remarkable four-way arch set up at Leptis (Lepcis (Leptis Magna)) Magna in Tripolitania to commemorate a visit of about 203 is a pier decorated with a stylized bird's-eye view of an Oriental city under siege and (also on the piers) weirdly elongated representations of captives. The deeply undercut and drilled vine-scroll ornament here and in the Severan basilica nearby is similar to that found in Asia Minor, whence sculptors had doubtless been imported.

3rd and 4th centuries
 A new tension between naturalism and schematization marks the history of late-antique portraiture. In likenesses of Alexander Severus (Severus Alexander), the facial planes are simplified, and the tumbling curls of the 2nd-century baroque have been banished in favour of a skullcap treatment of the hair and sheathlike rendering of the beard. Toward the middle of the 3rd century, under Philip the Arabian and Decius, this clipped technique in hair and beard was combined with a return to something of the old, ruthless realism in the depiction of facial furrows, creases, and wrinkles. For a time, Gallienus reinstated the baroque curls and emotional expression, but in the later decades of the century the schematic handling of hair, beards, and features reappeared. Finally, in the clean-shaven faces of Constantine the Great (Constantine I) and his successors of the 4th and early 5th centuries, the conception of a portrait as an architectonic structure came to stay; and the naturalistic, representational art of the Greco-Roman world was exchanged for a hieratic, transcendental style that was the hallmark of Byzantine and medieval iconography. The hair is combed forward on the brow in rigid, striated locks, and the eyes are unnaturally enlarged and isolated from the other features. The face is so formalized that the identification of any given portrait becomes a problem. A colossal bronze emperor (near the church of S. Sepolcro, Barletta), for example, has been given the names of several different rulers of the late 4th and early 5th centuries. Throughout these centuries the favourite female coiffure shows a plait or twisted coil of hair carried across the back and top of the head from neck to crown, while under Constantine there was a brief revival of the two Faustinas' styles.

      Throughout the 3rd and 4th centuries, carved sarcophagi carry on the story of relief work. Aesthetically, the most notable 3rd-century example is an allover tapestry-like battle piece (Ludovisi Collection, Museo Nazionale Romano, Rome), which possibly was made for Decius' son Hostilian.

      Of 3rd-century state reliefs in Rome, virtually nothing has survived. Narrow historical friezes carved for the Arch of Constantine (Constantine, Arch of), completed for the celebrations of his decennalia (10th anniversary of his reign) in 315, show dwarfish, dumpy, niggling figures. Both these reliefs and those of the slightly earlier Arch of Galerius at Thessalonica look as though they had been worked by artists whose experience had been confined to the production of small-scale sculptures. The last examples of Roman carving are reliefs on the base of an obelisk of Theodosius in the Hippodrome at Constantinople, where the Emperor and members of his court, ranged in rigid, hieratic poses, watch the shows. Few original portions are extant of the spiral relief bands that entwined columns of Theodosius and Arcadius in Constantinople.

Minor forms of sculpture
 Of the minor forms of sculpture, none is more attractive than the art of modelling—in relief or in the round—in fine, white stucco (stuccowork). Decorative stucco work was cheaper and easier to produce than carving in stone or marble. Soft and delicate in texture, it was equally elegant whether left white or gaily painted. In domestic architecture it was a useful alternative or accessory to painting; notable are such examples as a pure white, exquisite vault decoration showing ritual scenes with small-scale figures, from a late republican or early imperial house near the Villa Farnesina in Trastevere (Museo Nazionale Romano); handsome pairs of large white griffins, framed in acanthus scrolls against a vivid red ground, in the late republican House of the Griffins on the Palatine; and a frieze depicting the story of the Iliad, in white figures on a bright blue background, in the House of the Cryptoporticus, or Homeric house, at Pompeii. For the use of this technique in palaces, the figure work in Domitian's villa at Castel Gandolfo in the Alban hills can be cited; it can be found in such public buildings as the Stabian and Forum baths and the Temple of Isis at Pompeii. The loveliest and most extensive stucco relief work in a semiprivate shrine is that in the underground basilica near the Porta Maggiore, Rome, where the scenes all allude to the world beyond the grave, to the soul's journey to it, and to the soul's preparation for it in this life Some of the best surviving stuccos are in tombs (tomb): the tomb of the Innocentii and the tomb of the Axe under the church of S. Sebastiano on the Via Appia; the tombs of the Valerii and the Pancratii on the Via Latina (in the latter, stucco work is attractively combined with painting in the flat); and the tomb of the Valerii under St. Peter's, Rome, where the interior walls of both the main and subsidiary chambers are almost completely covered with recesses, niches, and lunettes (lunette) (semicircular or crescent-shaped spaces) containing stucco figures. The Vatican tomb of the Valerii must be reckoned as a classic place for the study of this delightful and all too scantily represented branch of Roman art.

      Ivory (ivory carving) was another popular material for minor sculpture. It was worked in the round, in relief, and in such forms as small portraits, figurines, caskets, and furniture ornaments, of which the carved plaques composing the throne, or “Cathedra of Maximianus,” at Ravenna (probably 6th century) provide a notable instance. The consular and other diptychs comprise one of the most distinctive types of ivory relief work in the 4th and 5th centuries. Among them are masterpieces that kept alive the traditions of Hellenistic carving, such as a diptych of the Symmachi and Nicomachi families (one leaf of which is in the Victoria and Albert Museum, London, and the other in the Musée de Cluny, Paris), and some outstandingly fine examples of late antique portraiture, such as the Probus diptych at Aosta (Cathedral treasury) with a double portrait of Honorius, the Felix diptych in Paris (dated 428), and one of Boethius, consul in 487, at Brescia (Civico Museo dell'Età Cristiana). Fine examples of wood carving are panels with biblical scenes on the 5th-century door of the church of Sta. Sabina on the Aventine.

      Many types of carving in precious stones (gemstone) were practiced by Roman-age craftsmen, and it is to them that the credit goes for the majority of intaglios (intaglio) that have survived from ancient times. (Intaglios are engraved or incised figures depressed below the surface of the stone so that an impression from the design yields an image in relief.) The widespread taste for them is reflected in the many existing glass-paste imitations reproducing their subjects, which include portraits of both imperial and private persons, and a large variety of divine and mythological groups and figures, personifications, animals, etc. Many bear the signatures of Greek artists.

 The most impressive series of Roman gems consists of cameos (cameo) representing imperial persons. These are miniature reliefs cut in precious stones with different coloured strata (so that the relief is of a different colour from the ground), whereas intaglios, like the ancient seals mentioned earlier, were reliefs, as it were, in reverse, cut into the surface so that a true relief only emerges from an impression. Among the earliest surviving examples of the great imperial cameos are the Blacas onyx (British Museum, London), portraying Augustus in the guise of Jupiter; the Gemma Augustea (see photograph—>), a sardonyx (an onyx with parallel layers of sard) in the Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna, and the Grand Camée de France, a sardonyx in the Bibliothèque Nationale, Paris, which were probably carved under Caligula and present, respectively, the apotheosis of Augustus and of Tiberius, the latter with Divus Augustus, also; and a sardonyx cameo of Claudius with Jupiter's aegis (Royal Art Collection at Windsor Castle). Late antique examples of the craft are a rectangular sardonyx (city library at Trier), portraying Constantine the Great and members of his house and an onyx with busts of Honorius and Maria (Rothschild Collection, Paris).

      Other varieties of carving in precious stones are represented by a miniature head of a girl (British Museum) wearing the hair style (hairdressing) of Messalina and Agrippina the Younger, which is cut in plasma; an onyx vase in the Braunschweigisches Landesmuseum, Braunschweig, possibly of the 1st century, depicting an emperor and empress as Triptolemus and Demeter; and a late-antique vase, carved in honey-coloured agate and decorated front and back with a naturalistic vine and with the head of Pan, cupped in acanthus, on either shoulder (Walters Art Gallery, Baltimore).

      Closely akin to cameos (cameo glass) and vessels cut in precious stones are their substitutes in opaque “cameo glass,” worked in two layers, with the designs standing out in white against a dark-blue or bright-blue background. To this class belong a blue vase from Pompeii (Museo Archeologico Nazionale), with Cupids gathering grapes; the Auldjo Vase (British Museum, London), with an exquisitely naturalistic vine; and the celebrated Portland Vase, also in the British Museum, the scenes on which have always been the subject of scholarly controversy but are generally supposed to depict myths relating to the afterlife. Similar imitations of carving in precious stones are late antique diatreta (“cage cups”), the decoration of which is cut back from the outer surface of the mold-cast blank. This openwork ornamentation sometimes represents the crisscross meshes of a net, while on other vessels it consists of an elaborate figure scene, the design in either case being very deeply undercut and, for the most part, only connected with the background by short shanks of glass. Of the figured examples, the most spectacular surviving specimens are a dark-blue situla (“bucket”) with a hunting scene (treasury of St. Mark's, Venice) and a dull-green cup presenting the story of Lycurgus (“Rothschild Vase,” British Museum). Of the other types of glass with figured decoration, molded cups with gladiatorial and circus scenes are characteristic of the early-imperial period; and the 4th-century glassworker's craft is represented by vessels with cut or incised designs. Among the most important centres of glass production under the empire were Syria, Alexandria, and the Cologne region.

      Figured terra-cotta (terra sigillata ware) tablewares (terra sigillata—a term often incorrectly stretched to cover plain wares) were cheaper versions of costly decorated silverwares. During the last century of the republic and in the early decades of the 1st century of the empire, Arretium ( Arezzo) was the most flourishing centre of the manufacture of a fine type of red-gloss pottery. As signatures on the pots reveal, Italian firms often employed Greek and Oriental craftsmen, and the mythological and floral themes of the vessels' molded ornamentation owe much to the inspiration of Hellenistic art.

      From shortly before the mid-1st century AD onward, the markets enjoyed by Italian fabrics were captured by the products of potteries now established in southern, central, and eastern Gaul. These manufactured cheaper, more mass-produced, and aesthetically inferior red-gloss and black-gloss wares, popularly known as “Samian,” some varieties of which continued into the 4th century. The decoration of Gaulish pots was, for the most part, molded; but some vessels carry applied motifs made in individual molds, and others show designs incised to counterfeit cut glass. Yet another type of ornament was carried out in the barbotine technique, by which relief work was produced by trailing liquid clay across the surface of the pot. As regards the content of the decoration, themes from daily life were added to traditional subjects based on Greco-Roman mythology and on natural history. The E barbotine hunt cups (produced mainly at Castor, Northamptonshire) are the highlight of the native Romano-British potter's craft.

      A late-antique class of red-gloss pottery, known as late A ware, with scenes in relief from Greek mythology and from Roman spectacles, was manufactured in a southern Mediterranean area, probably Egypt.

Jocelyn M.C. Toynbee Ed.

Early Christian (Christianity)
      Early in the 20th century it was thought that Christian art began after the death of Christ or, at least, in the second half of the 1st century AD. But later discoveries and studies showed that a truly Christian art—that is, with a style quite distinctive from Pagan Roman art—did not exist before the end of the 2nd or beginning of the 3rd century. When it ended, or rather developed into something else, is harder to say. Early Christian art penetrated all the provinces of the Roman Empire, adapting itself to existing pagan art. It subsequently created its own forms, which varied according to local stylistic evolution. The new capital at Constantinople (ancient Byzantium (Istanbul)), founded by the emperor Constantine the Great (306–337), was to be an important centre of art. The art produced there, now known as Byzantine art, extended throughout the entire Christian East. It is customary to distinguish early Christian art of the West or Latin part from the Christian arts of regions dominated by the Greek language and to consider the latter as proto-Byzantine, while acknowledging, however, a certain latitude in the initial date of this separation: 330, the foundation of Constantinople; 395, the separation of the Greek part of the empire from its Latin sector; or, finally, the reign of Justinian (527–565). The transition from the earlier to the later art discussed in the next sections took place at different times in different locations; therefore, there can be no precise chronological boundary. Only after Justinian's reign did many Eastern regions submit to the ascendancy of the art of Constantinople, following until the 6th and even the 7th century the paths traced by Christian art in its beginnings. In the West the end of Early Christian art is easier to determine. Closely tied to Roman art, it finished with the collapse of the empire at the end of the 5th century. Then, transformed into a multitude of regional art styles, it assimilated various influences from the East and from the barbaric peoples who superseded their Roman masters.

      The vague boundaries of this art in time and space make a definition of its character difficult. Its style evolved from the current Greco-Roman art. The new elements lay not in form but in content: places of worship very different from pagan temples, iconography drawn from the Scriptures. As the hold of the church over public and private life grew, these new elements tended to set traditional subjects completely aside. Early Christian art, while deeply rooted in Greco-Roman art, became a new entity, as distinct from ancient art as from that of the Middle Ages. An obvious difference is the absence of monumental public sculpture. Early Christian sculpture was limited to small pieces and private memorials and only gradually became incorporated into ecclesiastical architecture.

Sarcophagi (sarcophagus)
      The imagery of sarcophagi followed an evolution similar to that of the catacomb paintings. The same biblical and Gospel subjects were introduced into pagan or neutral compositions. In the second or third quarter of the 3rd century, the oldest Christian sarcophagi were hardly distinguishable from the pagan. On one at Sta. Maria Antiqua, Rome, a seated philosopher reading a scroll, a praying figure, and a “Good Shepherd” are “Christianized” by the scenes that accompany them on either side: Jonah resting and the Baptism of Christ. Thus, a sarcophagus from the Via Salaria (Rome, Vatican Museums), which represents the same subjects except for the truly Christian scenes, can be called “Christian” only with reservation.

      During the 4th century this iconography was enriched and became more strictly narrative; the miracles of Christ (Jesus Christ), fully described, were included, the crossing of the Red Sea was often depicted in a long frieze, and the episodes of the Passion of Christ—his arrest, his trial before the Jewish council, his presentation to Pilate, and the Way of the Cross—often extended along the faces of the sarcophagi. The Crucifixion itself was represented by only a bare cross, surmounted by a crown enclosing the monogram of Christ: thus, the symbolic image of the triumph over death. This hesitation to portray the dead Christ on the Cross, an ignominious mode of punishment reserved by the Romans for slaves and abject criminals, disappeared only gradually during the course of the 5th and 6th centuries.

 The largest group of Early Christian sarcophagi was found in Rome and its vicinity, although others were found elsewhere in the Mediterranean region. The classicizing style of the first half of the 3rd century became vulgar and a little crude around 300, but it became progressively refined in the time of Constantine and his sons. To the years from 340 to 370 belong the best Roman works: the sarcophagi called the “Two Brothers” (Museo Cristiano), that of Junius Bassus, dated 359, another with columns (both in the grotto of St. Peter's, Rome), that of the “Three Good Shepherds” (Vatican Museums), and, finally, one in S. Sebastiano, Rome, which contains several rare scenes from the story of Lot. While bearing witness to a renaissance of Classical style, they are laden with a new spirituality. A final flourishing occurred near the end of the 4th century in Milan with the decoration of a sarcophagus (S. Ambrogio), which combined an elegant finesse in the figures (due probably to Greek influence) to the vigour of the Roman style.

      The sarcophagi of the Middle East and of Ravenna belong principally to the 5th and 6th centuries and to a different artistic tradition. Those of Constantinople and of Asia Minor are fewer in number and lack stylistic homogeneity. Several examples (e.g., sarcophagus of a child and another of the Apostles, end of the 4th century, both in the Arkeoloji Müzeleri, Istanbul) have a harmonious beauty inspired by Classical Greek art; others are in a totally different and more popular style. The sarcophagi of Ravenna, which first appear at the end of the 4th century, stand midway between the Greek art of the East and Latin art. That of Bishop Liberius (4th–5th centuries) of Ravenna at the church of S. Francesco is close to the classicizing Roman sarcophagi in the handling of figures, while the composition—Christ and the Apostles isolated under arcades—finds its models in Asia Minor. Successive waves of Eastern influence affected local style, producing in the 5th century an art distinct from that of the rest of Italy and the Middle East.

      The Christianization of the decorative arts was a slower process than that of monumental art. The presence of pagan imagery on small, movable objects, usually intended for secular use, was less shocking than the same imagery would be on the walls and floors of religious buildings. Because many of these objects were made of precious materials, most of them have disappeared. Only ivories are preserved in considerable number. On a small coffer from Brescia (Civico Museo Romano), second half of the 4th century, Gospel scenes cover the four sides and the top, surrounded by a border of biblical subjects similar to those whose presence has been noted in the paintings of the catacombs and on the sarcophagi. The figures are characterized by a gentle beauty and are close to those of certain Roman sarcophagi of the middle and third quarter of the 4th century. Ivories such as the holy women at the tomb and the Ascension of Christ in the Museo d'Arte Antica, Castello Sforzesco in Milan and in the Bayerisches Nationalmuseum in Munich; six miracles of Christ, divided between the two leaves of a diptych, now in Berlin and in Paris; a coffer in London (British Museum) that bears one of the oldest, if not the oldest, representations of Christ on the cross; and a reliquary found at Pula, Istria, Croatia—all belong to a group of ivories that were produced either in Rome or in northern Italy from the end of the 4th to the middle of the 5th century. In the second half of the 5th century the quality of ivory carving declined in the West; it improved, however, at Constantinople and perhaps other eastern cities, such as Antioch and Alexandria.

Henri Stern

Eastern Christian
      The Byzantine era really began with the transference of the capital of the Roman Empire from Rome to the site of ancient Byzantium on the Bosporus in the year AD 330, the new capital thereafter being called Constantinople, after its founder, the emperor Constantine I. Constantine had 17 years earlier been responsible for recognizing Christianity, and from the outset he made it the official religion of the new city. The art dedicated to the service of the faith, which had already begun to develop in the days when Christians were oppressed, received official recognition in the new centre and was also subjected to a number of new influences, so that it owed a debt on the one hand to Italy and Rome and on the other to Syria and Asia Minor, where Oriental elements were prominent. It must not be forgotten that the population of Constantinople and its neighbourhood was Greek, not Latin, so that the poetic and philosophical outlook of the Greek world was itself a very considerable influence.

Constantinople and the Byzantine Empire

Decorative work
      Sculpture underwent changes very similar to those in architecture. The decorative work in Hagia Sophia illustrates its nature. In the Classical world naturalistic representation had prevailed; at Hagia Sophia the forms are still basically representational, but they are treated in an abstract manner, more advanced in degree than at St. Polyeuktos. Capitals of the period are similarly stylized even when they use bird or animal forms, for these are usually treated as part of an overall balanced pattern. With this tendency toward stylization in architectural sculpture, it is not surprising to find that three-dimensional, representational sculpture was progressively going out of fashion. Portrait sculptures had been made of most of the early emperors, and the texts report that a mounted figure of Justinian I topped a column in front of Hagia Sophia. But that was the last of the series; figural compositions in high relief had adorned sarcophagi, and similar reliefs had found a place on the walls of churches, but virtually none of these dates from later than Justinian's reign. Instead, flat slabs with low-relief ornament akin to that on the capitals and cornices of Hagia Sophia, some of it even purely geometric, came into vogue. These slabs were used for the lower sections of windows or to form a screen between the body of the church and the sanctuary; they were later to develop into the high structures called iconostases (iconostasis), which eventually became universal in Orthodox churches.

Ivories
 The minor sculptural arts are essential to any treatment of medieval sculpture in general, partly because more is known about them and partly because some of the most able masters of the period preferred to work on small-scale objects, and patronage was ready to support them. Most important are the ivories. They comprise a wide variety of types, ranging from small pyxides—circular vessels used in the liturgy—to large-scale works made up of a number of separate panels, like the famous throne of Maximian, the Archbishop of Ravenna, at Ravenna (c. 550; Museo Arcivescovile, Ravenna). Most usual, however, were the flat plaques used as diptychs, book covers, etc. Considerable numbers of these, dating mostly from the late 5th and early 6th centuries, have been preserved. After about the middle of the 6th century, however, ivories become rarer: very few can be dated to the period between the reign of Justinian and the revival of Byzantine art in the 9th century.

      Diptychs, or two-panel ivories, seem to have been very popular both for use as book covers and for ceremonial purposes. The most impressive of them were imperial. In these each leaf was made up of five panels; on the central one was a portrait of the emperor; at the sides were standing figures of the consuls; below were scenes, usually of tribute bearers; and above were angels upholding a bust of Christ. They thus illustrated the Byzantine ideas of hierarchy, Christ above and the world below, dominated by the emperor as Christ's vice-regent. The finest of them, known as the Barberini ivory, is in the Louvre and probably depicts Anastasius I (491–518); another, of his wife, the empress Ariadne, is divided between several collections.

 More numerous today are the diptychs that were issued by the consuls (consul) on coming to office. Their fabrication ceased when the office of consul was abolished by Justinian in 541; though by no means are all the consuls portrayed before that time, leaves of the diptychs issued by a large number of them survive. Each leaf consisted of a single plaque. The earlier ones, like that of Probus (408), are still Roman in style; but those dating from just before and just after 500, which constitute the majority, are in a different style, either more ornate or very much simpler. The more elaborate ones are well represented by leaves of the consul Flavius Anastasius (517), in the Cabinet des Médailles, Bibliothèque Nationale, Paris; they show the consul enthroned, with lively circus scenes below. The plainer type is represented by a consular diptych of Justinian dated 521 (six years before his accession as emperor), now exhibited in the Castello Sforzesco at Milan, where the decoration is confined to rosettes at the four corners and a medallion with a Latin inscription at the centre.

      Most of the official ivories were probably carved at Constantinople, but it seems likely that others, which were intended for more general use or for the church, may well have been done elsewhere. Rome, Milan, Alexandria, and Antioch in Syria were all important centres, and there has been a good deal of dispute among experts as to where many of the ivories were made. Maximian's throne, the most elaborate of them all, has been assigned to Alexandria, Constantinople, and even to Ravenna itself; and there has been argument as to whether the consular diptychs were carved at Constantinople, Rome, or Alexandria. There is, however, unanimity with regard to certain types. Thus, a number of rather small plaques bearing decorations in a clumsy but expressive style can safely be assigned to Palestine, and probably to Jerusalem; another group, characterized by a similar search for realism but by greater technical proficiency, can perhaps be attributed to Antioch. A leaf in the British Museum, with the Adoration of the Magi above and the Nativity below, illustrates the first type; a composite diptych used as a book cover, now at Ravenna, represents the second. Each of its leaves is made up of five panels, like those of the imperial diptychs, but here Christ occupies the central one, and there are scenes from the Gospels and the Old Testament all around.

      Work of a more polished type, where classical scenes, single figures, or, less often, events from the Bible are the subjects, has been associated with Alexandria. At one time this city was regarded as the primary centre of production, and numerous ivories of major importance were attributed to it, notably the throne of Maximian. The panels that compose the latter are in various styles and are certainly not all of the same school. Those on the sides, depicting scenes from the life of Joseph, are vivid and expressive, whereas those on the front, showing John the Baptist, prophets, and ornamental scrollwork, are grand and elegant. It is possible that the artist who did the Joseph scenes was trained in Alexandria, but most of the rest of the work is now generally regarded as Constantinopolitan, and it was probably there that the throne was carved, wherever the craftsmen had been trained. Also typical of Constantinople, especially during the rule of Justinian, is a large panel in the British Museum representing the archangel Michael. The treatment of this youthful figure and his drapery is in a style reminiscent of classic Greek art, but this is happily combined with ornate decoration and a hieratic composition.

      A few ivories bearing secular scenes may also be assigned to the capital; one of the most important is a diptych in the Hermitage at St. Petersburg with depictions of animal combats in the circus.

 A fragment of a sceptre in the name of Leo VI (886–912) at the Staatliche Museen Preussischer Kulturbesitz, Berlin, a panel showing the crowning of Constantine VII Porphyrogenitus by Christ (944) in Moscow, and one with the crowning of Romanus II (945) in the Cabinet des Médailles, Paris, can be dated exactly. But in most cases, dates can only be suggested on the basis of style. The ivories have been classified under a number of headings in a monumental survey made by A. Goldschmidt and K. Weitzmann. They term their first group that of Romanus and associate a number of ivories with that showing his crowning, mentioned above; they include triptychs with the deesis on the central panel in the Vatican, the Palazzo Venezia at Rome, and the Louvre, the last known as the “Harbaville Triptych”, as well as panels at Dresden, Venice, Vienna, and elsewhere.

      Goldschmidt and Weitzmann's second group is built up around an ivory in the church of Sta. Francesca at Cortona, Italy, which bears the name of Nicephorus II Phocas (963–969). It includes among others a fine triptych with the Virgin on the central panel, at Luton Hoo, Bedfordshire, England. The faces are broader and heavier than those on ivories of the Romanus group. Other groups are distinguished not so much on the basis of date as by form or style, such as groups termed the “painterly” and the “framed,” while a more obvious group is composed of caskets. The majority of examples are dated to the later 10th or earlier 11th centuries, but manufacture of objects in this group apparently continued at least until the early 12th century, the later ones being either more linear in style, like a panel with the Baptist and four Apostles in the Victoria and Albert Museum, London, or the figures being very much elongated, as in a St. John at Liverpool. High relief and deep undercutting were apparently in special favour early in the 11th century.

 Though the caskets were no doubt often carved by the same people who carved the plaques, they constitute an independent group not only because of their form but also because they are nearly all adorned with secular motifs that have been drawn from Classical literature. The panels bearing the scenes are framed in bands adorned with rosettes or sometimes human heads in profile; because of this, the caskets are often termed rosette caskets. The most exquisite in execution, if also mannered in style, is one in the Victoria and Albert Museum known as the Veroli casket. A few caskets of different type are also known; one at Florence has the rosette borders, but they frame panels bearing Christ, the Virgin, and saints; one at Troyes, France, has no rosette borders, while its side panels show horsemen of Persian type and, at the ends, phoenixes that are distinctly Chinese. During the later part of the 12th century, soapstone plaques became more common than ivories, probably for economic reasons, but they bore low-relief decorations in a very similar style.

David Talbot Rice

      A distinct Georgian sculptural tradition did not emerge until the advent of Christianity, which stimulated a demand for a large number of carved stone reliefs. The earliest of these were based on Early Christian models. In the 8th and 9th centuries the high-relief figures of Early Christian art gave way to figures rendered in wholly linear fashion. In the 10th and 11th centuries the reliefs became gradually more plastic and expressive until they were again freed, to a considerable degree, from the background. At the same time there was an increasing interest in the disposition of figures in a harmonious design. By the 12th century, however, sculptors were beginning to look more to ornamentation than to figural representation. Repetition of themes characterized most of Georgian sculpture in subsequent centuries. Sculpture of all periods was always smaller than life-size.

      The stone construction of Armenian churches lent itself to carved decorations, and architectural sculpture was more extensively used in Armenia than in any other country of the Middle East, except Georgia. The reliefs of the 4th-century hypogeum (a subterranean structure hewn out of rock) at Aghts along with those on numerous funerary stelae (upright slabs of inscribed stone) antedating the Arab conquest exemplify the early stages of stone sculpture. Beginning with the 6th century, and perhaps even earlier, floral and geometric motifs as well as figure representations were carved around the windows of the churches, between the arches of the blind arcades, and on the lintels and the lunettes over the doors. Decorative ornaments became increasingly intricate during the later periods.

      The outstanding example in Armenian art of the use of architectural sculpture is the Church of the Holy Cross, built in the early 10th century on the island of Aghthamar in Lake Van; this is the earliest medieval example, either in the East or in the West, of a stone building entirely covered with relief sculpture. Around the dome and on the four facades may be seen a variety of animals, vine and other floral scrolls, and large figures of saints and scenes from the Old Testament. A portrait of King Gagik I Artsruni, offering to Christ a model of the church he had erected, appears on the west facade. Such donor portraits, sometimes carved in the round as at Ani, were one of the characteristic features of the decoration of Armenian churches.

      Strictly speaking, the adjective Coptic, when it is applied to art, should be confined to the Christian art of Egypt from the time when the Christian faith may be recognized as the established religion of the country among both the Greek-speaking and Egyptian-speaking elements of the population. In this sense Coptic art is essentially that reflected in the stone reliefs, wood carvings, and wall paintings of the monasteries of Egypt, the earliest foundations of which date from the 4th and 5th centuries AD. It is, however, common practice to include within Coptic art all forms of artistic expression that, like the so-called Coptic textiles, need have no religious intent or purpose. The term has also been further extended to denote stylistic characteristics that can be traced back to the 2nd and 3rd centuries AD and perhaps earlier.

      A specifically Christian art was slow in developing: when it did emerge, it was not the product of a school of Christian artists inventing new forms of expression. It continued the style current in the country, evolving from the late antique art of Egypt, in which themes derived from Hellenistic and Roman art may or may not have been given new allegorical significance. There is little direct legacy from the art of pharaonic Egypt either in the style of execution or in the choice of decorative themes. The most obvious survival in Christian iconography is the peculiar looped form of cross derived from the ancient Egyptian writing of the word for life ( ankh). Less convincing is the connection postulated between the concept of Maria lactans (representations of the Virgin nursing her child) and bronze and terra-cotta statues of the ancient Egyptian goddess Isis suckling the infant sun god Horus or between representations of saints on horseback and some late figures of the adult Horus in an identical pose.

      The extent to which Egypt may have exerted a major creative influence on Christian art is uncertain in the absence of material remains of the Christian period from Alexandria, the great metropolis of Egypt from the time of the Ptolemies and a city that played an important and, at times, decisive role in the intellectual life of the early church. A series of Christian ivory carvings, of unrecorded provenance, is frequently referred to as Alexandrian on stylistic considerations and adduced as proof of a continuing artistic skill in the Hellenistic tradition.

      Objects found in the hinterland depart from the Classical canons of proportion and mode of representation. Political and economic conditions in Egypt from the time of its incorporation in the Roman and, later, Byzantine empires doubtless account for much of the provincial appearance of Egyptian and Coptic art and the emergence of a freer, more popular folk style. Lack of the kind and degree of patronage that had been given by the pharaohs, Ptolemies, and, to some extent, Roman emperors to the old religion of Egypt meant an impoverishment of schools of skilled craftsmen, avoidance of costlier materials, and a decline in the high standard of finish. Particularly noticeable is the absence of carving in the round, of work of monumental scale, and of the use of the harder ornamental stones that had been characteristic of pharaonic art.

      Characteristic Coptic stylistic features are to be observed in tombstones from the Delta site of Terenuthis. These depict the dead man frontally posed beneath a gabled pediment of mixed architectural style, hands extended at right angles from the body and bent upward from the elbow in the orans (praying) position, a pose that appeared frequently in the earliest Christian art in Rome. There is no firm evidence, however, that the community was Christian. Similarly, the series of architectural elements carved in relief from Oxyrhynchus and Heracleopolis may not all be from Christian buildings. The earlier material from Heracleopolis, dating probably from the 4th century, is notable for its figure subjects drawn from classical mythology, carved in a deep relief that leaves them almost freestanding, producing an effective play of light and shade. As such reliefs were painted, the absence of fine detail in the carving was less noticeable.

      Much of the material available for a study of Coptic sculpture has not been found in context, and, in the absence of assured information concerning its provenance and of circumstantial evidence for dating (even in the cases of pieces from known sites), it is impossible to provide a detailed account of the development of Coptic sculpture. In general, the figures are stiff in pose and movement; there is a tendency for the carving to become flat, and there is little in the way of narrative scenes drawn from biblical stories. The most successful carvings are probably the impressive variety of decorated capitals (capital), particularly from the monasteries of Apa Jeremias at Ṣaqqārah and of Apa Apollo at Bāwīṭ. Among them are basket-shaped examples decorated with plaitwork, vine and acanthus leaves, and animal heads. The form imitates a style introduced into Constantinople by the emperor Justinian I, and it is clear that, in the hinterland of Egypt, there was during the 6th century certain artistic influence on Coptic art from Byzantium, despite religious and political differences. Contemporary Byzantine influence seems to have been at work on other architectural elements at Bāwīṭ, as, for example, in the finely carved limestone pilaster depicting, on one side, a geometric and floral pattern surmounted by a saint and, on the other, vine scrolls and birds below an archangel.

Arthur Frank Shore

Western Christian
      With the dissolution of the Roman Empire in the West, cultural hegemony passed to the Eastern Empire, but older traditions remained in western Europe and intermingled with several invaders—Germanic tribes arriving from the north and Christians arriving from Constantinople as well as from Rome. The Merovingian art of the Franks, which was culturally predominant throughout Europe in the 6th century, survives principally in grave relics, such as jewelry, hollowware, and the like.

      In Italy the Lombards, who invaded the country in 568, propagated Germanic art, but there is a strong Mediterranean influence in the sculpture—stone plaques for choir screens, altars and altar canopies, sarcophagi, and details of architecture, for example; the abstract decorations, many of them interlaced motifs, were to be blended with more and more Byzantine elements. The creatures and vegetation become almost impossible to recognize—they aspire, as it were, to be ornamental stone writing rather than representation. Similar ornaments were also applied in stucco; for example, in S. Salvatore at Brescia and especially in the famous Tempietto at Cividale del Friuli (both 8th century). At Cividale del Friuli, standing figures of saints have been incorporated in decoration in which the Byzantine influence is obvious.

      In Ireland, monumental crosses (cross) represented the Celtic Christian tradition, and similar Anglo-Saxon crosses may be found in England. The abstracted decoration recalls the relief style in Italy, but here the surface is not a flat plane but is packed with round, knoblike projections that create a plastic rather than a glyphic effect.

Carolingian (Carolingian art) and Ottonian periods
      The cultural revival of the Carolingian period (768 to the late 9th century), stimulated by the academia palatina at Charlemagne's court, is the first phase of the pre-Romanesque culture, a phase in which late Classical and Byzantine elements amalgamated with ornamental designs brought from the East by the Germanic tribes. The German Ottonian (Ottonian art) and early Salian emperors (950–1050), who succeeded the Carolingians as rulers of the Holy Roman Empire, assumed initially the Carolingian artistic heritage, although Ottonian art later evolved into a distinct style.

 Little Carolingian sculpture has survived, but in Ottonian days the sculpting of freestanding statues was taken up again, although the earliest specimens, serving as they did as reliquaries, were still closely related to the silversmith's and goldsmith's art; for example, the famous statue of “Sainte-Foy” at Conques (France) and the “Golden Madonna” at Essen. The wooden “Gero Crucifix” (about 73.6 inches [187 centimetres] high; cathedral of Cologne), which was carved before 986, already reveals a certain realism in the representation of the shape of the body, in contrast to the contemporary crucifix of Gerresheim (before 1000). The so-called Bernward Crucifix at Ringelheim (Germany) is between the two. The reliefs on the wooden doors of Sankt Maria im Kapitol at Cologne display an affinity with the mid-11th-century Romanesque ivories of the Meuse district. The Carolingian bronze doors in Aachen were imitated at Mainz, where Bishop Willigis had similar portal wings made for his cathedral. He was far surpassed, however, by Bernward at Hildesheim, who had the still extant door wings of the cathedral (1015) decorated with typological images in parallel, scenes from the Old and the New Testament; in theme, the images go back to early Christian examples Bernward had seen in Italy, but the force of the gestures and the use of unadorned surface as dramatic interval in the episode of Adam and Eve reproached by the Lord has no precedent in the history of art. The influence of Classical art manifests itself clearly in the so-called Christ's Column (12.8 feet [3.9 metres] high; c. 1020; St. Michael's, Hildesheim), which, with its figures spiralling around the shaft, reminds one of the triumphal columns of Trajan and Marcus Aurelius. Originally, it was crowned by a cross. As belonging to the art associated with Bernward, one must also reckon the seven-branched candlestick in the Minster of Essen (90.6 inches [230 centimetres] high; before 1011) and the bronze crucifix at Essen-Werden (42.5 inches [108 centimetres] high; c. 1060), a late product of the same school.

      The term Romanesque—coined in 1818 —denotes in art the medieval synthesis of the widespread Roman architectural and artistic heritage and various regional influences, such as Teutonic, Scandinavian, Byzantine, and Muslim. Although derived primarily from the remains of a highly centralized imperial culture, the Romanesque flowered during a period of fragmented and unstable governments. It was the medieval monasteries (monastery), virtual islands of civilization scattered about the continent, that provided the impetus—and the patronage—for a major cultural revival.

      The bronze “Christ's Column” is a modest prophecy of the monumental spirit that would distinguish the sculptural decoration of the new monastic buildings rising in much of western Europe. Developed in the abbey doorways and on the pillars and capitals of cloisters, where the sculptor had to learn anew the technique of stone carving and of rendering the human figure, this spirit gradually grew stronger.

      During the 11th century more and more churches were constructed in the Romanesque style, the massive forms of which are another indication of this sculptural instinct. Romanesque sculpture culminated in France in the great semicircular relief compositions over church portals, called tympanums (tympanum). The example at Moissac (c. 1120–30), which represents the Apocalyptic vision with the 24 elders, is a particularly brilliant demonstration of how devices of style can so transform the objects of nature that they seem entirely purged of terrestriality. All the forms are suspended in a predominating plane that denies physical space. Differences in scale are masterfully exploited: the tiny figures of the elders are a foil to the looming image of Christ in the centre. With great consistency, every detail has been subjected to a process of stylization that produces rhythmic patterns in the drapery, hair, and feathers. The central figure is so flattened as to appear disembodied, while the two towering angels have been so attenuated that their bodies have lost all mass.

 The astonishing variety that master sculptors such as Gislebertus, Benedetto Antelami, and Nicola Pisano achieved within the confining principles of Romanesque style can be illustrated, on the one hand, by the tympanums of Burgundy, such as the spectral “Last Judgment” at Autun or the “Pentecost” at Vézelay, and, on the other, by the less visionary sculpture of Provence, such as that of Saint-Trophime in Arles or of the church in Saint-Gilles, which retain many of the forms and characteristics of Classical antiquity.

      Another sculptural form that reappeared in Europe during the latter part of the Romanesque period was sepulchral sculpture, in which a sculptured figure of the deceased was cut or molded on top of a sarcophagus or on the sepulchral slab set into the floor of an abbey or cloister.

Jan Joseph Marie Timmers Ed.

Gothic
      The difficulty with many anatomies of Gothic art is that they become involved in attributing a meaning to Gothic that it is incapable of sustaining. It is not, for one thing, a medieval word; instead, it is an invention of the 16th century attributed, as it were, posthumously, by historians after the Gothic style had been trampled into virtual insensibility by the Italian Renaissance. The word refers to the Teutonic tribes who were thought to have destroyed Classical Roman art and were thus considered barbarians. But nobody in the 13th century thought of himself as Gothic. The fact is that the literature of art criticism (art criticism) is virtually nonexistent in the Middle Ages. Certainly people talked about art, patrons valued it, connoisseurs appraised it. But the terms in which this was done must now, for the most part, be a matter of speculation or imagination. There was not necessarily anything mysterious about this. It is common to suppose that medieval discussions on art were infused with a degree of spirituality. This is probably mistaken. There is, for instance, little that is spiritual about financing the building of a gigantic cathedral. It is certain that clergymen preached sermons about art, giving it a spiritual and symbolic interpretation. It is also true that, since a large proportion of art served a religious function, artists were, in some sense, “servants of God.” But they were also the servants of far more worldly considerations, such as earning a living or achieving a reputation, and these should never be discounted in any imaginative re-creation of the medieval artist's existence.

Early Gothic
      Throughout this period, as in the Romanesque period, the best sculptors were extensively employed on architectural decoration (ornament). The most important agglomerations of figure work to survive are on portals, and, in this, once again, the church of Saint-Denis assumes great significance. The western portals (built 1137–40), part of a total facade design, combined features that remained common throughout the Gothic period: a carved tympanum (the space within an arch and above a lintel or a subordinate arch); carved surrounding figures set in the voussoirs, or wedge-shaped pieces, of the arch; and more carved figures attached to the sides of the portal. As it survives, Saint-Denis (France) is disappointing; the side figures have been destroyed and the remainder heavily restored. The general effect is now more easily appreciated on the west front of Chartres cathedral. (Chartres Cathedral)

 If one compares the portals here (c. 1140–50) with those of early 13th-century Reims, one can see that the general direction of the changes in this early period of Gothic sculpture was toward increased realism. The movement toward realism is not manifest in a continuous evolution, however, but in a series of stylistic fashions, each starting from different artistic premises and achieving sometimes a greater degree of realism but sometimes merely a different sort of realism. The first of these fashions can be seen in the sculpture on the west front of Chartres. That the Christ and the Apostle figures are in some sense more human than the Romanesque apparitions at Vézelay and Autun (c. 1130) need hardly be argued. That the figures, with their stylized gestures and minutely pleated garments, are at all “real” is doubtful. That their forms are closely locked to the architectural composition is clear. The features of the Chartres sculpture had a wide distribution; they are found, for example, at Angers, Le Mans, Bourges, and Senlis cathedrals. There are stylistic connections with Burgundy and also with Provence. The fashion lasted from c. 1140 to 1180.

 The centre of development for the second style lay in the region of the Meuse. The activity of one of the chief artists, a goldsmith called Nicholas Of Verdun, extends at least from the so-called Klosterneuburg altar (1181) into the early years of the 13th century. His style is characterized by graceful, curving figures and soft, looping drapery worked in a series of ridges and troughs. From these troughs is derived the commonly used German term for this style—Muldenstil. This drapery convention is essentially a Greek invention of the 4th century BC. It seems likely that Nicholas seized the whole figure style as a tool to be used in the general exploration of new forms of realism. It remained extremely popular well into the 13th century. A rather restrained version of the style decorated the main portals of the transepts (the transversal part of a cruciform church set between the nave and the apse or choir) of Chartres (c. 1200–10). It is also found in the earliest sculpture (c. 1212–25) of Reims Cathedral and in the drawings of the Sketchbook of Villard de Honnecourt (c. 1220).

      In the opening years of the 13th century yet another type of realism emerged. It seems to have originated at Notre-Dame, Paris (Notre-Dame de Paris) (c. 1200), and to have been based on Byzantine prototypes, probably of the 10th century. The looping drapery and curving figures were abandoned; instead, the figures have a square, upright appearance and are extremely restrained in their gestures. Figures in this style are found at Reims, but the major monument is the west front (c. 1220–30) of Amiens Cathedral.

 Once again, the style changed. On the west front of Reims worked a man called after his most famous figure, the Joseph Master. Working in a style that probably originated in Paris c. 1230, he ignored the restraint of Amiens and the drapery convolutions of the Muldenstil and produced (c. 1240) figures possessing many of the characteristics retained by sculpture for the next 150 years: dainty poses and faces and rather thick drapery hanging in long V-shaped folds that envelop and mask the figure.

      Another aspect of this quest for realism was the spasmodic fashion throughout the 13th century for realistic architectural foliage decoration. This resulted in some astonishingly good botanical studies—at Reims cathedral, for example.

      The effects elsewhere in Europe of this intense period of French experiment were as piecemeal and disjointed as the effects of the architectural changes. In England, the concept of the Great Portal, with its carved tympanum, voussoirs, and side figures, was virtually ignored. The remains of a portal the style of which may be connected with Sens cathedral survive from St. Mary's Abbey, York, England (c. 1210). Rochester cathedral (c. 1150) has carved side figures, and Lincoln cathedral (c. 1140) once had them. The major displays of English early Gothic sculpture, however, took quite a different form. The chief surviving monument is the west front of Wells cathedral (c. 1225–40), where the sculpture, while comparing reasonably well in style with near-contemporary French developments, is spread across the upper facade and hardly related at all to the portal.

 In Germany, the story is similar. On the border between France and Germany stands Strasbourg, the cathedral of which contains on its south front some of the finest sculpture of the period (c. 1230). A very fine and delicate version of the Muldenstil, it comes reasonably close to the best transept sculpture of Chartres. But it differs in two important respects. Predictably, its architectural framework is entirely different; and it has the slightly shrill emotional character, common in German art, that represents an effort to involve and move the spectator. Shrill emotionalism is again found at Magdeburg cathedral in a series of “Wise and Foolish Virgins” (c. 1245) left over from some abandoned sculptural scheme. Influenced by Reims rather than Chartres, the sculpture of Bamberg cathedral (c. 1230–35) is a heavier version of the Muldenstil than that at Strasbourg.

 But of all this German work, by far the most interesting complex is in the west choir (c. 1250) of Naumburg cathedral. Here, the desire for dramatic tension is exploited to good effect, since the figures—a series of lay founders in contemporary costume—are given a realistic place in the architecture, alongside a triforium gallery. Naumburg also has a notable amount of extremely realistic foliage carving.

      It is hard to say what a French mason would have made of this English and German work. With the major Spanish work of the period, however, he would have felt instantly at home. Burgos cathedral has a portal (1230s) that is very close to the general style of Amiens, and its layout is also, by French standards, reasonably conventional.

High Gothic
      Late sculptural developments of the early Gothic period were of great importance for the High Gothic period. The Joseph Master at Reims and the Master of the Vierge Dorée at Amiens both adopted a drapery style that, in various forms, became extremely common for the next century or more; both introduced into their figures a sort of mannered daintiness that became popular. These features appear in an exaggerated form in some of the sculpture for the Sainte-Chapelle, Paris.

      On the whole, this period saw the decline of architectural sculpture. Given the emphasis placed on geometric patterning by the Rayonnant style, perhaps this is not surprising. A few portals, such as those on the west front of Bourges cathedral, were completed, but they have a very limited interest. The field of sculpture that expanded with great rapidity was the more private one, represented by tombs and other monuments.

      For this, the family feeling of Louis IX was partly responsible. By making sure that both his remote ancestors and his next of kin got a decent burial—or reburial—he was responsible for an impressive series of monuments (the remnants of which are now chiefly in Saint-Denis) executed mainly in the years following 1260. Although earlier examples and precedents may be found, Louis IX had a large share in popularizing the idea of the dynastic mausoleum, and many other important people followed suit.

      The monuments executed for St. Louis have come down in such a battered state (almost entirely as a result of the destruction wrought during the French Revolution) that it is difficult to generalize about them. One can say, however, that Louis's masons popularized two important ideas. One was the tomb chest decorated with small figures in niches—figures generally known as weepers, since they often represented members of the family who might be presumed to be in mourning. Later, in the early 14th century, the first representations appear of the heavily cloaked and cowled professional mourners who were normally employed to follow the coffin in a funeral procession. The second innovation introduced by Louis's masons lay in the emphasis given to the effigy. Around 1260 the first attempts were made to endow the effigy with a particular character. This may not have involved portraiture (it is obviously hard to be sure), but it did involve a study of different types of physiognomy, just as the botanical carving of the early Gothic period had involved a study of different kinds of leaves.

      A somewhat similar story may be told of English sculpture during this period. The architectural carving found at Westminster Abbey (mainly of the 1250s) has much of the daintiness of contemporary French work, although the drapery is still more like that of the early Chartres or Wells sculpture than that of the Joseph Master. The baggy fold forms of the Joseph Master rarely appear in England before the sculptured angels of the Lincoln Angel Choir (after 1256).

      Architectural sculpture in England probably remained more interesting than the continental equivalent because first-rate masons continued to work in this field in England until the end of the 13th century. Hence, around 1295 one can still find a work such as the botanical carving of Southwell Chapter House. Even in the 14th century, there are such architectural and sculptural curiosities as the west front of Exeter cathedral. Sculptural interest, however, in buildings such as Gloucester Cathedral Choir (begun soon after 1330), where the effect depends on traceried panels, is virtually nonexistent; and the “leaves of Southwell” were succeeded almost at once by an extremely dull form of foliage commonly known as “bubbleleaf,” which remained more or less standard for the 14th and 15th centuries.

      As in France, much of the virtuosity in carving went into private tombs and monuments. The best surviving medieval mausoleum is Westminster Abbey, where a large number of monuments in a variety of mediums (especially purbeck, bronze, alabaster, and freestone) is further enhanced by some of the floors and tombs executed by Italian mosaic workers introduced by Henry III. Especially well preserved is the tomb of Edmund Crouchback, earl of Lancaster (Lancaster, Edmund, 1st Earl of) (died 1296), which has a splendid canopy and retains some of its original colouring.

      As in the early Gothic period, the west of England produced some highly original work that appears to stand outside the normal canon of European development. The earliest monument in this series is the tomb of Edward II (c. 1330–35), which is notable for one of the most elaborate surviving medieval canopies. It is preceded stylistically by the wooden canopies of stalls in Exeter cathedral and thus is likely to be a translation into stone of carpenters' work. It was followed by a series of monuments, in Tewkesbury and elsewhere, extending into the 15th century and then dying out.

      German High Gothic sculpture is represented by some rather dainty, elegant figures, enveloped in curving and bulky drapery, around the choir of Cologne cathedral (consecrated in 1322). There is also some impressive figure sculpture on the west front of Strasbourg cathedral (begun after 1277). It is strongly influenced by the Joseph Master of Reims but also by the earlier Gothic sculpture of Strasbourg itself. Although it varies in style, much of it is far more expressive than the related French work. The sculptors seem to have been trying to capture an emotive mood.

      Spanish (Spain) High Gothic architectural sculpture is probably less interesting but, by French standards, is more conventional than the German. Major portals exist at León (13th century) and Toledo (14th century) cathedrals, which conform more or less to the rather elegant and mannered French style. Spain also possesses a considerable number of interesting tombs from this period.

Italian Gothic
 The figurative arts in Italy during the period 1250–1350 have a strong line of development. The most important 13th-century sculptors were Nicola Pisano (Pisano, Nicola) (1210/20–1278/84) and his son Giovanni (Pisano, Giovanni) (c. 1245–after 1314). Both worked mainly in Tuscany, and both executed pulpits that rank as their major completed works. Nicola's style, as seen in the Pisa Baptistery (1259–60) and Siena cathedral (1265–68) pulpits, was heavily influenced by Classical sculpture—especially by the facial types and the methods of constructing pictorial relief compositions. Nevertheless, his reliefs resemble 13th-century sculpture, particularly in the handling of the drapery. Moreover, in moving from Pisa to Siena, one is conscious of a transition from a strongly antique style to something much closer to northern Gothic sculpture. Nicola's use of Classical ideas was in some way linked with a search for a more realistic style. It forms, in this respect, an interesting parallel to the Muldenstil work of Nicholas of Verdun, who was active in the Mosan region from the late 12th to the early 13th century.

 The sculptural style of Giovanni does not develop from that of his father. His pulpit in S. Andrea Pistoia (completed 1301), for instance, is technically less detailed and refined but emotionally much more dramatic. While it is possible that the emotionalism of his work was inspired by Hellenistic sculpture, it is also possible that Giovanni had travelled in and been influenced by the north, especially Germany.

      Giovanni's first major independent work was a facade for Siena cathedral (c. 1285–95). The lower half alone was completed, and it survives in the present building along with a large proportion of Giovanni's imposing figure sculpture. It is quite dissimilar to French facades, although the placing of the main sculpture above the portals finds an elusive parallel in Wells cathedral, in England (c. 1225–40).

      The fame of Nicola's workshop spread to other areas of Italy. For S. Domenico in Bologna, his workshop made a shrine for the body of St. Dominic (1260s). And in Milan, a shrine for the body of St. Peter Martyr was made for S. Eustorgio (1335–39) by Giovanni di Balduccio in a style derived from the Pisano workshop. The most famous Pisano “exports,” however, were Arnolfo Di Cambio, who worked for the papal court in Rome c. 1275–1300, and Tino di Camaino, who worked at the Neapolitan court c. 1323–37.

      Arnolfo's style is the more difficult to understand. Although he worked alongside Giovanni Pisano during the 1260s, their works have little in common. Arnolfo's sculpture is very solid and impassive. He excelled at formal, static compositions, such as were required for church furniture and for tombs. He designed the funerary chapel as well as the tomb of Pope Boniface VIII and like the Pisanos was architect as well as sculptor; indeed, he was the first architect of the new cathedral of Florence (founded 1296).

       Tino Di Camaino went south after a training in Siena and a successful career in Tuscany. Sometimes his style approaches the elegance and sweetness of northern 14th-century sculpture, but there is generally a residual heaviness, especially in the faces, that reminds one of his origins in the Pisano circle. He was famous as a tomb sculptor, and the largest collection of his monuments is in Naples (much of the sculpture, however, was executed by his workshop). The tombs make an interesting comparison with those of the French and English royal houses. At another mausoleum (of the Scaliger family (della Scala family)), at Verona, the figure sculpture is reminiscent of the Pisano style, but the decorative canopy work is more elaborate and closer to northern art.

      The workshop of the facade of Orvieto cathedral and the work of the sculptor and architect Andrea Pisano (Pisano, Andrea) (no relation to Nicola and Giovanni) are less clearly connected with the Pisano tradition. The facade of Orvieto was designed by the Sienese Lorenzo Maitani c. 1310. The sculptural decoration is in varying styles, the best of which is an extraordinarily low and delicate relief that gives an almost pictorial quality.

      Andrea Pisano is known chiefly through the bronze doors completed for the Baptistery of Florence cathedral during the 1330s. The scenes of the life of St. John the Baptist are set in quatrefoils (a four-lobed foliation), a common High Gothic decorative motif. Within this awkward shape, the episodes are composed with masterly skill. Although nothing certain has been established about the training of Andrea Pisano, his background is likely to have been similar to that of some of the Orvieto sculptors. The main difference is the evident impact of Giotto's painting, which led Andrea to make his figures rather stocky and solid.

      Andrea had a son, Nino Pisano, about whom little is known but from whose hand a group of Madonnas survives. They are interesting in that they veer strongly in the direction of daintiness and sweetness and, to this extent, look more northern than almost any other group of Italian sculpture before the early work of Lorenzo Ghiberti.

      The plastic arts are harder to understand in this period, because they have been far more frequently the subject of wanton destruction. Enormous quantities, for example, of goldsmiths' work owned by the French royal family have almost entirely vanished. A few of the remaining pieces testify to the quality of the work, which is beautifully finished and gaily coloured in the technique of en ronde bosse enamelling—for example, the “Thorn Reliquary” (c. 1400–10; British Museum, London), and the “Goldenes Rössel” at the Stiftskirche, Altötting, Germany (1403).

      More seriously, large quantities of private monumental sculpture have been lost in France and the Low Countries. The main sculptor of the French royal family in the second half of the 14th century was a native of Valenciennes, André Beauneveu. His reputation was so widespread that he rather surprisingly earned a mention in the chronicles of Jean Froissart. He produced a large number of monuments, especially for King Charles V, of which several effigies survive. This sculpture, while technically good, is somewhat pedestrian and hardly serves as a prelude to the work of Claus Sluter (Sluter, Claus), who worked for Charles V's brother Philip the Bold, duke of Burgundy.

 Sluter's surviving work is mainly at Dijon, France, where he was active from about 1390 to about 1406. His figure style is very strongly characterized and detailed and, at times, emotional. This suggests that his origins are German and that he may have come from the region of Westphalia. The intrusive realism of Sluter's work, however, is also symptomatic of a gradual change in sculptural style during this period. The strong characterization of the faces of his figures finds parallels in the near-contemporary triforium busts and Přemyslid tombs in St. Vitus' Cathedral in Prague. Sluter's drapery style, which veers dramatically away from the somewhat reticent elegance of previous court sculpture, also has parallels in the east. Bohemia and Austria possess a series of Madonna figures (Schöne Madonnen) swathed in extremely elaborate and artificial drapery arrangements.

      The International Gothic sculptural style forms an interesting prelude to developments in Italy, especially to the early work of Donatello and the gradual introduction of Classical ideas into sculpture, for these ideas can be seen as part of a search for an alternative to the elegance of International Gothic. How far Florentines had any knowledge of northern developments is not clear. Ghiberti certainly knew a little about them; moreover, the task of rebuilding Milan cathedral during this period (c. 1400) brought large numbers of northern masons across the Alps. As yet, however, the extent to which the sculpture on Milan cathedral was influenced by northern ideas has not been determined.

      England stands apart from much of the development represented by Sluter's style. The royal tombs in Westminster Abbey, which extend up to Richard II (died 1400), do not reflect changes subsequent to the phase of André Beauneveu. Further, a fashion for bronze effigies, going back to the effigy of Henry III (1291–93), persisted in England. But whatever the regional idiosyncracies, Westminster tombs, existing as a group in situ, provide a somewhat faded and battered impression of what these great collections of medieval family monuments looked like.

Late Gothic
      In the years around 1400, when International Gothic flourished, Italian and northern artists had achieved some sort of rapprochement. Under the renewed influence of antique art, Italy drew away again, and it was not until the 16th century that the north showed any real disposition to follow suit in the imitation of Classical models. While painting and architecture of the 15th century have a reasonably well-defined development, sculptural development is harder to trace—partly because much crucial work (especially in the Low Countries) has been destroyed. It is clear, however, that elaboration rather than restraint was the rule—indeed, the exceptions to the rule (mainly found in France) stand out. This taste for the highly complicated and elaborate—especially in Spain and Germany—was encouraged by the dual influences of painting and architecture. Like the painters, the sculptors enjoyed giving extremely realistic detail and expression to their figures; and, like the architects, they enjoyed complicated tracery work, often encasing their compositions in tabernacle-like enclosures of brilliantly fantastic architecture. To 20th-century eyes, the result may seem overloaded and the total impression exhausting; but in its time the work of, for example, Michael Pacher or Veit Stoss must have been admired precisely for the way in which the sculptor used every conceivable opportunity to display his virtuosity.

      One interesting characteristic of the late Gothic period deserves comment: the increase in the amount of art produced by foreign artists for countries such as Hungary, Poland, and Scotland. Competition between countries for the work of the best artists was not new. Throughout the Middle Ages artists travelled widely. In the 13th century Villard De Honnecourt went from northern France to Hungary, and Roman marble workers journeyed to Westminster. In the period c. 1400 there was much interchange between northern and southern Europe. In the 15th century, this general pattern was confirmed; the Netherlandish sculptor Gerhaert Nikolaus von Leyden (Gerhaert von Leyden, Nikolaus), for instance, became court sculptor in Vienna, and the Italian sculptor and architect Andrea Sansovino (Sansovino, Andrea) served the Portuguese court in the 1490s. There is also the work of the Franconian sculptor Veit Stoss (Stoss, Veit) for the Polish court at Cracow (c. 1480) and the work of Bernt Notke of Lübeck for Aarhus (Denmark), Tallinn (Estonia), and Stockholm (c. 1470–90). Numerous other objects could be added. More specifically, there is the altar executed by Meister Francke (Francke, Meister) of Hamburg for Helsingfors (1420s) and Hugo van der Goes' (Goes, Hugo van der) panels for the Palace of Holyrood, near Edinburgh (1470s).

      Sluter's (Sluter, Claus) work for the court of Burgundy lasted about 15 years. During this time, he worked on three major items: the main portal of the chapel of the Charterhouse near Dijon; inside the chapel, the tomb of his patron, Philip the Bold; (Philip II) and a large Calvary group for the Charterhouse cloisters. When he died in 1406, the continuance of his work was assured by the employment of his nephew and heir, Claus de Werve, until his death in 1439. Further, the pattern of the finally completed tomb of Philip the Bold became famous immediately and was frequently imitated all over Europe.

      The forcefulness and boldness of Sluter's sculpted figures is combined with elaborate decorative work—on the canopy of the tomb of Philip the Bold, for example. A similar decorativeness is found in the contemporary carved Dijon altarpieces of Jacques de Baerze. The combination remained more or less constant for the rest of the Gothic period.

      The spread of this style is hard to trace. In Germany, the most interesting artists worked in the second half of the century. Two of the more important sculptors were Gerhaert Nikolaus von Leyden and Michael Pacher (Pacher, Michael) of Brunico. They were followed by a number of virtuoso southern German artists: Veit Stoss of Nürnberg, Tilman Riemenschneider (Riemenschneider, Tilman) of Würzburg, and Adam Kraft (Kraft, Adam) of Nürnberg. In northern Germany, the most original figure was Bernt Notke (Notke, Bernt) of Lübeck. Much of the fantastic decorative involvement of his work may now seem overwhelming. The love of realistic detail is well illustrated by Notke's monumental group of St. George and the Dragon (St. Nicholas' Church, Stockholm), where the dragon's spines are made from real antlers. The group as a whole is, of course, of wood, a medium that could be employed to create intricate, open, thin, and spiky forms impossible in stone.

      On the whole, the sculpture produced in France seems to show more decorative restraint. Certainly, the chief French works surviving take the form of large groups, as in the Tonnerre “Entombment” (1450s), or of architectural schemes in which the decoration is clearly subordinate to the figures, as in Châteaudun, Castle Chapel (c. 1425).

      Restraint is also notable in the chantry chapel of Richard Beauchamp, earl of Warwick (c. 1450; Warwick), which has some obvious motifs taken over from the workshop of Sluter. But many of the chantry chapels so common in 15th-century England—for instance, the Henry V Chantry, Westminster Abbey (1440s), or the chantries of John Alcock (c. 1488) and Nicolas West (c. 1534) at Ely cathedral—show an extraordinary mixture of sculpture and tracery work more reminiscent, as an expression of taste, of Germany or Spain.

      The full impression of such profusion can now best be judged from the Chapel of Henry VII (c. 1503–c. 1515; Westminster Abbey), which is unique in England for the amount of sculpture that has been preserved.

 Spanish (Spain) 15th-century sculpture also tended to be extremely ornate. A number of huge, carved high altarpieces survive—for instance, in the cathedrals of Burgos (1486–88) and Toledo (begun 1498). Some of the altar pieces, like that at Toledo, were designed and executed under the direction of German or Netherlandish artists.

      The change from late Gothic to Renaissance was superficially far less cataclysmic than the change from Romanesque to Gothic. In the figurative arts, it was not the great shift from symbolism to realistic representation but a change from one sort of realism to another.

      Architecturally, as well, the initial changes involved decorative material. For this reason, the early stages of Renaissance art outside Italy are hard to disentangle from late Gothic. Monuments like the huge Franche-Comté chantry chapel at Brou (1513–32) may have intermittent Italian motifs, but the general effect intended was not very different from that of Henry VII's Chapel at Westminster (Westminster Abbey). The Shrine of St. Sebaldus at Nürnberg (1508–19) has the general shape of a Gothic tomb with canopy, although much of the detail is Italianate. In fact, throughout Europe the “Italian Renaissance” meant, for artists between about 1500 to 1530, the enjolivement, or embellishment, of an already rich decorative repertoire with shapes, motifs, and figures adapted from another canon of taste. The history of the northern artistic Renaissance is in part the story of the process by which artists gradually realized that Classicism represented another canon of taste and treated it accordingly.

      But it is possible to suggest a more profound character to the change. Late Gothic has a peculiar aura of finality about it. From about 1470 to 1520, one gets the impression that the combination of decorative richness and realistic detail was being worked virtually to death. Classical antiquity at least provided an alternative form of art. It is arguable that change would have come in the north anyway and that adoption of Renaissance forms was a matter of coincidence and convenience. They were there at hand, for experiment.

      Their use was certainly encouraged, however, by the general admiration for Classical antiquity. They had a claim to “rightness” that led ultimately to the abandonment of all Gothic forms as being barbarous. This development belongs to the history of the Italian Renaissance, but the phenomenon emphasizes one aspect of medieval art. Through all the changes of Romanesque and Gothic, no body of critical literature appeared in which people tried to evaluate the art and distinguish old from new, good from bad. The development of such a literature was part of the Renaissance and, as such, was intimately related to the defense of Classical art. This meant that Gothic art was left in an intellectually defenseless state. All the praise went to ancient art, most of the blame to the art of the more recent past. Insofar as Gothic art had no critical literature by which a part of it, at least, could be justified, it was, to that extent, inarticulate.

Andrew Henry Robert Martindale Ed.

The Renaissance

      The revival of Classical learning in Italy, which was so marked a feature of Italian culture during the 15th century, was paralleled by an equal passion for the beauty of Classical (Classicism and Neoclassicism) design in all the artistic fields; and when this eager delight in the then fresh and sensuous graciousness that is the mark of much Classical work—to the Italians of that time, seemingly the expression of a golden age—became universal, complete domination of the Classical ideal in art was inevitable.

      This turning to Classical models was less sudden and revolutionary than it seemed. Throughout the history of Romanesque and Gothic Italian art, the tradition of Classical structure and ornament still remained alive; again and again, in the 12th and 13th centuries Classical forms—the acanthus leaf, moulding ornaments, the treatment of drapery in a relief—are imitated, often with crudeness, to be sure, but with a basic sympathy for the old imperial Roman methods of design. Nicola Pisano, at work in the mid-13th century, was but the first of many Italian artists, particularly sculptors, to turn definitely to Roman antecedents for inspiration.

      Sculpture was the first of the arts in Florence to develop the Renaissance style. Some would date the beginning of the Renaissance to the sculptural competition in 1401 for the bronze doors of the Baptistery (Gates of Paradise) of the cathedral of Florence; others would propose the commission to Donatello and Nanni di Banco in 1408 for four seated saints for the facade of the cathedral. The competition reliefs for the bronze doors, submitted in 1402, reveal a change in attitude toward sculpture, and the figures of the Evangelists are the manifestation of that change. The development of Florentine sculpture roughly parallels the development in painting from a dignified monumental style to a relaxed sweetness, although there is no one in painting to approach the rich inventive genius of Donatello.

      Donatello, like his friends the architect Brunelleschi and the painter Masaccio, was one of the most outstandingly original artists in Western history. He undoubtedly was influenced by the concepts of antiquity current in Florence, but there was relatively little antique sculpture visible for him to study in his formative years. He first appears as a mature genius working on two of the major projects of the 15th century, the sculptural decoration of the cathedral of Florence and of the guild church of Or San Michele.

 His “St. George,” begun c. 1415 for the niche of the Armourer's Guild at Or San Michele, indicates the new direction in sculpture. Here he reveals such a deep knowledge of the human figure at rest and in movement that he may already have begun his investigation into proportion and the statics and dynamics of the human figure. But the tension between repose and action—the representation, in fact, of pause—also is a psychological achievement, hardly to be matched in earlier sculpture. It is noteworthy, too, that the monumental simplicity and power of the piece is achieved by such a subtle manipulation of the planes and such a technical virtuosity in carving the marble that the observer is rarely concerned with the material. The figure is neither flesh nor stone; it simply is.

      In the relief under the niche occupied by “St. George,” Donatello introduced another great innovation that was to have unlimited repercussions in Florentine art. Relief has always been a problem for sculptors because it must follow a narrow path between the two-dimensionality of painting and the three-dimensionality of full-round sculpture. Donatello conceived of a very low relief in which the subtle modelling of planes suggests the illusion of depth and figures moving in space while still respecting the integrity of the plane. He continued to develop the potentialities of this relief style throughout his long career and strongly determined the kind of relief sculpture executed in Florence.

 In his brief career Nanni di Banco was as prolific and inventive as Donatello. In his earliest works, such as the “Isaiah,” he approached more closely the Classic ideal than did Donatello, and in his late work at the Porta della Mandorla he began to evolve a relaxed style that was to have its greatest impact after mid-century. About 1411–13 he executed the “Quattro Santi Coronati” (“Four Crowned Saints”; see photograph—>) for the niche of the woodworkers and stoneworkers guild at Or San Michele. In this commission he solved one of the most difficult problems facing the sculptor, that of the group conceived in the round. Although some of the figures still retain certain Gothicizing elements in the draperies and in the heads, the major impression is of a group of Roman senators born again in the Renaissance. The group is bound together by the spatial relation of one to the other and by a kind of mute conversation in which they are all engaged.

 Lorenzo Ghiberti (Ghiberti, Lorenzo) won the competition for the bronze doors of the Baptistery. He began work in 1403 and set the doors in place in 1424. Ghiberti's fame rests upon his second set of doors, the “Gates of Paradise” (Gates of Paradise) (1425–52). The gilded bronze reliefs are treated almost like paintings, for they are rectangular in format and contained within a frame. Unlike the earlier doors, in which the ground plane is simply a neutral backdrop, it is here treated in such a way that it suggests sky and space. Figures are placed in landscape or in perspectivally rendered architecture to suggest a greater depth to the relief than actually exists. At the time that he was executing his first set of bronze doors, Ghiberti undertook to cast the first life-sized bronze statue since antiquity, his “St. John the Baptist” (1412–16) for Or San Michele. Although the figure and its draperies reveal Ghiberti's strong adherence to a late Gothic style, with this work he moved technically into the Renaissance. The influence of Donatello and Nanni di Banco liberates the “St. Matthew” of 1419–22, for Or San Michele, from the older traditions. Ghiberti achieved fame in his own time as a bronze founder and as the master of the shop in which many sculptors and painters of the early Renaissance were trained.

 The Sienese sculptor Jacopo Della Quercia was the most important sculptor of 15th-century Siena. He executed the Fonte Gaia (1414–19), a public fountain for the Piazza del Campo, the main square of Siena, and was awarded the commission for a baptismal font in the baptistery of Siena cathedral. Always a procrastinating artist, he postponed work on the font to such a degree that the reliefs were finally awarded to other sculptors, including Donatello and Ghiberti. Jacopo's major work is the relief sculpture around the main portal of S. Petronio, Bologna (1425–38; see photograph—>). The sculptural treatment of the low relief figures and the suggestion of a space adequate to contain them parallels the painting of Masaccio. The dramatic vigour and powerfully conceived forms had a great influence on the young Michelangelo.

 Donatello dominated Florentine sculpture of the second quarter of the 15th century. He executed a series of prophets and a “Cantoria,” or singing balcony, for the cathedral, saints for Or San Michele, decorative reliefs and bronze doors for the Old Sacristy of S. Lorenzo, and a bronze “David” (now in the Bargello, Florence) that comes closer to recapturing the spirit of antiquity than any other work of the early Renaissance—indeed, the very idea of a freestanding sculpture of a nude hero was without precedent since antiquity. During the decade 1443–53 Donatello was in Padua executing the equestrian statue of Gattamelata to stand in front of the church (see photograph—>). Erasmo da Narni, called Gattamelata, was a condottiere, or leader of mercenary troops, who rose to a position of importance. The statue is an idealization of nature in both horse and rider and a reinterpretation of antiquity. Donatello certainly knew the antique statue of Marcus Aurelius in Rome during his stay there (1431–33). He uses the concept of antiquity, the pose of the antique bronze horses at St. Mark's in Venice, and the forms of the war-horse of his own time. The rider is clothed in quasi-antique armour and bears little or no resemblance to the effigy on Gattamelata's tomb inside the church. Donatello is not concerned with particulars but with the idealized and generalized aspects of man that reveal his potential nobility. The “Gattamelata” states the basic concept that almost all equestrian statues have followed since that time. Donatello's presence in Padua gave rise to a productive local school of bronze sculptors and workers, and his reliefs on the high altar there influenced painters and sculptors of northern Italy.

      One of his first works upon his return to Florence was a wooden statue of Mary Magdalene for the baptistery of the cathedral. The nervous energy and conscious distortion of forms that may be detected in all his work becomes explicit in the emaciated figure clothed in her own hair. This same emotionalism and distortion is even more pronounced in his last work, the pulpits for the church of S. Lorenzo in Florence.

 Antonio Pollaiuolo expresses in his sculpture the same sort of muscular activity and linear movement as in his painting—he has the energy but not the interest in emotion found in Donatello. His small bronze “Hercules and Antaeus” (c. 1475; Bargello, Florence; see photograph—>) is a forceful depiction of the struggle between these two powerful men from classical mythology. The angular contours of the limbs and the jagged voids between the figures are all directed toward expressing tautness and muscular strain, and the work is one of the earliest examples of the statuette in modern times.

      The popularity of small bronzes (bronze work), usually of secular, often of pagan, subjects and sometimes objects of utility (inkwells, candleholders, and so on), increased in popularity toward the end of the century. The elegant, polished antique gods made by Antico in Mantua and the brilliantly modelled satyrs made by Riccio (Riccio, Andrea) in Padua set a standard in such works that has never been excelled. Bronze statuettes were made by almost all the major sculptors of the 16th century in Italy.

      In complete contrast with Pollaiuolo, Desiderio da Settignano is perhaps best known for his portraits of women and children, although he also executed two public monuments of major importance in Florence—the tomb of Carlo Marsuppini in Sta. Croce (c. 1453–55) and the “Tabernacle of the Sacrament” in S. Lorenzo (1461). The tabernacle, which was probably assembled and completed by assistants after Desiderio's death, indicates the new trends taking shape in Florentine sculpture. The central panel employs a perspectivized space. The figures moving into that space are defined in a linear manner that emphasizes contours and billowing draperies to suggest movement. The lateral, full round figures of angels are modelled with a delicacy and subtlety of surface to create relaxed and sweet figures very different from Donatello's strong, virile early saints.

      Antonio Rossellino (Rossellino, Antonio) collaborated with his older brother Bernardo (Rossellino, Bernardo) on the tomb of Leonardo Bruni (Bruni, Leonardo) (c. 1445–49) in Sta. Croce but soon became the dominant personality in the family business. The great sculptural complex of the Cardinal of Portugal tomb (1461–66) in S. Miniato al Monte (San Miniato al Monte) at Florence reveals the same general tendencies as Desiderio's contemporary work. The tomb is decorated with soft and relaxed angels and a tender Madonna and Christ Child in the roundel. Similar tendencies can be found in such artists as Agostino di Duccio, Mino da Fiesole, and Luca della Robbia.

 Andrea del Verrocchio (Verrocchio, Andrea del) was more interested than these sculptors were in movement, which he expressed in a somewhat restrained manner. His group of “Christ and St. Thomas” for Or San Michele (c. 1467–83) solves the problem of a crowded niche by placing St. Thomas partly outside the niche and causing him to turn inward toward the figure of Christ. His large equestrian statue of Bartolomeo Colleoni (Colleoni, Bartolomeo) (1483–88; see photograph—>) in Venice descends from Donatello's “Gattamelata,” but a comparison of the two works reveals Verrocchio's evidence of greater interest in movement. The “Putto with Dolphin” (c. 1479; formerly in the Palazzo Vecchio, Florence, but now replaced by a copy) is at once an exquisite fountain decoration, an antique motif restated in Renaissance terms, and the clearest statement of Verrocchio's interest in suggested movement. The child in the piece is seen to be turning; the movement is reinforced by the fish, and the suggestion of motion culminates in the actual movement of the water spouting from the dolphin's mouth. Verrocchio also reveals his indebtedness to Desiderio in the way he treats the surfaces.

Michelangelo and the High Renaissance
      Sixteenth-century sculpture is dominated by the figure of Michelangelo. Although he was born and trained in the 15th century, his style and the bulk of his creations place him firmly in the 16th century. Michelangelo's example was so powerful that Mannerist Florentine artists such as Bartolommeo Ammannati and Baccio Bandinelli could only struggle feebly against it. Others, such as Vincenzo Danti, found it easier to succumb and to follow docilely. Jacopo Sansovino effectively escaped the influence of Michelangelo by transferring his activities to Venice. In Padua a group of bronze workers continued to develop the tradition of fantastic and often beautiful small bronzes that had its origins in Donatello's shop. It was only toward mid-century with artists such as Benvenuto Cellini or at the end of the century with Giambologna that Florentine sculpture found individuals who were able to assimilate Michelangelo's pervasive influence.

  Michelangelo Buonarroti is said to have learned sculpture from the minor Florentine sculptor Bertoldo di Giovanni, who provided a link with the tradition of Donatello. An early work, the “Madonna of the Stairs” (c. 1492; Casa Buonarroti, Florence), reflects a type of Donatello Madonna and Donatello's very low relief. After the expulsion of the Medici from Florence, Michelangelo fled to Bologna; there he executed three figures for the tomb of S. Domenico and saw the powerful reliefs of Jacopo della Quercia (see photograph—>). By 1496 he was in Rome, where he carved a “Bacchus,” now in the Bargello, Florence. Michelangelo recaptures the antique treatment of the young male figure by the soft modulation of contours. The figure seems to be slightly off-balance, and the parted lips and hazy eyes suggest that he is under the influence of wine. The little faun also joins in the Bacchic revel by slyly stealing some grapes. In his first major sculptural work the 21-year-old artist succeeded in capturing the spirit of the antique as no artist before him had done. The “Pietà” (today in St. Peter's; see photograph—>), commissioned by a French cardinal, was begun immediately upon the completion of the “Bacchus.” The motif of the pietà is German in origin, but it is so completely transformed by Michelangelo that the work is one of the harbingers of the High Renaissance. The robes of the Madonna are exaggerated to create a solid base for the pyramidal composition. The figure of Christ is bent and twisted, in part to express the suffering of the crucifixion and in part to make it conform to the contours of the pyramid. All is directed toward creating a calm, dignified, and stable composition that expresses emotion and religious fervour by implication rather than by overstatement. The work is carried to a higher degree of finish than any of the succeeding works, and it is one of the few that Michelangelo signed.

      In 1501 Michelangelo was recalled to his native city of Florence to execute an over-life-size figure of “David.” (David) When the piece was completed, Michelangelo's contemporaries judged it too important to place out of sight high up on the cathedral, as had been originally proposed, and a committee voted to place it in front of the Palazzo Vecchio, the seat of Florentine civic government. Michelangelo's technical virtuosity is dramatically demonstrated by the fact that he extracted a figure about 14 feet (four metres) tall from a spoiled block. The youthful David was one of the symbols of Florence. Michelangelo sees him as a slightly awkward adolescent with large hands and feet, the body of a boy, and the head of a young man—a powerful figure who has not yet realized his full potential. The balance of the figure is subtly arranged to keep the bearing leg under the head while permitting the apparently nonbearing leg to be relaxed. The positions are reversed in the arms, giving the cross-axis balance of working and relaxed members. The head turns to the left to meet Goliath and the stone of the sling is concealed in the right hand. It is this subtle balance and adjustment of parts to create a unified and harmonious whole that places this work firmly in the High Renaissance style that was appearing simultaneously in painting and architecture.

      While in Florence from 1501 to 1505, Michelangelo carved “Madonna and Child” for Notre-Dame in Brugge. He began but did not finish a “St. Matthew” for the cathedral, and he painted the “Holy Family” (c. 1503–05; Uffizi, Florence), his reply to Leonardo's eminently popular “The Virgin and Child with St. Anne.” In competition with Leonardo he began but did not finish the “Battle of Cascina” for the Palazzo Vecchio. On command of Julius II he returned to Rome.

      The Roman years (1506–16) are characterized by what Michelangelo later called the tragedy of the tomb. He had been called to Rome to execute a monumental sepulchre for Pope Julius II. The Pope's financial difficulties and the jealousies of the papal court diverted the artist from the tomb to the painting of the Sistine ceiling. The death of Julius in 1513 caused the heirs to press for a smaller tomb and rapid completion. After many years of negotiations, in 1545 a much-reduced version was set in place in S. Pietro in Vincoli, instead of in St. Peter's as originally planned. The figures by Michelangelo for the tomb are now widely scattered. Only the “Moses” remains in place from the original projects. This figure, which recalls so strongly Donatello's (Donatello) “St. John the Evangelist,” was intended to be placed well above the observer's head and is so adjusted. The “Dying Slave” and the “Bound Slave” are now in the Louvre. The “Victory,” also intended for the tomb, was executed c. 1532–34 in Florence, where it has remained. Four unfinished figures of slaves were carved before 1534 and remained in Florence, where they once formed part of the grotto decoration at the Pitti Palace.

      With the election of Pope Leo X in 1513, Michelangelo was diverted from his projects and sent to Florence to design a facade for S. Lorenzo, a church under Medici patronage. Although Michelangelo promised that the facade would become the showplace of Italian sculpture, nothing came of the project. He was assigned instead to construct a tomb chapel as a pendant to Brunelleschi's Old Sacristy, and later to provide suitable housing for the Medici library in S. Lorenzo. While engaged in these projects Michelangelo was also put in charge of the fortifications of Florence prior to and during the siege of 1529. He complained, justly, that no one can plan and execute three projects simultaneously.

 The Medici (Medici Chapel) tombs (1520–34) gave the artist the opportunity to plan the architectural setting of his sculpture and to control both the light cast on the work and the position of the observer. Since the chapel was originally planned to contain the tombs of the Medici popes Leo X and Clement VII, it is best seen from behind the altar, where the papal celebrant of the mass for the dead would have stood. On the left is the tomb of Giuliano, on the right the tomb of Lorenzo, and before the observer the Madonna and Christ Child with the Medici patron saints, Cosmas and Damian; and beneath the two sarcophagi respectively lie the recumbent figures of “Night” and “Day,” and “Dawn” and “Dusk.”

      The “Pietà,” or “Deposition,” in the museum of the cathedral of Florence dates from around 1550 and may have been intended by Michelangelo for use in his own tomb. The figure of Nicodemus is a self-portrait and indicates Michelangelo's deep religious convictions and his growing concern with religion. His final work, the “Rondanini Pietà” (1552–64), now in the Castello Sforzesco, Milan, is certainly his most personal and most deeply felt expression in sculpture. The artist had almost completely carved the piece when he changed his mind, returned to the block, and drastically reduced the breadth of the figures. He was working on the stone 10 days before he died, and the piece remains unfinished. In its rough state the “Rondanini Pietà” clearly shows that Michelangelo had turned from the rather muscular figure of Christ of his earlier works (as can be seen from the partially detached original right arm) to a more elongated and more dematerialized form.

      Whether in Rome or Florence, Michelangelo had a strong influence on sculptors of the 16th century. Vincenzo Danti followed closely in Michelangelo's footsteps. His bronze “Julius III” of 1553–56 in Perugia is derived from Michelangelo's lost bronze statue of Julius II for Bologna. Many of his figures in marble are only free variations on themes by Michelangelo. In much the same way, Baccio Bandinelli (Bandinelli, Baccio) attempted to rival the monumentality of Michelangelo's “David” and the complexity of his “Victory” in the statue of “Hercules and Cacus” (1534), which was placed as a companion to the “David” in front of the Palazzo Vecchio. Bartolommeo Ammannati (Ammannati, Bartolommeo) should be best known for his design of the bridge of Sta. Trinità in Florence, but his most visible work is the Neptune Fountain (1560–75) in the Piazza della Signoria, with its gigantic figure of Neptune turned toward the “David” in presumptuous rivalry.

 Benvenuto Cellini (Cellini, Benvenuto) through his celebrated autobiography has left a fuller account of his picturesque life than that of any other artist of the 16th century. He was in Rome from 1519 to 1540 and was one of the defenders of the pope during the siege of the Castel Sant'Angelo. In France from 1540 to 1545, he executed there the celebrated saltcellar for Francis I and the “Nymph of Fontainebleau” (Louvre). The saltcellar is at once an example of 16th-century conspicuous consumption and of Mannerist conceits in art. It is of solid gold, which is covered in part by enamels as though it were a base metal. It was designed for use as a functional object upon the King's table to hold nothing more than common table salt. On his return to Florence in 1545 Cellini received the commission to cast the bronze “Perseus,” now in the Loggia dei Lanzi, Florence (see photograph—>), which he describes in some detail in his Autobiography. The youthful figure of Perseus seems to retain some of the airiness from his flight on the winged sandals of Hermes. He holds aloft the head of the Medusa in an outstretched arm, thus creating an open composition that exploits to the full the potential of the bronze medium. Void is almost as important as solid in this light and airy composition that would have been unthinkable and impossible in marble. Cellini intended the figure to be seen from a variety of viewing points, a relatively new idea in sculpture of this sort, and he leads the observer around by the position of the arms and the legs.

 Florentine sculpture at the end of the 16th century was dominated by the Fleming Giambologna and by his shop assistants. Giambologna went to Italy for study shortly after mid-century and settled in Florence in 1557. His earlier major work in Italy is the Fountain of Neptune (1563–66) in Bologna. By early 1565 he had also cast the earliest of his many versions of the bronze “Flying Mercury” that is his most famous creation. The ideas of Cellini's “Perseus” are here carried to their logical conclusion. The god borne along on the air by his winged sandals touches earth only on the slenderest base possible, which is, in fact, represented as a jet of air from the mouth of a wind god. The statue is perfectly balanced according to principles discovered early in the 15th century, yet the outthrust arms and legs give it a feeling of movement and of lightness. Giambologna understood Michelangelo's figura serpentinata, the upward spiralling composition, better than any sculptor of the 16th century. His marble group of the “Rape of the Sabines” (1579–83), in the Loggia dei Lanzi, Florence, interweaves three figures in an upward spiralling composition that prefigures the Baroque. Outside Florence, at the present Villa Demidoff in Pratolino, he carved a figure of the Apennines (1581) that seems to be a part of the living rock; it is an excellent example of late Mannerism, in which a paradoxical relationship between art and nature is often cultivated. As the favourite sculptor of the Medici, Giambologna and his prolific shop dominated Florentine sculpture at the end of the 16th century, training artists who were to carry late 16th-century ideas into the rest of Europe and prepare the way for the nascent Baroque.

John R. Spencer Ed.
      In sculpture, Venice was less independent of Florence and Rome than in painting. The major 16th-century impetus came from Jacopo Sansovino (Sansovino, Jacopo), a central Italian who arrived in Venice in 1527. Sansovino never adopted the full-scale Mannerism of Florence, and his style retained a High Renaissance flavour, but his pupils Danese Cattaneo and Alessandro Vittoria were selectively able to develop the more mannered aspects of Sansovino's style into a Venetian species of Mannerism.

      Vittoria stands closer to Florentine style than his contemporaries in painting, particularly in his decorative work, and his small bronzes display a serpentine grace surpassed only by Giambologna in Florence. His marble figures are, however, often more directly expressive than those of Florentine sculptors. His altarpiece for S. Francesco della Vigna (1561–63) conforms with the attenuated canons of Mannerist elegance. In sculpture as in painting, the narrative Venetian style proved to be more easily adaptable to the demands of the Counter-Reformation than the abstract artiness of central Italian Mannerism. The work of Vittoria and of the painter with whom he was most closely associated, Palma il Giovane, seems to anticipate many of the characteristics of Baroque art.

Mannerist sculpture outside Italy
 In the north of Europe, Giambologna's influence was paramount. Both Hubert Gerhart and Adriaan de Vries (Vries, Adriaen de), the leading exponents of northern Mannerist sculpture, can be considered as followers of the expatriate Fleming. Gerhart worked (1583–94) for Hans Fugger at Kirchheim, Augsburg, and at Amsterdam under de Sustris, and for the archduke Maximilian I of Bavaria, at whose court he produced bronze figures of considerable accomplishment (1598–1613). De Vries joined Bartholomaeus Spranger in 1601 at Rudolf's court in Prague. His “Psyche with Three Cupids” (Nationalmuseum, Stockholm) is a characteristic example of his stylishness—a wonderful satin finish, spiralling complexity, and a soaring grace reminiscent of Giambologna's “Mercury”.

 As in painting, France owed its early acquisition of Mannerist sculptural style to Italian artists at Fontainebleau, to Primaticcio's (Primaticcio, Francesco) stucco style, and to Cellini. Jean Goujon (Goujon, Jean) began from this point of inspiration, and his decorations for the “Fountain of the Innocents” at the Louvre (1547–49) possess a sophisticated refinement all'antica unequalled by any non-Italian artist of the period.

 The influence of Primaticcio's suave stucco decorations is even more apparent in the early work of the other great French sculptor of the century, Germain Pilon (Pilon, Germain). This is not surprising since his elegant “Monument for the Heart of Henry II” was probably completed under Primaticcio's supervision. His statues for Primaticcio's Tomb of Henry II, however, show him moving toward greater naturalism and expressiveness. In his later works Pilon achieved a freedom of plasticity and feeling for texture that anticipated Baroque developments.

      Spanish (Spain) Renaissance sculpture at first relied heavily upon visiting Italians, led by Andrea Sansovino, but with the advent of Ordóñez, Diego de Siloé, and the painter-sculptors Machuca and Beruguete, a native Spanish school of Mannerism was formed. Like his father (the painter Pedro), Alonso Beruguete (Berruguete, Alonso) studied in Italy. On his return to Spain about 1517, he began to develop an elaborately pictorial style in sculptural complexes of great originality. The fluid quality of his designs reaches its peak in the surging motions of the “Transfiguration Altar” (1543–48) for Toledo cathedral. Beruguete's greatest successor at Valladolid was Pompeo Leoni (Leoni, Pompeo), who collaborated with his father, Leone, on portraits of Charles V, composed in a disciplined and sternly Roman style, quite different from the expressive fluency of native Spanish sculpture that reemerged at the turn of the century in the few sculptures of polychromed wood by El Greco.

Martin J. Kemp

The Baroque (Baroque period) period

Early and High Baroque
      At the beginning of the 17th century, sculpture in all of Italy, with the exception of Florence, was at a low ebb; and the dry, frankly propagandist nature of the decoration of the Borghese and Sistine chapels in Sta. Maria Maggiore, Rome, reveals this only too clearly. With Stefano Maderno and Camillo Mariani a slightly more imaginative interpretation of the demands of the Council of Trent is to be found, while certain aspects of the work of Pietro Bernini (Bernini, Pietro) (1562–1629) were to have considerable influence on his son Gian Lorenzo. The first breath of the new Baroque spirit, however, is to be found in the immense vitality of the equestrian monuments in Piacenza (1612–25) by Francesco Mochi; and a comparable fiery vigour is the keynote of the fresco “Aurora” by Guercino (Guercino, Il) in the Casino Ludovisi, Rome (1621–23). The forms are pierced and opened up, and the momentary, unstable poses, with draperies fluttering and tails lashing, give a vivid movement that releases the figures from the Mannerist spell.

      No field was more congenial to the spirit of Baroque art than sculpture carried out on a conspicuous scale. The Baroque artist achieved dramatic pictorial unity by abolishing the traditional limits separating painting, sculpture, and architecture. The solid masses of sculpture and even of architecture were made to move in space by means of such motive forms as undulations; sculpture was transformed by such painter's devices as richly varied illusionistic textures, coloured materials, and irregularly dappling light effects.

 Gian Lorenzo Bernini (Bernini, Gian Lorenzo), the greatest sculptor of the 17th and 18th centuries, established the sculptural principles for those two centuries in a series of youthful works of unrivalled virtuosity, as the “Apollo and Daphne.” Stone was now completely emancipated from stoniness by open form and by an astonishing illusion of flesh, hair, cloth, and other textures, pictorial effects that had earlier been attempted only in painting. These qualities made what his contemporaries called his “speaking portraits” seem unprecedentedly alive; portrait sculpture for two centuries was a variation of these innovations. In the statue of St. Longinus in St. Peter's in Rome, Bernini created the characteristic formula of Baroque sculpture by throwing the draperies into a violent turmoil, the complicated and broken involutions of which are not rationally explained by the figure's real bodily movement but seem paroxysmally informed by the miracle itself. The passion with which he imbued his sculptured figures, capturing the most transitory states of mind, reached its apogee in the representation of the ecstasy of St. Teresa (Teresa of Ávila, Saint) in the Cornaro Chapel, Sta. Maria della Vittoria, Rome (1645–52) and in the figure of the expiring Ludovica Albertoni in the Altieri Chapel, S. Francesco a Ripa, Rome (c. 1674). The former is generally considered the masterpiece of Baroque religious sculpture and shows how Bernini could organize the arts of architecture, painting, and sculpture in an overwhelming assault on the senses that dispels the resistance of the intellect. This ambitious plan was typical of the mature Bernini, whose spiritual and artistic aspirations exceeded the scope of his early secular salon statues. His later works were largely religious and unprecedentedly vast in scale, as in the dazzling “Cathedra Petri,” which covers the whole end of St. Peter's in Rome with a teeming multitude of figures.

      The tombs of Bernini are magnificent spectacles in which symbolic figures, clothed in sweeping draperies, with rhetorical gesture and expressive features, share in some emotional experience, theatrically depicted. An example is the tomb of Alexander VII in St. Peter's, Rome. The pontiff, set in a great apse, kneels on a high pedestal about which Charity, Truth, Justice, and Wisdom weep disconsolately while Death, a skeleton, raises the great draperies of polychrome and gold that veil a darkened doorway. Another work, the fountain of the Triton in the Piazza Barberini, Rome, from which all clarity of profile or of shadow, all definiteness of plane, are removed, is also characteristic of Bernini's style, widely imitated throughout Europe.

 Bernini's art was the basis of all Baroque sculpture, but his example was not always followed, and the work of his more restrained contemporaries, such as Alessandro Algardi (Algardi, Alessandro) (relief of “Meeting of Attila and Pope Leo,” 1646–53, St. Peter's, Rome) and the Fleming François Duquesnoy (Duquesnoy, François), attracted more approval from theorists of art. The latter's “St. Susanna” in Sta. Maria di Loreto in Rome, a figure after the antique but enlivened with Berninian textures, was originally made to look toward the observer and, with a gesture, to direct his attention to the altar. The distinction between art and life that the Mannerists had cultivated was banished by this active participation of the statue in the viewer's space and activities, another important innovation of Bernini.

Late Baroque
      In late 17th-century painting, composition became increasingly decorative rather than structural, and there was a loosening of design in the individual figures as well. This dissolution is also to be found in sculpture of the period, such as in the proto-Rococo figures of Filippo Carcani (active 1670–90) in Rome and, to a lesser extent, in those of Filippo Parodi (1630–1702) in Genoa, Venice, and Naples. Outside Venice and Sicily the true Rococo made little headway in Italy.

      A more or less classical late Baroque style, best exemplified by the heroic works of Camillo Rusconi in Rome, was dominant in central Italy through the middle of the 18th century. Rusconi's work had considerable influence outside Italy as well.

 The latter half of the century saw the emergence of a much lighter and more theatrical manner in the works of Agostino Cornacchini and of Pietro Bracci, whose allegorical figure “Ocean” on the Fontana di Trevi by Niccolò Salvi (Salvi, Nicola) (completed 1762; see photograph—>) is almost a parody of Bernini's sculpture. Filippo della Valle worked in a classicizing style of almost French sensibility, but the majority of Italian sculpture of the mid-18th century became increasingly picturesque with a strong tendency toward technical virtuosity. Complex sculptured groups designed by Luigi Vanvitelli (Vanvitelli, Luigi) for the park of the palace at Caserta (c. 1770) are almost tableaux vivants (“living pictures”) in a landscape setting, while the Cappella Sansevero de' Sangri in nearby Naples (decorated 1749–66) is one of the most important sculptured complexes of the time. Allegorical groups by Antonio Corradini and Francesco Queirolo vie with each other in virtuosity and include such conceits as fishnets cut from solid marble and the all-revealing shrouds developed by Giuseppe Sammartino. Florentine sculpture of the 18th century is less spectacular, and Giovanni Battista Foggini took back from Rome the compromise style of Ferrarza, while Massimiliano Soldani-Benzi seems to have been instrumental in the brilliant revival there of small-scale bronze statuettes. Giovanni Marchiori worked in Venice with an attractive painterly style, in part based on the wood carvings of Andrea Brustolon; (Brustolon, Andrea) and Giovanni Maria Morlaiter ran the full gamut to a late 18th-century classicism close to the early works of the great Neoclassical sculptor Antonio Canova.

Baroque and Rococo (Rococo style) outside Italy
 Spanish sculpture of the 17th and 18th centuries exhibits a greater continuity with late Gothic art than does the painting; and the Counter-Reformation demands for realism and an emotional stimulus to piety led to sculpture with glass eyes, human hair, and even real fabric costumes. Italian Renaissance sculpture had made a very limited impact in Spain, and with few exceptions this was in the court ambience only, while Spanish Baroque sculpture is almost entirely religious and of a fundamentally popular nature. Gregorio Hernández (Hernández, Gregorio) in sculptures like the “Pieta” (1617; Museo Nacional de Esculturas, Valladolid, Spain) revealed an emotional realism more Gothic than Baroque; but in the figures of Manuel Pereira there is a clear-cut monumentality and intense concentration comparable to that of Zurbarán. Both were active in Castile, though the main centre of sculptural activity was Seville and Granada, with Juan Martínez Montañés (Montañés, Juan Martínez) as the dominant personality. The intense realism and deep spirituality of his figures were followed by his pupil Alonso Cano (Cano, Alonso); but in the figures of Cano's pupil Pedro de Mena (Mena, Pedro de), his simple monumentality is replaced by a more picturesque and theatrical gracefulness. José de Mora, also a pupil of Cano, took this process even further. But in general the 18th century saw a sad decline in Spanish sculpture.

      In comparison with painting, the sculpture of the 17th century in the southern provinces is extremely disappointing. The Flemish sculptor François Duquesnoy spent almost all of his career in Rome, while those who remained in Flanders, such as his brother Hieronymus Duquesnoy the Younger, were mostly secondary artists influenced by Rubens. Artus Quellinus the Elder reveals a much more individual style, particularly in his decorations for the Town Hall in Amsterdam, and the tendency toward a painterly style is more pronounced in the work of his son Artus Quellinus the Younger, Rombout Verhulst, and Lucas Faydherbe.

      The end of the Twelve Years' Truce in 1621 had brought back Antwerp's (Antwerp) old troubles, and the control of the Scheldt by the United Provinces was confirmed by the Peace of Westphalia (1648). Economic depression and French aggression in the second half of the 17th century combined to make the southern provinces increasingly provincial, while under the provisions of the Treaty of Utrecht (1713) and the Treaty of Rastatt (1714) the territories passed to Austria. Eighteenth-century painting and sculpture became increasingly weak and provincial, though fantastic pulpits carved by Hendrik Frans Verbruggen, Michel Vervoort, and Theodor Verhaegen provide a remarkable parallel to those in central Europe.

  Duquesnoy was much admired in France, where the sculptors of Louis XIV (the “Sun King”), such as François Girardon (Girardon, François), continued his tradition of setting correct and charming allusions to the antique in a pictorial and spatial context that is wholly Baroque. Girardon's tomb of the Cardinal de Richelieu (Richelieu, Armand-Jean du Plessis, cardinal et duc de) (see photograph—>), in the church of the Sorbonne, Paris, is illustrative of the Baroque monuments of France, calmer and more conservative than those of Italy. The dying cardinal, lying on his sarcophagus and originally gesturing in supplication toward the altar, is upheld by Religion and mourned by Science. The three figures, united by the lines of skillfully arranged draperies, are informed by a solemn and touching sentiment. The academic discipline imposed by the Sun King's ministers, especially Colbert (Colbert, Jean-Baptiste), discouraged less tractable spirits, such as the passionate genius Pierre Puget (Puget, Pierre). His unique expressions of anguish are couched in the physical terms of highly original works like the “Milo of Crotona” (see photograph—>); here the composition of a figure rigid with pain is given an almost unbearable tension.

      Antoine Coysevox (Coysevox, Antoine), another of the sculptors of Louis XIV, had begun in the official “academic Baroque” style, but his later works, undertaken after the death of Colbert, are witnesses of the gradual acceptance of the Baroque in France, which now acquired the artistic leadership that Italy had long held over the rest of Europe. At the same time, the style was made lighter, gayer, and more ornamental, in accordance with 18th-century taste, as seen in the famous “Chevaux de Marly” by Guillaume Coustou (Coustou, Guillaume) now marking the entrance to the Champs-Élysées in Paris but designed for Marly, as part of the most innovative outdoor display of sculpture since the 16th-century gardens of Italy. Coustou's bust of his brother Nicolas has a characteristic freshness and informality whereby 18th-century artists avoided the grandeur they found pompous in the Berninian tradition.

 This 18th-century style that reduced the Baroque to exquisite refinement was the art of the aristocratic salon and boudoir. The little marble “Mercure” (1741) of Jean-Baptiste Pigalle (Pigalle, Jean-Baptiste) is almost wholly Berninian, except in its intimacy and deliberate unpretentiousness; even in Pigalle's most ambitious undertakings, the relative scale of the figures is much reduced and the whole composition opened up, in contrast to Bernini's tombs. Nevertheless, the narrative and indeed the allegory of his masterpiece, the tomb of the Maréchal de Saxe (Saxe, Maurice, comte de) (1753; Saint-Thomas, Strasbourg), is as enthralling and memorable as any 17th-century sculpture, although the theme, significantly, no longer seems to be inspired by the Christian faith. At the same time, the more classical current of French sculpture continued and gained importance as the 18th century advanced. The clarified form and continuous, unbroken contours of Étienne-Maurice Falconet's (Falconet, Étienne-Maurice) marble “Bather” (1757) adapt the Classic tradition to a pretty and intimate Rococo ideal that is the quintessence of 18th-century taste. This Classicism was purified by Jean-Antoine Houdon (Houdon, Jean-Antoine), who avoided the playful air of the Rococo boudoir in his “Diana” (c. 1777; see photograph—>) and his marble nude in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York City (1782). His portrait sculptures are the ultimate in the 18th-century refinement of Bernini's tradition.

 In the context of the rather restrained French sculpture of the 18th century, the blatant sensuality of Clodion (byname of Claude Michel) is the exception rather than the rule. Portrait busts by Jean-Baptiste Lemoyne (Lemoyne, Jean-Baptiste) and Pigalle follow the direction taken by Coysevox in his “Robert de Cotte,” but Augustin Pajou (Pajou, Augustin) and Houdon soon abandoned the Rococo in favour of a Neoclassical approach. Edme Bouchardon (Bouchardon, Edmé), however, flirted only briefly with the Rococo and otherwise remained firmly attached to the classicizing tradition of French sculpture.

      English sculpture of the early 17th century was very provincial, with Nicholas Stone (Stone, Nicholas) and Edward Marshall the only English-born sculptors to rise above the general level of mediocrity. Their styles were based on contemporary Netherlandish sculpture with small admixtures of Italian influence; and after 1660 the uncomprehending borrowings of John Bushnell from Bernini serve only to make his figures look ludicrous. The most distinguished English-born sculptor of the second half of the 17th century was Edward Pierce, in whose rare busts is to be found something of Bernini's vigour and intensity. But the general run of English sculpture as represented by Francis Bird, Edward Stanton, and even the internationally renowned woodcarver Grinling Gibbons (Gibbons, Grinling) remained unexceptional. It was not until John Michael Rysbrack (Rysbrack, John Michael) from Antwerp settled in England in c. 1720, followed by the Frenchman Louis-François Roubillac (Roubiliac, Louis-François) in c. 1732, that two sculptors of European stature were active in England. The busts and tombs of Rysbrack and Roubillac have a power and vitality previously unknown in English sculpture; they were responsible for the revival that took place in the 18th century.

Central Europe (Germany)
      While the influence of Giambologna persisted in some quarters, Hans Krumper and Hans Reichle produced bronze figures less indebted to the Classical tradition but with stronger individuality. Jörg Zürn, whose finest wood carvings are to be seen at Überlingen, and Ludwig Münsterman, in Oldenburg, continued in the Mannerist style, whereas Georg Petel, who came under the influence of Rubens, is almost the only sculptor to reveal the impact of the Baroque. Petel's importance lies mainly in his ivories, and Leonard Kern in Franconia developed a similar Rubensian style for his small statuettes.

      Painting and sculpture recovered slowly from the ravages of the Thirty Years' War, and some of the earliest reflections of the high Baroque of Bernini are to be found in the sculpture of Matthias Rauchmiller at Trier (1675) and Legnica (Liegnitz) in Silesia (1677).

      Among sculptors in Austria the forces of Classicism were stronger; and the weak north Italian late Baroque styles of Giovanni Giuliani and Lorenzo Mattielli were supplanted by the cool elegance and classical refinement of Georg Raphael Donner (Donner, Georg Raphael). His preference for the soft sheen of lead gave Austrian Baroque sculpture one of its most distinctive features.

      During the first four decades of the 18th century, Bohemian (Bohemia) Baroque art developed almost independently of Vienna. The brilliant rugged stone sculptures of Matyás Bernard Braun and Ferdinand Maximilián Brokoff, with their dynamism and expressive gestures, were truly Bohemian in spirit.

      Bavarian (Bavaria) Baroque art in the hands of the brothers Egid Quirin Asam (Asam, Egid Quirin) and Cosmas Damian Asam (Asam, Cosmas Damian) was almost entirely confined to churches, and their brilliant development of the theatrical illusionism of Bernini is achieved in the high altar of the monastery church at Rohr, in Germany (1718–25), and in St. John Nepomuk in Munich (begun 1733). Cosmas Damian's style as a painter was influenced by Rottmayr as well as by the Italian masters whom he studied during his stay in Italy (1711–14), while the sculptural style of Egid Quirin was formed on the south German tradition of wood carving, as well as on Bernini.

      In Upper Saxony there was also a native tradition before the arrival of Permoser, represented by the heavy figures of Georg Heermann and Konrad Max Süssner, both of whom had been active in Prague in the 1680s. Balthasar Permoser was trained in Florence under Foggini, whence he was summoned to Dresden in 1689. His painterly conception of sculpture, derived from Bernini, is revealed in the complex “Apotheosis of Prince Eugene” (1721; Österreichische Galerie, Vienna) and above all in the sculptural decoration of the Zwinger in Dresden initiated during the second decade. Paul Egell was a pupil of Permoser in Dresden at the time of the Zwinger decorations, and in 1721 he was appointed court sculptor at Mannheim. Egell's elongated and refined Baroque figures were an effective counter to the Classicism of Donner, and his personality was decisive in Franconia and the Palatinate during the first half of the century.

       Berlin under the Great Elector of Brandenburg had become an increasingly important centre, both politically and artistically; and the full-bodied Baroque style of Andreas Schlüter (Schlüter, Andreas), as revealed by his equestrian monument to the Great Elector (1696–1708), now at Charlottenburg, was fully in sympathy with the time.

 No hard and fast division can be made between the Baroque and the Rococo in central and eastern Europe, either chronologically or stylistically. The first Rococo decorative ensembles in Germany, the Reiche Zimmer of the Residenz in Munich, were built by the Frenchman François de Cuvilliés (Cuvilliés, François de, The Elder) in 1730–37, but in painting and sculpture the situation is more complicated. Ignaz Günther (Günther, Ignaz), the greatest south German sculptor of the 18th century, was trained under Johann Baptist Straub; the elongated forms of Egell's sculpture at Mannheim, however, deeply impressed him, and his development was toward an almost Mannerist grace and refinement. Günther was capable of the most extraordinarily sensitive characterization of surfaces, even when painted white; and this he combined with an interpretation of character comparable to the late Gothic sculptors, thus giving his figures a realism and immediacy that is almost uncanny. Apart from their lightness and vivacity, however, it is the figures' relationship to the altars on which they are placed that reveals their Rococo quality. Gone are the great coordinated ensembles of the Asams, and instead each figure has a totally separate existence of its own and a balance is only to be found when the church interior is taken as a whole.

      Swabian (Swabia) sculpture of the period is characterized by the extremely successful partnerships between the sculptors and stucco artists. For Zwiefalten and Ottobeuren Joseph Christian provided the models from which Johann Michael Feichtmayr created the superb series of larger than life-size saints and angels that are the glory of these Rococo interiors. Feichtmayr was a member of the group of families from Wessobrunn in southern Bavaria that specialized in stucco work and produced a long series of masters, including Johann Georg Übelherr and Joseph Anton Feuchtmayer, whose masterpieces are the Rococo figures at Birnau on Lake Constance. The sculptor Christian Wenzinger worked at Freiburg im Breisgau in relative isolation, but his softly modelled figures have a delicacy that recalls the paintings of Boucher.

      Until his death Johann Wolfgang van der Auvera was the most powerful personality in the field of sculpture in the area, but later Ferdinand Dietz at Bamberg pursued an increasingly individual Rococo style that often parodied the growing taste for Neoclassicism. Prussian Rococo sculpture was less distinguished, though the decorations of Johann August Nahl are among the most imaginative in Germany.

      Austrian sculpture of the later 18th century, as represented by Balthasar Ferdinand Moll, inclined more toward a realistic Rococo style than to the Classicism of Donner; and, although the strange, neurotic genius Franz Xavier Messerschmidt began in this style, at the end of his career he produced a startling series of grimacing heads when he lived as a recluse in Bratislava.

      The Baroque style as it was imported to Russia from western Europe by the imperial court never amounted to what might properly be termed a Russian Baroque period. A great influx of Western influence during this period, especially under the sponsorship of Peter the Great, did, however, dispel the predominance of Byzantine ideas and forms. The brilliant Baroque busts of Bartolomeo Carlo Rastrelli the Younger established during the early 18th century a distinguished tradition of Russian portrait sculpture that was maintained by Fedot Shubin. The parks and gardens of the Rococo palaces of the empress Elizabeth were adorned with sculpture, but the work was done almost exclusively by Italians and Frenchmen commissioned for the task.

      With the coming of Europeans to Central and South America, indigenous symbolism and sculptural forms blended with Renaissance realism, Baroque elegance, and subsequent stylistic currents. Indian traits appeared in such European-introduced sculptural forms as the stone crosses that were erected in churchyards; statues, whether by European sculpture or aboriginal pupils, depicted Jesus, the Virgin Mary, saints, and occasionally an earthly benefactor of the church. Materials were of wood, plant fibre pulp coated with canvas and gesso, or plaster. The statues often had real costumes and hair, glass eyes and teeth, and extremely realistic flesh—bloody, bruised, and torn—with taut muscles and distended veins. Gold halos or crowns were added and costume textures were imitated by the gold-leaf-and-paint estofado technique. Many of these were undoubtedly inspired by paintings brought from Europe.

      Few sculptors are known by name from the colonial period and fewer attributions are possible. At least a dozen individuals can be identified in Mexico in the 16th century, however, and twice that number in the 17th; the best known are José Cora of Puebla and his nephew Zacarias, and Gudiño of Querétaro. Many were both sculptors and architects, a necessity of the times. In the 18th century considerable artistic stimulus was provided by the Spanish-born Neoclassicist Manuel Tolsa, first director of the Academy in Mexico City, first to produce an equestrian statue in the New World (of Charles IV), and teacher of many sculptors of subsequent fame. The second most important artistic centre of the colonial era was Quito, Ecuador, which was known particularly for its decorative sculpture.

      The sculpture is marginally less provincial than the paintings, and, for example, the choir stalls carved by Pedro de Noguera and his assistants for Lima cathedral (1624–26) are of distinguished quality. The Baroque tradition tended to last until well into the 19th century in sculptures such as the robust figures of António Francisco Lisboa (e.g., “O Aleijadinho,” or “The Little Cripple”), the greatest sculptor that Brazil has produced.

Peter Cannon-Brookes Joseph Hudnut James Holderbaum Arthur Voyce Carleton Ivers Calkin Ed.

Neoclassical and Romantic sculpture

Neoclassicism
      The 18th-century arts movement known as Neoclassicism represents both a reaction against the last phase of the Baroque and, perhaps more importantly, a reflection of the burgeoning scientific interest in classical antiquity. Archaeological investigations of the classical Mediterranean world offered to the 18th-century cognoscenti compelling witness to the order and serenity of Classical art and provided a fitting backdrop to the Enlightenment and the Age of Reason. Newly discovered antique forms and themes were quick to find new expression.

      The successful excavations contributed to the rapid growth of collections of antique sculptures. Foreign visitors to Italy exported countless marbles to all parts of Europe or employed agents to build up their collections. The accessibility of the sculpture of antiquity, in museums and private houses and also through engravings and plaster casts, had a far-reaching formative influence on 18th-century painting and sculpture. The great majority of ancient sculptures collected were Roman, although many of them were copied from Greek originals and were believed to be Greek.

      In the writing of Johann Joachim Winckelmann (Winckelmann, Johann), the great German historian of ancient art, Greek art had been considered immeasurably superior to Roman. It is curious, however, how little positive influence the marbles (Elgin Marbles) that Lord Elgin took to England from the Parthenon in Athens had on sculpture in western Europe, although they had a great influence on scholars. The ideals of Neoclassical sculpture—its emphasis on clarity of contour, on the plain ground, on not rivalling painting either in the imitation of aerial or linear perspective in relief or of flying hair and fluttering drapery in freestanding figures—were chiefly inspired by theory and by Roman neo-Attic works, or indeed by Roman pseudo-Archaic art. The latter class of art exerted an influence on John Flaxman, who was enormously admired for the severe style of his engravings and relief carvings.

“ decorum” and idealization
      Academic theorists, especially those of France and Italy during the 17th century, argued that the costume, details, and setting of a work be as accurate as possible when representing a period and place in the historical past. The 18th century and, in particular, the Neoclassicists inherited this theory of “decorum” and, enabled by all the newly available archaeological evidence, implemented it more fully than had any of their precursors.

 A series of monuments to 18th- and early 19th-century generals and admirals of the Napoleonic Wars in St. Paul's Cathedral and Westminster Abbey demonstrate an important Neoclassical problem: whether a hero or famous person should be portrayed in Classical or contemporary costume. Many sculptors varied between showing the figures in uniform and showing them completely naked. The concept of the modern hero in antique dress belongs to the tradition of academic theory, exemplified by the English painter Sir Joshua Reynolds (Reynolds, Sir Joshua) in one of his Royal Academy Discourses: “The desire for transmitting to posterity the shape of modern dress must be acknowledged to be purchased at a prodigious price, even the price of everything that is valuable in art.” Even the living hero could be idealized completely naked, as in two colossal standing figures of Napoleon (1808–11; Apsley House, London, and Brera, Milan) by the Italian sculptor Antonio Canova (Canova, Antonio, marchese d'Ischia). One of the most famous of Neoclassical sculptures is Canova's “Paolina Borghese as Venus Victrix” (1805–07; Borghese Gallery, Rome). She is shown naked, lightly draped, and reclining sensuously on a couch, both a charming contemporary portrait and an idealized antique Venus.

Relation to the Baroque (Baroque period) and the Rococo
      Classical academic theories circulating in the Renaissance, and especially in the 17th century, favoured the antique and those artists who followed in this tradition. The artists praised included Raphael, Michelangelo, Giulio Romano, and Annibale Carracci. The slightly later generation of writers added the name of the French painter Nicolas Poussin to the list. The exuberance and “fury” of the Baroque must be avoided, it was argued, because they led to “barbarous” and “wicked” works. Continuing in this tradition, Winckelmann, for example, argued that the Italian Baroque sculptor and architect Bernini had been “misled” by following nature.

      Such hostility to Baroque works, however, did not immediately eradicate their influence on 18th-century artists, as can be seen, for example, in an early work by Canova, “Daedalus and Icarus” (1779; Museo Civico Correr, Venice), executed before he had been to Rome. In Canova's tomb of Pope Clement XIV (1784–87; SS. Apostoli, Rome), the Pope, seated on a throne above a sarcophagus, is treated in a dramatically realistic style with hand raised in a forceful gesture reminiscent of papal tombs of the 17th century.

      Although the Neoclassical artists and writers expressed contempt for what they regarded as the frivolous aspect of the Rococo (Rococo style), there is a strong influence of French Rococo on the early style of some of the Neoclassical sculptors. Étienne-Maurice Falconet, Flaxman, and Canova all started to carve and model with Rococo tendencies, which were then gradually transformed into more Classical elements.

 Hostile critics of Neoclassical sculpture have tended to compare such works to “a valley of dry bones.” Some artists misunderstood the advocacy of Winckelmann and his school to imitate ancient art. Winckelmann meant—as did 17th-century theorists before him, and writers such as Shaftesbury and Jonathan Richardson, who influenced him considerably—imitation to be a means of discovering ideal beauty and conveying the spirit of the original. He did not advocate servile copying of the antique. Unfortunately, spiritless copies were made, and these led to a proliferation of the Neoclassical style and its classification as “frigid.” In sculpture some of the important commissions regrettably resulted in this lifeless concept of Neoclassicism. Among the examples are large marbles of Christ, John the Baptist, and the Apostles by the Danish sculptor Bertel Thorvaldsen (Thorvaldsen, Bertel) in the Church of Our Lady, Copenhagen (1821–27 and 1842). Thorvaldsen's marbles, unlike Canova's, lose little when seen only as plaster casts, and indeed the surface of the sculpture was deliberately left neutral and the act of carving left to others.

      Gestures and emotions in Neoclassical works are usually restrained. In bacchanalian scenes the gaiety is held in check, never bursting into exuberance. In a tragic scene, Andromache does not shed a tear as she mourns the death of Hector. When Flaxman did attempt terror, as in the marble “Fury of Athamas” (1790–92; Ickworth, Suffolk), the violence is forced and unconvincing. Indeed, there hardly exists in any Neoclassical sculptor's work a convincing image of rage. The concept of antique calmness permeated European art. Canova with his “Hercules and Lichas” (1796; Galleria Nazionale d'Arte Moderna, Rome) produced a large marble of exaggerated expression beyond his normal range and to some extent beyond his abilities. Like Flaxman, he was far more successful when carving images of delicacy, bordering on charm.

      Prominent early British (United Kingdom) Neoclassicist sculptors included John Wilton, Joseph Nollekens (Nollekens, Joseph), John Bacon (Bacon, John) the Elder, John Deare, and Christopher Hewetson, the last two working mostly in Rome. The leading artist of the younger generation was John Flaxman (Flaxman, John), professor of sculpture at the Royal Academy and one of the few British artists of the period with an international reputation. The last generation of Neoclassicists included the sculptors Sir Richard Westmacott, John Bacon the Younger, Sir Francis Chantrey (Chantrey, Sir Francis Legatt), Edward Hodges Baily, John Gibson (Gibson, John), and William Behnes.

 While Neoclassicism in France was dominated by painting and architecture, the movement did find a number of notable exponents in sculpture. These included Claude Michel, called Clodion, creator of many small Classical figures, especially nymphs; Augustin Pajou (Pajou, Augustin); and Pierre Julien. Pigalle's pupil Jean-Antoine Houdon (Houdon, Jean-Antoine) was the most famous 18th-century French sculptor, producing many Classical figures and contemporary portraits in the manner of antique busts. Other contemporary sculptors included Louis-Simon Boizot and Étienne-Maurice Falconet (Falconet, Étienne-Maurice), who was director of sculpture at the Sèvres factory. The slightly younger generation included the sculptors Joseph Chinard, Joseph-Charles Marin, Antoine-Denis Chaudet, and Baron François-Joseph Bosio. The early sculpture of Ingres's well-known contemporary François Rude (Rude, François) was Neoclassical.

      Important among central European sculptors early in the period was Johann Heinrich von Dannecker. Subsequent Neoclassicists included Johann Gottfried Schadow (Schadow, Gottfried), who was also a painter but is better known as a sculptor; his pupil, the sculptor Christian Friedrich Tieck; the painter and sculptor Martin von Wagner; and the sculptor Christian Daniel Rauch.

 The most important Italian (Italy) Neoclassicist was Antonio Canova (Canova, Antonio, marchese d'Ischia), the leading sculptor, indeed by far the most famous artist of any sort, in Europe by the end of the 18th century. Canova's position in the following 20 years may be compared only with that enjoyed by Bernini (Bernini, Gian Lorenzo) in the 17th century. The differences between their careers, however, are of great importance. Only at the commencement of his career did Bernini carve gallery sculpture for princely collectors, but the majority of Canova's works belong to this category. Both artists remained resident for most of their life in Rome, but whereas Bernini was controlled by the popes and only rarely permitted to work for foreign potentates, Canova's principal patrons were foreigners, and he supplied sculpture to all the courts of Europe. A fine sculptor of varying styles, including austere, sentimental, and horrific, Canova produced an extensive body of work that includes Classical groups and friezes, tombs, and portraits, many in antique dress. He was also a painter, regrettably bad. His pupil and collaborator, Antonio d'Este, is one of the more interesting of the lesser Italian Neoclassical sculptors. Other Neoclassical sculptors in Rome included Giuseppe Angelini, best known for the tomb of the etcher and architect Giambattista Piranesi (Piranesi, Giovanni Battista) in the church of Sta. Maria del Priorato, Rome.

      In Milan, Camillo Pacetti directed the sculptural decoration of the Arco della Pace. The work of Gaetano Monti, born in Ravenna, can be seen in many northern Italian churches. The Tuscan sculptor Lorenzo Bartolini executed some important Napoleonic commissions. The “Charity” (Pitti Palace, Florence) is one of the more famous examples of his later Neoclassicism. It should be noted, however, that he did not see himself as a Neoclassical artist and that he challenged the idealism that was favoured by Canova and his followers.

 The Swede Johan Tobias Sergel, court sculptor to the Swedish king Gustav III, and the Dane Bertel Thorvaldsen, who lived most of his life in Rome, were among the best known Neoclassical sculptors in Europe. Thorvaldsen was the chief rival to Canova and eventually replaced him in critical favour. His work was more severe, sometimes even archaizing in character, and his religious sculpture, most notably his great figure of Christ in the Church of Our Lady in Copenhagen, exhibits a deliberately chilling, sublime style that still awaits sympathetic reassessment. Among his more notable pupils was the Swedish sculptor Johan Byström.

      The principal Neoclassicists in Spain were the painter José de Madrazo y Agudo and the sculptor José Alvarez de Pereira y Cubero.

      Both leading Russian Neoclassicists were sculptors. Ivan Petrovich Martos studied under Mengs, Thorvaldsen, and Batoni in Rome and became a director of the St. Petersburg Academy. His best works are tombs. Mikhail Kozlovskij contributed to the decoration of the throne room at Pavlovsk.

      Apart from the painter Benjamin West (West, Benjamin), who worked almost entirely in London, the leading Neoclassicists among American (United States) artists were sculptors. William Rush (Rush, William) produced standing Classical figures including those formerly decorating a waterworks in Philadelphia (now in the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts). In the middle years of the 19th century there came into prominence four sculptors: Horatio Greenough (Greenough, Horatio), who executed several government commissions in Washington, D.C.; Hiram Powers (Powers, Hiram), known particularly for his portrait busts; Thomas Crawford (Crawford, Thomas), who did monumental sculpture; and William Wetmore Story (Story, William Wetmore), who lived and worked in Rome, where he was associated with several other prominent 19th-century Americans.

David Irwin

19th-century sculpture
      In the 19th century sculptors throughout the Western world were affected in an unprecedented way by the great public annual exhibitions organized by the Academies. Great patrons at court or among the nobility could still play a very important part in making an artist's reputation, but publicity from these exhibitions was crucial. Among examples of sculptures that attracted sensational publicity of this sort are François Rude's “Neapolitan Fisherboy” (1834; Louvre), Hiram Powers' “Greek Slave” (1843), Auguste Clésinger's “Woman Bitten by a Snake” (1847; Louvre), and Randolf Rogers' “Nydia the Blind Girl” (1858).

      In all these sculptures except the last the subject is more or less nude. In all except the first there is a strong narrative interest. In these respects they resemble the prize pieces set by the French Royal Academy of Painting and Sculpture and by its numerous imitators. Unlike those prize pieces, however, these works drew for their subjects not upon Greek or Roman mythology or history: Nydia is a Roman girl but taken from a modern novel about Pompeii, and the Greek slave is a contemporary Christian girl taken captive by the Turks. The old clichés about “academic” sculpture in the 19th century are hopelessly inadequate. The Academies in their educational program often encouraged a heroic but restrained Neoclassicism—their exhibitions, on the other hand, encouraged an appeal to novelty, to sentiment, and to sensationalism (often of an unfortunate kind), involving subjects from modern life and modern literature.

 The exhibition piece was often a plaster cast of the original clay model. Several versions in marble or bronze were then made if there was the demand. These would be acquired for the sculpture galleries, conservatories, or gardens of great collectors, as well as for museums, which, for the first time, included collections of modern art. In reduced form they might also make an appearance amid the crowded furnishings of fashionable drawing rooms. Upon the chimneypiece perhaps some miniature scene of jungle violence modelled by Barye and cast in bronze might be displayed (see photograph—>), while behind the ferns a marble nude would shrink in vain from male scrutiny.

      The proliferation of domestic sculpture was made possible by a series of technical innovations chiefly associated with Paris. Improved reducing machines greatly facilitated the half-size replication of exhibition pieces, and the reproduction of such works on a still smaller scale as bronze (bronze work) statuettes; new methods of sand-casting meant that these bronzes were also available in larger editions and at a lower cost. The reproduction of terra-cotta sculpture also thrived in Paris as it had done in the late 18th century; busts of men of letters and women of fashion, together with groups of seductive nymphs, were always the most popular subjects. The miniature sculptures (often also reproductions of larger works) in biscuit porcelain, which had also been produced in 18th-century Paris, also continued to be popular in England for a while, as well as France.

      Exalted notions of the artist's role, inculcated by the Academies and dramatized by Romantic literature, did little to encourage sculptors to involve themselves with what was often described as “mere” ornament. Mechanical methods—more and more sophisticated machinery for turning and pointing, as well as reducing machinery and novel techniques of casting—were often employed with great success. This resulted, however, not only in more bad sculpture than before but also in more badly carved and cast ornament in architecture, furniture, and metalwork. In Paris, however, the fertile genius of Albert Carrier-Belleuse (Carrier-Belleuse, Albert) particularly excelled in devising such objects as gasoliers supported by pretty girls in a luxurious style that combined elements from the art of the 16th, 17th, and 18th centuries. In England, Alfred Stevens, inspired by the versatility of the Italian Renaissance, was happy to devote himself to the design of cutlery and fire grates, and, at the end of the century, Alfred Gilbert, creator of the most remarkable metropolitan fountain since the Renaissance (the Eros in Piccadilly Circus), also became the first sculptor of the foremost rank since Cellini to devote himself wholeheartedly to the art of the goldsmith.

 Perhaps the least successful aspect of 19th-century sculpture was the large-scale relief panels and pedimental ornaments and niche stances on churches and public buildings—the individual styles encouraged by the exhibition were inappropriate, and traditional styles tended to be artificially resurrected. The subject matter was often selected for negative purposes—to avoid offense, to seem impressive, to fill gaps. The unsuitability of this sort of task for the artist with a romantic sense of independence is obvious, and the situation did once arise, in the case of David d'Angers (David d'Angers, Pierre-Jean), of a sculptor's choosing his own program for one of the great public buildings in Paris (the Panthéon) against the wishes of his patrons. This same sense of independence also made for difficult relations between sculptors and architects. The quarrels between the architect of the Paris Opéra and Jean-Baptiste Carpeaux (Carpeaux, Jean-Baptiste) were typical; what was atypical was the success of Carpeaux's festive high relief of nymphs in abandoned dance (completed in 1869; see photograph—>).

      Another type of public sculpture—the portrait, typically in bronze, erected in a town square or other public space—flourished in the 19th century as it had not done since the first centuries AD. The first prominent sculptures of this sort commemorating nonroyal figures since antiquity seem to have appeared in Britain. The statues of Nelson by Sir Richard Westmacott erected in Liverpool and Birmingham soon after the subject's death were followed by statues of political heroes such as Fox and Pitt. By the end of the century, even relatively minor generals, philanthropists, or entrepreneurs were commemorated in this manner—almost invariably at the expense of public subscribers. The rest of Europe eventually followed this English example.

 The young countries of the New World—the United States and later the republics of Latin America—commemorated with statues heroes whom they perceived as national saviours and founders. It may be that statues of Nelson excited as much patriotic sentiment as those of Washington or Bolívar, but Nelson could not embody the nation as the others did, nor certainly could any statue of a European monarch. For Europe national pride could best be promoted by an appeal to the past. Among the most remarkable public sculpture of the 19th century must certainly be counted Carlo Marochetti's “Duke Emmanuel Philibert” (1833, Turin) and Christian Daniel Rauch's “Frederick the Great” (1836–51, East Berlin) and the several statues of Joan of Arc in France. These were works of not simply historical but also topical and political significance, as indeed was the colossal “Christ of the Andes” by Mateo Alonso erected in 1902 on the border of Chile and Argentina (photograph—>). Abstractions were also endowed with a more urgent ideological content than in former centuries. In France, at least in the great “Triumph of the Republic” by Jules Dalou (Dalou, Jules) (unveiled in 1899 in the Place de la Nation), these could be animated with genuine passions. This is not true of the Statue of Liberty in New York City, which has nonetheless made an impact on the popular imagination.

      In the 19th century, funeral sculpture was as completely revolutionized as public sculpture. Whereas previously it had only really been in England that a large section of the wealthier classes had enjoyed the privilege of erecting substantial sculptured memorials, the opening up of large landscaped municipal cemeteries made this possible elsewhere. These cemeteries, of which the finest examples are in Paris and in Italy, were free from ecclesiastical censorship, and new themes quickly developed that were appropriate for an age of doubt and of desperate faith. The sentimentality and sensationalism of the annual exhibition were found here also, and so too was much exhibitionist virtuosity devoted to depicting the veiled faces and figures of ascending souls and their androgynous angelic escorts, as well as to recording bourgeois haberdashery.

      This virtuosity is largely associated with Italian sculpture; and in a sense the Italians continued to dominate sculpture throughout the Western world after the death of Canova, by supplying the skilled carvers who were everywhere employed to translate into marble ideas worked out in clay. The greatest sculptors of the 19th century tended to play a smaller part than any of their predecessors in the actual carving, and the most vital sculpture of the period is preeminently plastic: when one thinks of the broken surfaces of the portrait busts by Carpeaux, for example, or of the precarious balances, open forms, and eloquent contours of Gilbert's statuettes, one thinks of wax and clay.

Nicholas B. Penny

Modern sculpture

19th-century beginnings
      The origins of modern art are usually traced to the mid-19th-century rejection of Academic tradition in subject matter and style by certain artists and critics. Painters of the Impressionist (Impressionism) school that emerged in France in the late 1860s sought to free painting from the tyranny of the subject and to explore the intrinsic qualities of colour, brushwork, and form. This expansive notion of visual rendering had revolutionary effects on sculpture as well. The French sculptor Auguste Rodin (Rodin, Auguste) found in it a new basis for life modelling and thus restored to the art a stylistic integrity that it had hardly possessed for more than two centuries.

 Rodin's highly naturalistic early work, “The Age of Bronze” (1877), is effective because the banal studio pose of a man leaning on a staff produced an unconventional and expressive gesture when the staff was removed. From Honoré Daumier, Rodin had learned the bold modelling of surfaces that are emotive rather than literal; the statue is only a rough approximation that avoids the definitive finish of earlier sculpture and remains in a state of becoming. Eventually, Rodin even worked with mere fragments such as broken torsos, and he enormously enlarged the range of figure composition. The mass, until then the principal vehicle of sculptural composition, was explosively opened by these methods; in contrast to earlier sculpture, which depended on the interplay of solid and void, Rodin's works are fused with the surrounding space. These methods evolved in his many works, such as “Adam” (1880), “Eve” (1881), and others, originally conceived as a part of the masterpiece of modern sculpture, “The Gates of Hell,” undertaken by Rodin in 1880 and never really completed. It was inevitable that the translucent nature of the marble surface should engage the attention of Rodin, and even though he always prepared the models in clay and left the execution in stone to assistants, such marbles as “The Kiss” (1885), when properly exhibited with light partly from the rear, appear to glow with the incandescence of their passionate intensity.

Joseph Hudnut James Holderbaum
      Although the art of Rodin appears conservative in comparison to the painting of the time, in that he continued to use literary themes while painting did not, the new style that he evolved did much to revive sculpture's significance as an expressive medium, and his importance to 20th-century sculpture can hardly be overestimated. His fresh search and revelation of the basic movements of modern life had a profound influence on the generation of European sculptors who followed him.

      Among Rodin's contemporaries, Edgar Degas (Degas, Edgar), whose sculpture, begun in the 1880s, was an intimate study of movement and light, in several respects predicts 20th-century developments. Rodin's Italian counterpart, Medardo Rosso (Rosso, Medardo), lived in Paris during the 1880s; his work was known and owned by Rodin. Less gifted than Rodin but interested in the same problems, Rosso used wax in such a way that light was suffused through sensitively modelled portraits, and labile forms were created to express the flux that he felt was a condition of modern life. In Italy Rosso influenced Arturo Martini (Martini, Arturo) and through him Giacomo Manzù (Manzù, Giacomo), Marino Marini, and Alberto Viani.

The 20th century
 The ablest of Rodin's many pupils were Émile-Antoine Bourdelle (Bourdelle, Antoine) and Charles Despiau (Despiau, Charles). Bourdelle's “Héraklès Archer” (1910) is an attempt to continue Rodin's active postures; but the results are melodramatic, and the forms are heavy and less sensitively modelled. Despiau, who was director of Rodin's shop from 1907 to 1914, also responded to the interest in Classicism; his best work, “Girl from the Landes” (1904), was a balance of individual traits in the Rodin tradition, combined with graceful poses and well-rounded forms.

 Two of the many other young sculptors attracted to Paris by Rodin's fame were Wilhelm Lehmbruck (Lehmbruck, Wilhelm) and Constantin Brancusi. Lehmbruck's early work has the soft modelling by touches of clay characteristic of the time, as in his “Mother and Child” (1907) and “Bust of a Woman” (1910). Brancusi's “Sleeping Muse” (1908) and the small “Bust of a Boy with Head Inclined” (1907) reflect Rodin's later interests in the expressiveness of modelling as opposed to strenuous gesture. Pablo Picasso and Henri Matisse were also early disciples of Rodin, as was Jacob Epstein, particularly in his naturalistic and psychologically incisive portraits.

Avant-garde sculpture (1909–20)
      In the second decade of the 20th century the tradition of body rendering extending from the Renaissance to Rodin was shattered, and the Cubists, Brancusi, and the Constructivists emerged as the most influential forces. Cubism, with its compositions of imagined rather than observed forms and relationships, had a similarly marked influence.

      One of the first examples of the revolutionary sculpture is Picasso's (Picasso, Pablo) “Woman's Head” (1909). The sculptor no longer relied upon traditional methods of sculpture or upon his sensory experience of the body; what was given to his outward senses of sight and touch was dominated by strong conceptualizing. The changed and forceful appearance of the head derives from the use of angular planar volumes joined in a new syntax independent of anatomy. In contrast to traditional portraiture, the eyes and mouth are less expressive than the forehead, cheeks, nose, and hair. Matisse's (Matisse, Henri) head of “Jeanette” (1910–11) also partakes of a personal reproportioning that gives a new vitality to the less mobile areas of the face. Likewise influenced by the Cubists' manipulation of their subject matter, Alexander Archipenko (Archipenko, Alexander) in his “Woman Combing Her Hair” (1915) rendered the body by means of concavities rather than convexities and replaced the solid head by its silhouette within which there is only space.

 Brancusi (Brancusi, Constantin) also abandoned Rodin's rhetoric and reduced the body to its mystical inner core. His “Kiss” (1908), with its two blocklike figures joined in symbolic embrace, has a concentration of expression comparable to that of primitive art but lacking its spiritualistic power. In this and subsequent works Brancusi favoured hard materials and surfaces as well as self-enclosed volumes that often impart an introverted character to his subjects. His bronze “Bird in Space” became a cause célèbre in the 1920s when U.S. customs refused to admit it duty free as a work of art.

      Raymond Duchamp-Villon (Duchamp-Villon, Raymond) began as a follower of Rodin, but his portrait head “Baudelaire” (1911) contrasts with that by his predecessor in its more radical departure from the flesh; the somewhat squared-off head is molded by clear, hard volumes. His famous “Horse” (1914), a coiled, vaguely mechanical form bearing little resemblance to the animal itself, suggests metaphorically the horsepower of locomotive drive shafts and, by extension, the mechanization of modern life. Duchamp-Villon may have been influenced by Umberto Boccioni (Boccioni, Umberto), one of the major figures in the Italian Futurist movement and a sculptor who epitomized the Futurist love of force and energy deriving from the machine. In “Unique Forms of Continuity in Space” and “Head + House + Light” (1911), he carried out his theories that the sculptor should model objects as they interact with their environment, thus revealing the dynamic essence of reality.

 Jacques Lipchitz (Lipchitz, Jacques) came to Cubism later than Archipenko and Duchamp-Villon, but after mastering its meaning he produced superior sculpture. In 1913, after several years of conservative training, he made a number of small bronzes experimenting with the compass curve and angular planes. They reveal an understanding of the Cubist reconstitution of the bodies in an impersonal quasi-geometric armature over which the artist exercised complete autonomy. Continuing to work in this fashion, he produced “Man with a Guitar”, and “Standing Figure” (1915), in which voids are introduced, while in the early 1920s he developed freer forms more consistently based on curves.

 Lehmbruck's mature style emerged in the “Kneeling Woman” (1911) and “Standing Youth” (1913), in which his gothicized, elongated bodies with their angular posturings and appearance of growing from the earth give expression to his notions of modern heroism. In contrast to this spiritualized view is his “The Fallen” (1915–16), intended as a compassionate memorial for friends lost in the war.

Constructivism and Dada
 Between 1912 and 1914 there emerged an antisculptural movement, called Constructivism, that attacked the false seriousness and hollow moral ideals of academic art. The movement began with the relief fabrications of Vladimir Tatlin (Tatlin, Vladimir Yevgrafovich) in 1913. The Constructivists and their sympathizers preferred industrially manufactured materials, such as plastics, glass, iron, and steel, to marble and bronze. Their sculptures were not formed by carving, modelling, and casting but by twisting, cutting, welding, or literally constructing: thus the name Constructivism.

      Unlike traditional figural representation, the Constructivists' sculpture denied mass as a plastic element and volume as an expression of space; for these principles they substituted geometry and mechanics. In the machine, where the Futurists saw violence, the Constructivists saw beauty. Like their sculptures, it was something invented; it could be elegant, light, or complex, and it demanded the ultimate in precision and calculation.

      Seeking to express pure reality, with the veneer of accidental appearance stripped away, the Constructivists fabricated objects totally devoid of sentiment or literary association; Naum Gabo's (Gabo, Naum) work frequently resembled mathematical models, and several Constructivist sculptures, such as those by Kazimir Malevich (Malevich, Kazimir) and Georges Vantongerloo, have the appearance of architectural models. The Constructivists created, in effect, sculptural metaphors for the new world of science, industry, and production; their aesthetic principles are reflected in much of the furniture, architecture, and typography of the Bauhaus.

      A second important offshoot of the Cubist collage was the fantastic object or Dadaist (Dada) assemblage. The Dadaist movement, while sharing Constructivism's iconoclastic vigour, opposed its insistence upon rationality. Dadaist assemblages were, as the name suggests, “assembled” from materials lying about in the studio, such as wood, cardboard, nails, wire, and paper; examples are Kurt Schwitters' (Schwitters, Kurt) “Rubbish Construction” (1921) and Marcel Duchamp's (Duchamp, Marcel) “Disturbed Balance” (1918). This art generally exalted the accidental, the spontaneous, and the impulsive, giving free play to associations. Its paroxysmal and negativist tenor led its subscribers into other directions, but Dadaism formed the basis of the imaginative sculpture that emerged in the later 1920s.

Conservative reaction (1920s)
      In the 1920s modern art underwent a reaction comparable to the changes experienced by society as a whole. In the postwar search for security, permanence, and order, the earlier insurgent art seemed to many to be antithetical to these ends, and certain avant-garde artists radically changed their art and thought. Lipchitz' portraits of “Gertrude Stein” (1920) and “Berthe Lipchitz” (1922) return volume and features to the head but not an intimacy of contact with the viewer. Tatlin and Alexander Rodchenko broke with the Constructivists around 1920. Jacob Epstein (Epstein, Sir Jacob) developed some of his finest naturalistic portraiture in this decade. Rudolph Belling abandoned the mechanization that had characterized his “Head” (1925) in favour of musculature and individual identity in his statue of “Max Schmeling” of 1929. Matisse's reclining nudes and the “Back” series of 1929 show less violently worked surfaces and more massive and obvious structuring.

      Aristide Maillol (Maillol, Aristide) continued refining his relaxed and uncomplicated female forms with their untroubled, stolid surfaces. In Germany, Georg Kolbe's “Standing Man and Woman” of 1931 seems a prelude to the Nazi health cult, and the serene but vacuous figures of Arno Breker, Karl Albiker, and Ernesto de Fiori were simply variations on a studio theme in praise of youth and body culture. In the United States adherents of the countermovement included William Zorach (Zorach, William), Chaim Gross, Adolph Block, Paul Manship (Manship, Paul), and Wheeler Williams.

Sculpture of fantasy (1920–45)
      One trend of Surrealist (Surrealism) or Fantasist sculpture of the late 1920s and the 1930s consisted of compositions made up of found objects (ready-made), such as Meret Oppenheim's “Object, Fur Covered Cup” (1936). As with Dadaist fabrications, the unfamiliar conjunction of familiar objects in these assemblies was dictated by impulse and irrationality and could be summarized by Isidore Ducasse's (Lautréamont, comte de) often-quoted statement, “Beautiful . . . as the chance meeting on a dissecting table of a sewing machine with an umbrella.”

      Of greater artistic importance was the sculpture of a second group that included Alberto Giacometti (Giacometti, Alberto), Jean Arp (Arp, Jean), Lipchitz, Henry Moore (Moore, Henry), Barbara Hepworth (Hepworth, Dame Barbara), Picasso, Julio González (González, Julio), and Alexander Calder (Calder, Alexander). Although these sculptors were sometimes in sympathy with Surrealist objectives, their aesthetic and intellectual concerns prohibited a more consistent attachment. Their art, derived from visions, hallucinations, reverie, and memory, might best be called the sculpture of fantasy. Giacometti's “Palace at 4 A.M.”, for example, interprets the artist's vision not in terms of the external public world but in an enigmatic, private language. Moore's series of “Forms” suggest shapes in the process of forming under the influence of each other and the medium of space. The appeal of primitive and ancient ritual art to Moore, the element of surprise in children's toys for Calder, and the wellsprings of irrationality from which Arp and Giacometti drank were for these men the means by which wonder and the marvelous could be restored to sculpture. While their works are often violent transmutations of life, their objectives were peaceful, “. . . to inject into the vain and bestial world and its retinue, the machines, something peaceful and vegetative.” ([Jean] Hans Arp, On My Way, Documents of Modern Art, vol. 6, p. 123, George Wittenborn, Inc., New York, 1948.)

Other sculpture (1920–45)
 The sculpture of Moore, Gaston Lachaise (Lachaise, Gaston), and Henri Laurens (Laurens, Henri) during the 1920s and '30s included mature, ripe human bodies, erogenic images reminiscent of Hindu sculpture, appearing inflated with breath rather than supported by skeletal armatures. Lachaise's “Montagne” (1934–35) and Moore's reclining nudes of the '30s and '40s are identifications with earth, growth, vital rhythm, and silent power. Prior to Moore and the work of Archipenko, Boccioni, and Lipchitz, space had been a negative element in figure sculpture; in Moore's string sculptures and Lipchitz' transparencies of the 1920s, it became a prime element of design.

      Lipchitz' figure style of the late 1920s and '30s is inseparable from his emerging optimistic humanism. His concern with subject matter began with the ecstatic “Joy of Life” (1927). Thereafter his seminal themes were of love and security and assertive passionate acts that throw off the inertia of his Cubist figures. In the “Return of the Prodigal Son” (1931), for example, strong, facetted curvilinear volumes weave a pattern of emotional and aesthetic accord between parent and child.

      The American sculptor John B. Flannagan (Flannagan, John Bernard) rendered animal forms as well as the human figure in a simple, almost naive style. His interest in what he called the “profound subterranean urges of the human spirit in the whole dynamic life process, birth, growth, decay and death” (quoted in Carl Zigrosser, Catalog for the Exhibition of the Sculpture of John B. Flannagan, p. 8, The Museum of Modern Art, New York, 1942) resulted in “Head of a Child” (1935), “New One” (1935), “Not Yet” (1940), and “The Triumph of the Egg” (1941).

      Somewhat more mystical are Brancusi's (Brancusi, Constantin) “Beginning of the World” (1924), “Fish” (1928–30), and “The Seal” (1936). As with Flannagan, the recurrent egg form in Brancusi's art symbolizes the mystery of life. Nature in motion is the subject of Alexander Calder's mobiles (mobile), such as “Lobster Trap and Fish Tail” (1939) and others suggesting the movement of leaves, trees, and snow. In the history of sculpture there is no more direct or poetic expression of nature's rhythm.

Developments after World War II
      “The modern artist is the counterpart in our time of the alchemist-philosopher who once toiled over furnaces, alembics and crucibles, ostensibly to make gold, but who consciously entered the most profound levels of being, philosophizing over the melting and mixing of various ingredients” (Ibram Lassaw, quoted by Lawrence Campbell in Art News, p. 66, The Art Foundation Press, New York, March 1954). While work in the older mediums persisted, it was the welding, soldering, and cutting of metal (metalwork) that emerged after 1945 as an increasingly popular medium for sculpture. The technical and expressive potential of uncast metal sculpture was carried far beyond the earlier work of González and Picasso.

      The appeal of metal is manifold. It is plentifully available from commercial supply houses; it is flexible and permanent; it allows the artist to work quickly; and it is relatively cheap compared to casting. Industrial metals also relate modern sculpture physically, aesthetically, and emotionally to its context in modern civilization. As the American sculptor David Smith (Smith, David) has commented, “Possibly steel is so beautiful because of all the movement associated with it, its strength and functions. Yet it is also brutal, the rapist, the murderer and death-dealing giants are also its offspring” (quoted in Garola Giedion-Welcker, Contemporary Sculpture, Documents of Modern Art, vol. 12, p. 123, George Wittenborn, Inc., New York, 1955).

      The basic tool of the metal sculptor is the oxyacetylene torch, which achieves a maximum temperature of 6,500° F (3,600° C; the melting point of bronze is 2,000° F). The intensity and size of the flame can be varied by alternating torch tips. In the hands of a skilled artist the torch can cut or weld, harden or soften, colour and lighten or darken metal. Files, hammers, chisels, and jigs are also used in shaping the metal, worked either hot or cold. The sculptor may first construct a metal armature that he then proceeds to conceal or expose. He builds up his form with various metals and alloys, fusing or brazing them, and may expose parts or the whole to the chemical action of acids. This type of work requires constant control, and many sculptors work out and guard their own recipes.

      Other sculptors such as Peter Agostini, George Spaventa, Peter Grippe, David Slivka, and Lipchitz, who were interested in bringing spontaneity, accident, and automatism into play, returned to the more labile media of wax and clay, with occasional cire-perdue casting, which permit a very direct projection of the artist's feelings. By the nature of the processes such work is usually on a small scale.

      A number of artists brought new technique and content to the Dadaist form of the assemblage. Among the most important was the American Joseph Cornell (Cornell, Joseph), who combined printed matter and three-dimensional objects in his intimately sealed, often enigmatic “boxes.”

      Another modern phenomenon, seen particularly in Italy, France, and the United States, was the revival of relief sculpture and the execution of such works on a large scale, intended to stand alone rather than in conjunction with a building. Louise Nevelson (Nevelson, Louise), for example, typically employed boxes as container compartments in which she carefully disposed an assortment of forms and then painted them a uniform colour. In Europe the outstanding metal reliefs were those by Alberto Burri (Burri, Alberto), Gio and Arnaldo Pomodoro, César, Zoltán Kemény (Kemeny, Zoltan), and Manuel Rivera.

      Development of metal sculpture, particularly in the United States, led to fresh interpretations of the natural world. In the art of Richard Lippold (Lippold, Richard) and Ibram Lassaw, the search for essential structures took the form of qualitative analogies. Lippold's “Full Moon” (1949–50) and “Sun” (1953–56; commissioned by the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York City, to hang in its room of Persian carpets) show an intuition of a basic regularity, precise order, and completeness that underlies the universe. Lassaw's comparable interest in astronomical phenomena inspired his “Planets” (1952) and “The Clouds of Magellan” (1953).

      In contrast to the macrocosmic concern of these two artists were the interests of sculptors such as Raymond Jacobson, whose “Structure” (1955) derived from his study of honeycombs. Using three basic sizes, Jacobson constructed his sculpture of hollowed cubes emulating the modular, generally regular but slightly unpredictable formal quality of the honeycomb.

      Isamu Noguchi's (Noguchi, Isamu) “Night Land” is one of the first pure landscapes in sculpture. David Smith's “Hudson River Landscape” (1951), Theodore J. Roszak's “Recollections of the Southwest” (1948), Louise Bourgeois's (Bourgeois, Louise) “Night Garden” (1953), and Leo Amino's “Jungle” (1950) are later examples.

      In the 1960s a number of sculptors, particularly in the United States, began to experiment with using the natural world as a kind of medium rather than a subject. Among the more notable examples were the American Robert Smithson (Smithson, Robert), who frequently employed earth-moving equipment to alter natural sites, and the Bulgarian-born Christo, whose “wrappings” of both natural and man-made structures in synthetic cloth generated considerable controversy. The name environmental sculpture has come to denote such works, together with other sculptures that constitute self-contained environments.

The human figure since World War II
      Since figural sculpture moved away from straightforward imitation, the human form has been subjected to an enormous variety of interpretations. The thin, vertical, Etruscan idol-like figures developed by Giacometti showed his repugnance toward rounded and smooth body surfaces or strong references to the flesh. His men and women do not exist in felicitous concert with others; each form is a secret sanctum, a maximum of being wrested from a minimum of material. Reg Butler's (Butler, Reg) work (e.g., “Woman Resting” [1951]) and that of David Hare (“Figure in a Window” [1955]) treat the body in terms of skeletal outlines. Butler's figures partake of nonhuman qualities and embody fantasies of an unsentimental and aggressive character; the difficulties and tensions of existence are measured out in taut wire armatures and constricting malleable bronze surfaces. Kenneth Armitage and Lynn Chadwick, two other British sculptors, make the clothing a direct extension of the figure, part of a total gesture. In his “Family Going for a Walk” (1953), for example, Armitage creates a fanciful screenlike figure recalling wind-whipped clothing on a wash line. Both Chadwick and Armitage transfer the burden of expression from human limbs and faces to the broad planes of the bulk of the sculpture. Chadwick's sculptures are often illusive hybrids suggesting alternately impotent De Chirico-like figures or animated geological forms.

      Luciano Minguzzi admired the amply proportioned feminine form. Minguzzi's women (e.g., “Woman Jumping Rope” [1954]) may exert themselves with a kind of playful abandon. Marini's (Marini, Marino) women (e.g., “Dancer” [1949]) enjoy a stately passivity, their quiescent postures permitting a contrapuntal focus on the graceful transition from the slender extremities to the large, compact, voluminous torso, with small, rich surface textures.

      The segmented torso, popular with Arp, Laurens, and Picasso earlier, continued to be reinterpreted by Alberto Viani, Bernard Heiliger, Karl Hartung, and Raoul Hague. The emphasis of these sculptors was upon more subtle, sensuous joinings that created self-enclosing surfaces. Viani's work, for example, does not glorify body culture or suggest macrocosmic affinities as does an ideally proportioned Phidian figure; his torsos are seen in a private way, as in his “Nude” (1951), with its large body and golf ball-sized breasts.

      Among the most impressive figure sculptures made in the United States in the late 1950s were those by Seymour Lipton (Lipton, Seymour). Their large-scale, taut design and provocative interweaving of closed and open shapes restore qualities of mystery and the heroic to the human form.

      The American George Segal (Segal, George) emerged from the Pop movement of the 1950s and '60s as a major figurative sculptor. His plaster casts from live models, usually left white and indistinctly featured, are often situated in mundane settings of actual furniture or other objects.

      The works of the French-born American artist Marisol contrast sharply with Segal's in their boxlike forms, onto which highly individualized features are usually painted. In the 1970s and '80s, Duane Hanson (Hanson, Duane), another American, took Segal's live-model casting technique a step further with his startlingly naturalistic, fully pigmented cast fibreglass figures.

Archaizing, idol making, and religious sculpture
      After World War II several sculptors became interested in the art of early Mediterranean civilizations. The result was a conscious archaizing of the human form with the intent of recapturing qualities of Cycladic idols, early Greek and Egyptian statuary, and some aspects of late Roman art.

      Moore's (Moore, Henry) admiration for archaic Greek sculpture produced “Draped Reclining Figure” (1952), which shows his return to the solid form and the suggestion of power and force by using drapery as a tense foil for the volumes that press against it. His “King and Queen” (1952–53) resulted from further excursions into the archaic Greek myth world.

      The interest in recreating idols or totems was continued by Arp (Arp, Jean) in his “Idol” (1950) and by Noguchi in his Stone Age-type sculptures for the Connecticut General Life Insurance Company (Hartford). By creating presences that elude rational definition, these artists restored to art its ancient aura of myth, mystery, and magic in an age that consistently disclaims their existence.

      The argument that modern sculpture is inappropriate for religious requirements is disproved by works of Lipchitz, Lassaw, and Herbert Ferber. In keeping with the Jewish preference for nonfigural art, Ferber's “. . . and the bush was not consumed” (1951), commissioned by a synagogue in Millburn, New Jersey, comprises clusters of branches and boldly shaped weaving flames, invisibly suspended in a powerful and intimate vision that absorbs its viewers with its hypnotic rhythm. Lassaw's “Pillar of Fire,” for the exterior of a synagogue in Springfield, Massachusetts, also has a mesmerizing pattern recalling the illusory images sometimes seen in flames. Lipchitz' (Lipchitz, Jacques) sculpture of the “Virgin of Assy” (1948–54) was commissioned for the Catholic church at Assy, France.

      Moreover, an increasing number of gifted sculptors are providing handsome liturgical objects and decorations, such as Harry Bertoia's (Bertoia, Harry) shimmering reredos, Lipton's work for a synagogue in Tulsa, Oklahoma, and Roszak's sculptured spire for Kresge Chapel on the campus of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge.

Public and private memorials
      After World War II there was a flood of public memorial sculpture, and in Europe especially many of the commissions were carried out by modern sculptors. A striking war memorial in Italy is Mirko Basaldella's gate for the monument to the Roman hostages killed in the Ardeatine Caves (1951). For its full effect the gate must be seen in connection with the rugged masonry wall to which it is attached. The gate was cast in metal and fashioned in a tangled, thicket-like pattern that suggests the painfully difficult passage from life to death for those who died in the caves.

      Another imposing memorial is Ossip Zadkine's (Zadkine, Ossip) monument to the bombing of Rotterdam, a figure recoiling from the violence that descended from the sky. In Moore's “Warrior with a Shield” a soldier defiantly raises his shield and mutilated body toward the ill-starred heavens during the Battle of Britain. Epstein's (Epstein, Sir Jacob) public monument to “Social Consciousness” (1952–53), in Fairmount Park, Philadelphia, treats the helplessness of those confronted with pressures over which they have no control. In contrast to the invulnerable champions of academic art, these sculptures image the hero in distress.

Other developments
      Despite the rapid and exciting developments in both architecture and sculpture, the two have seldom been meaningfully and integrally united. The architecture of Le Corbusier, Frank Lloyd Wright, Pier Luigi Nervi, Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, and others occasionally shows strong sculptural qualities, but relatively rarely were their surfaces planned to receive sculpture. Freestanding sculptures such as those created by Gabo, Pevsner, De Rivera, Calder, and Noguchi have been used to provide intimacy and visual relief from the severity of the “cult of the cube” in architecture. The architectural firm of Skidmore, Owings & Merrill successfully used Bertoia's brilliant screens and Noguchi's sculptures and garden ideas; Roszak's “Eagle” for the American embassy in London and Moore's changeable reliefs on the London Time and Life Building held out hope for further thoughtful integration of the arts.

      Also of great moment is the phenomenon of the sculptor-designer who has produced important changes in furniture and industrial design. Max Bill's (Bill, Max) school in Ulm, Germany, showed great promise. Playground facilities have been revolutionized by such designs as those made by Noguchi for Creative Playthings Inc. in the United States and the slides, hollowed forms, and climb apparatus of Egon Moeller-Nielson for parks in Stockholm. Noguchi, Moholy-Nagy, Bill, Bertoia, and many other modern artists contributed to the breakdown of the distinction between the object of utility and the work of art. Not since Gothic times has sculpture shown such promise of becoming an extensive and important part of human existence.

Albert Edward Elsen Ed.
      In Italy, traditional trends in sculpture are reflected in the brilliant accomplished modelling of Giacomo Manzù; Marino Marini (Marini, Marino), devoting himself almost entirely to the single theme of horse and rider, gave a bald realistic style an oddly apocalyptic force. The rough-hewn monumentality of the figures of the Austrian carver Fritz Wotruba (Wotruba, Fritz) is characteristic of this phase. Joannis Avramidis, also working in Vienna, turned figures into clusters of simplified formal echoes; the third sculptor of the Viennese group, Rudolf Hoflehner, who worked in iron, transformed them into symbolic presences. The segmental iron sculpture of the Spaniard Eduardo Chillida (Chillida, Eduardo) deals with a more limited and powerful range of forms.

      Robert Rauschenberg (Rauschenberg, Robert) in the United States sought to place his subtly calculated “combines” in the gap between reality and art, contrasting the significance of paint with the borrowed imagery and objects that are juxtaposed to it. Another American, Claes Oldenburg (Oldenburg, Claes), began by reconstructing common things out of the random pictorial substance of Abstract Expressionism; his later reconstructions of the rigid furniture of life are tailored out of limp plastic sheeting, and the paradox oddly extends one's knowledge of the objective world.

      In the reliefs of the Venezuelan Jesús Raphael Soto, the shifting paradoxes of vision are given a delicate order. Aside from this, the widespread work in kinetic mediums, such as that of Nicholus Takis, during the 1960s formed a separate genre, winking and shuddering on its own, most nearly linked to the Surrealist tradition.

      Other sequels of the general rationalization and concentration of artistic means have been more fertile. In the hands of the U.S. painters Kenneth Noland (Noland, Kenneth) and Frank Stella (Stella, Frank), painting discovered new shapes, both within the rectangular canvas and beyond it. The new value that was given to the painted plane did not benefit painting only. The British painter Richard Smith deployed it in three dimensions in painted constructions that re-create impressions of commercial packaging in terms of the spatial imagination of the arts. Sculpture, reequipped with colour, developed remarkably, and Anthony Caro (Caro, Sir Anthony) led a group of British sculptors in exploration of spatial modulation and formal analogy.

Sir Lawrence Gowing

Additional Reading

General
An excellent general history of world art is Hugh Honour and John Fleming, A World History of Art (1982; U.S. title, The Visual Arts: A History), which examines sculpture in relation to the other arts. H.W. Janson, History of Art (1962; 2nd ed., 1977), is also recommended. Among books that discuss sculpture of many periods, Ruth Butler, Western Sculpture: Definitions of Man (1975), is unusually valuable. So, too, is F. David Martin, Sculpture and Enlivened Space (1981). For the techniques of sculpture see W. Verhelst, Sculpture: Tools, Materials, and Techniques (1973); and Rudolf Wittkower, Sculpture (1977). The making of bronze sculptures, omitted from the latter, is brilliantly elucidated by Jennifer Montagu, Bronzes (1963, reissued 1972). Erwin Panofsky, Tomb Sculpture (1964), traces from ancient Egypt to about 1800 some of the major themes of one very important class of Western sculpture.

Ancient Mediterranean
Sculpture in the early civilizations of southern Europe is seldom studied separately, but it is featured in the following general works: John Boardman, Pre-Classical (1967, reissued 1979); R.W. Hutchinson, Prehistoric Crete (1962); A. Arribas, The Iberians (1964); N.K. Sandars, Prehistoric Art in Europe (1968); and Spyridon Marinatos, Crete and Mycenae (1960).

Greek, Hellenistic, Etruscan, and Roman art
An authoritative and comprehensive account of ancient Greek art (which, for the most part, means Greek sculpture) is Martin Robertson, A History of Greek Art (1975). For a succinct introduction to sculpture only, see John Barron, Introduction to Greek Sculpture (1981, reissued 1984). For the Archaic period, G.M.A. Richter, Archaic Greek Art Against Its Historical Background (1949), is still valuable; for the so-called Classical period, Brunilde S. Ridgway, Fifth Century Styles in Greek Sculpture (1981), is a good detailed guide; and for the later periods, Margarete Bieber, The Sculpture of the Hellenistic Age, 2nd rev. ed. (1981), is highly useful. For the ancient literature on art, see J.J. Pollitt, The Art of Greece 1400–31 B.C.: Sources and Documents (1965). Etruscan sculpture is best discussed in Otto J. Brendel, Etruscan Art (1978). Sculpture features prominently in the most lively general books on Roman art: R. Bianchi Bandinelli, Rome: The Centre of Power (1970; originally published in Italian, 1969), and Rome: The Late Empire (1971); and Richard Brilliant, Roman Art (1974). Of more limited scope but great interest is Jocelyn M.C. Toynbee, Art in Roman Britain (1962). See also J.J. Pollitt, The Art of Rome c. 753 BC–AD 337: Sources and Documents (1966, reissued 1983).

Early Christian and early medieval
Good general surveys of the early Christian period that include some discussion of sculpture are Ernst Kitzinger, Byzantine Art in the Making (1977); John Beckwith, The Art of Constantinople, 2nd ed. (1968); André Grabar, The Beginnings of Christian Art: 200–395 (1967, originally published in French, 1966); Steven Runciman, Byzantine Style and Civilization (1975); and Cyril A. Mango, The Art of the Byzantine Empire 312–1453: Sources and Documents (1972). This last volume, together with Ernst Kitzinger, Early Medieval Art (1940; rev. ed., 1983), concerns also the early medieval period. Among more specialized studies of sculpture in the early Christian period, John Beckwith, Coptic Sculpture (1963); and Joseph Natanson, Early Christian Ivories (1953), should be mentioned. For general information on the early medieval period, see Peter Lasko, Ars Sacra 800–1200 (1972); George Henderson, Early Medieval (1972); and George Zarnecki, Art of the Medieval World (1975). Valuable studies specifically on sculpture include George H. Crichton, Romanesque Sculpture in Italy (1954); Hermann Leisinger, Romanesque Bronzes (1956); Fritz Saxl, English Sculptures of the Twelfth Century (1954); and M.F. Hearn, Romanesque Sculpture: The Revival of Monumental Stone Sculpture in the Eleventh and Twelfth Centuries (1981).

Gothic
Many of the ideas expressed in this section of the article are treated at greater length in Andrew Martindale, Gothic Art (1967). General studies of Gothic art include George Henderson, Gothic (1967); Joan Evans (ed.), The Flowering of the Middle Ages (1966, reissued 1984); and Johan Huizinga, The Waning of the Middle Ages (1924, reissued 1976; 12th Dutch ed., 1973). For the imagery of the period, the reader is referred to Émile Mâle, The Gothic Image: Religious Art in France of the Thirteenth Century (1958, reissued 1972; trans. of 3rd French ed., 1910), and Religious Art from the Twelfth to the Eighteenth Century (1949, reissued 1970; originally published in French, 1945). A useful anthology of the literary sources of the period is Teresa G. Frisch, Gothic Art 1140–1450 (1971). For a general treatment of English Gothic sculpture, see Lawrence Stone, Sculpture in Britain: The Middle Ages, 2nd ed. (1972); for France, Marcel Aubert, La Sculpture française au moyen âge (1947); and for Italy, John Pope-Hennessy, Italian Gothic Sculpture, 2nd ed. (1972).

Renaissance
There are numerous general books on Renaissance art, especially on Renaissance art in Italy, but sculpture is seldom adequately discussed in them. The best introduction to the sculpture is John Pope-Hennessy, Italian Renaissance Sculptures, 2nd ed. (1971). As a succinct guide to the sculpture in Florence, the most consistently important centre in Europe at this time, Charles Avery, Florentine Renaissance Sculpture (1970), is recommended. Renaissance sculpture in northern Europe is discussed in Anthony Blunt, Art and Architecture in France: 1500–1700 (1953); Wolfgang Stechow, Northern Renaissance Art: 1400–1600 (1966); Gert von der Osten and Horst Vey, Painting and Sculpture in Germany and the Netherlands: 1500–1600 (1969); and Michael Baxandall, The Limewood Sculptors of Renaissance Germany (1980). For Spain and Portugal, see George Kubler and Martin S. Soria, Art and Architecture in Spain and Portugal and Their American Dominions: 1500–1800 (1959).

Baroque and Rococo
The best brief general discussion of Western art of this period is Michael Kitson, The Age of Baroque (1966, reissued 1976), which includes some consideration of sculpture. For Italian Baroque sculpture, a better guide than Pope-Hennessy (above) is provided by the sections on sculpture in Rudolf Wittkower, Art and Architecture in Italy: 1600–1750, 3rd rev. ed. (1973, reissued 1982). Robert Enggass, Early Eighteenth-Century Sculpture in Rome, 2 vol. (1976); and the first two volumes (1977 and 1981) of François Souchal, French Sculptors of the 17th and 18th Centuries, must also be mentioned. For 18th-century France, the sections by Michael Levey on sculpture in Michael Levey and Wend Graf Kalnein, Art and Architecture of the Eighteenth Century in France (1972), are excellent. For English sculpture, see the admirable account in Margaret Whinney, Sculpture in Britain: 1530–1830 (1964). For Spain, Portugal, and Latin America, see Kubler and Soria (above); Harold E. Wethey, Colonial Architecture and Sculpture in Peru (1949, reprinted 1971); and Pal Kelemen, Baroque and Rococo in Latin America (1951).

Neoclassicism and the 19th century
An excellent general account of Neoclassicism, which includes much of value on sculpture, is Hugh Honour, Neoclassicism (1977). For England, see David G. Irwin, English Neoclassical Art (1966); Benedict Read, Victorian Sculpture (1982); Susan Beattie, The New Sculpture (1983); and Whinney (above). For France and Italy, see Gerard Hubert, La Sculpture dans l'Italie Napoléonienne (1964); Jane Van Nimmen and Ruth Mirolli, Nineteenth Century French Sculpture (1971), an admirable introduction; and Peter Fusco and H.W. Janson (eds.), The Romantics to Rodin (1980), also a good introduction. A superb general introduction—perhaps the only truly comprehensive one—to Western sculpture of the 19th century is H.W. Janson's contribution to Robert Rosenblum and H.W. Janson, Art of the Nineteenth Century (1984; U.S. title, 19th Century Art).

Modern
There are numerous general introductions to modern art, but most give little space to sculpture. The best books devoted to modern sculpture are Albert E. Elsen, Modern European Sculpture: 1918–1945 (1979); Herbert Read, A Concise History of Modern Sculpture (1964); and Fred Licht, Sculpture: 19th and 20th Centuries (1967). Some recent developments are described in Allen Kaprow, Assemblage: Environments and Happenings (1966); and Udo Kultermann, The New Sculpture (1968; originally published in German, 1967). For a prominent sculptor's compelling but contentious account of what sculpture consists of, see William Tucker, The Language of Sculpture (1977).Nicholas B. Penny

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