Sculpture History

Sculpture — three-dimensional art created by carving, modeling, casting, or assembling — is among humanity's oldest art forms. The Venus of Willendorf (c. 25,000 BCE, Austria) is an early figurative sculpture. Ancient Egyptian and Mesopotamian sculpture created idealized, hieratic figures. Classical Greek sculpture developed naturalism — the contrapposto stance, accurate anatomy, and ideal proportions — seen in the Parthenon frieze, Myron's Discobolus, and Praxiteles' Aphrodite of Knidos (the first nude female sculpture in the Western tradition). Michelangelo's David (1504, Florence) represents the Renaissance's greatest sculptural achievement — quarried from a single block of marble that had been abandoned as flawed, standing 5.17m tall. Rodin's The Thinker (1904) and Balzac (1898) broke from classical representation into psychological expressionism. Contemporary sculpture includes Jeff Koons's stainless steel balloon animals (sold for $91M at auction), Richard Serra's massive Cor-Ten steel plates, and Damien Hirst's diamond skull (For the Love of God, $100M).