Antonio Canova was an Italian Neoclassical sculptor, famous for his marble sculptures. Often regarded as the greatest of the Neoclassical artists, his sculpture was inspired by the Baroque and the classical revival, and has been characterised as having avoided the melodramatics of the former, and the cold artificiality of the latter.
Venus is a Roman goddess, whose functions encompass love, beauty, desire, sex, fertility, prosperity, and victory. In Roman mythology, she was the ancestor of the Roman people through her son, Aeneas, who survived the fall of Troy and fled to Italy. Julius Caesar claimed her as his ancestor. Venus was central to many religious festivals, and was revered in Roman religion under numerous cult titles.
A statue is a free-standing sculpture in which the realistic, full-length figures of persons or animals are carved or cast in a durable material such as wood, metal or stone. Typical statues are life-sized or close to life-size; a sculpture that represents persons or animals in full figure but that is small enough to lift and carry is a statuette or figurine, whilst one more than twice life-size is a colossal statue.
The statue of Laocoön and His Sons, also called the Laocoön Group, has been one of the most famous ancient sculptures since it was excavated in Rome in 1506 and put on public display in the Vatican Museums, where it remains today. The statue is very likely the same one that was praised in the highest terms by Pliny the Elder, the main Roman writer on art. The figures in the statue are nearly life-sized, with the entire group measuring just over 2 m in height. The sculpture depicts the Trojan priest Laocoön and his sons Antiphantes and Thymbraeus being attacked by sea serpents.
The sculpture of ancient Greece is the main surviving type of fine ancient Greek art as, with the exception of painted ancient Greek pottery, almost no ancient Greek painting survives. Modern scholarship identifies three major stages in monumental sculpture in bronze and stone: the Archaic, Classical (480–323) and Hellenistic. At all periods there were great numbers of Greek terracotta figurines and small sculptures in metal and other materials.
The Aphrodite of Knidos was an Ancient Greek sculpture of the goddess Aphrodite created by Praxiteles of Athens around the 4th century BC. It was one of the first life-sized representations of the nude female form in Greek history, displaying an alternative idea to male heroic nudity. Praxiteles' Aphrodite was shown nude, reaching for a bath towel while covering her pubis, which, in turn leaves her breasts exposed. Up until this point, Greek sculpture had been dominated by male nude figures. The original Greek sculpture is no longer in existence; however, many Roman copies survive of this influential work of art. Variants of the Venus Pudica are the Venus de' Medici and the Capitoline Venus.
Classical sculpture refers generally to sculpture from Ancient Greece and Ancient Rome, as well as the Hellenized and Romanized civilizations under their rule or influence, from about 500 BC to around 200 AD. It may also refer more precisely a period within Ancient Greek sculpture from around 500 BC to the onset of the Hellenistic style around 323 BC, in this case usually given a capital "C". The term "classical" is also widely used for a stylistic tendency in later sculpture, not restricted to works in a Neoclassical or classical style.
The study of Roman sculpture is complicated by its relation to Greek sculpture. Many examples of even the most famous Greek sculptures, such as the Apollo Belvedere and Barberini Faun, are known only from Roman Imperial or Hellenistic "copies". At one time, this imitation was taken by art historians as indicating a narrowness of the Roman artistic imagination, but, in the late 20th century, Roman art began to be reevaluated on its own terms: some impressions of the nature of Greek sculpture may in fact be based on Roman artistry.
The Venus de' Medici or Medici Venus is a 1.53 m tall Hellenistic marble sculpture depicting the Greek goddess of love Aphrodite. It is a 1st-century BC marble copy, perhaps made in Athens, of a bronze original Greek sculpture, following the type of the Aphrodite of Knidos, which would have been made by a sculptor in the immediate Praxitelean tradition, perhaps at the end of the century. It has become one of the navigation points by which the progress of the Western classical tradition is traced, the references to it outline the changes of taste and the process of classical scholarship. It is housed in the Uffizi Gallery, Florence, Italy.
Pauline Bonaparte as Venus Victrix is a semi-nude life-size reclining neo-Classical portrait sculpture by the Italian sculptor Antonio Canova. Reviving the ancient Roman artistic traditions of portrayals of mortal individuals in the guise of the gods, and of the beautiful female form reclining on a couch, it was commissioned by Pauline Bonaparte's husband Camillo Borghese and executed in Rome from 1805 to 1808, after the subject's marriage into the Borghese family. It then moved to Camillo's house in Turin, then to Genoa, only arriving in its present home around 1838.
The Augustus of Prima Porta is a full-length portrait statue of Augustus Caesar, the first emperor of the Roman Empire.
The nude, as a form of visual art that focuses on the unclothed human figure, is an enduring tradition in Western art. It was a preoccupation of Ancient Greek art, and after a semi-dormant period in the Middle Ages returned to a central position with the Renaissance. Unclothed figures often also play a part in other types of art, such as history painting, including allegorical and religious art, portraiture, or the decorative arts. From prehistory to the earliest civilizations, nude female figures were generally understood to be symbols of fertility or well-being.
Napoleon as Mars the Peacemaker is a colossal heroic nude statue by the Italian artist Antonio Canova, of Napoleon I of France in the guise of the Roman god Mars. He holds a gilded Nike or Victory standing on an orb in his right hand and a staff in his left. It was produced between 1802 and 1806 and stands 3.45 metres to the raised left hand. Once on display in the Louvre in Paris, it was purchased from Louis XVIII in 1816 by the British government, which granted it to the Duke of Wellington. It is now on display in Robert Adam's stairwell at the Duke's London residence, Apsley House.
In classical antiquity, the muscle cuirass, anatomical cuirass, or heroic cuirass is a type of cuirass made to fit the wearer's torso and designed to mimic an idealized male human physique. It first appears in late Archaic Greece and became widespread throughout the 5th and 4th centuries BC. Originally made from hammered bronze plate, boiled leather also came to be used. It is commonly depicted in Greek and Roman art, where it is worn by generals, emperors, and deities during periods when soldiers used other types.
The Sounion Kouros is an early archaic Greek statue of a naked young man or kouros carved in marble from the island of Naxos around 600 BCE. It is one of the earliest examples that scholars have of the kouros-type which functioned as votive offerings to gods or demi-gods, and were dedicated to heroes. Found near the Temple of Poseidon at Cape Sounion, this kouros was found badly damaged and heavily weathered. It was restored to its original height of 3.05 meters (10.0 ft) returning it to its larger than life size. It is now held by the National Archaeological Museum of Athens.
Ancient Greek art stands out among that of other ancient cultures for its development of naturalistic but idealized depictions of the human body, in which largely nude male figures were generally the focus of innovation. The rate of stylistic development between about 750 and 300 BC was remarkable by ancient standards, and in surviving works is best seen in sculpture. There were important innovations in painting, which have to be essentially reconstructed due to the lack of original survivals of quality, other than the distinct field of painted pottery.
The term Pseudo-athlete is used to describe works of art from the Late Republican period in Rome that combine a veristic head with an idealized body that references Classical Greek sculpture. Verism is a style of Roman portraiture that portrays an individual with aging facial features, most notably sagging skin around the mouth and eyes, short-cropped or balding hair, and deep wrinkles on the forehead and around the eyes and mouth. These features were emphasized under the tradition of verism in order to stress an advanced moral and psychological consciousness that comes along with advanced age. The veristic features of the pseudo-athlete's head are juxtaposed with the figure's body, which is depicted in the guise of an athletic youth from Classical Greece. The pseudo-athlete's body is typically depicted in heroic-nudity with highly smooth muscular forms and are often shown in an active stance or standing in an S-shaped curved known as contrapposto.
French sculpture has been an original and influential component of world art since the Middle Ages. The first known French sculptures date to the Upper Paleolithic age. French sculpture originally copied ancient Roman models, then found its own original form in the decoration of Gothic architecture. French sculptors produced important works of Baroque sculpture for the decoration of the Palace of Versailles. In the 19th century, the sculptors Auguste Rodin and Edgar Degas created a more personal and non-realistic style, which led the way to modernism in the 20th century, and the sculpture of Pablo Picasso, Georges Braque, Marcel Duchamp and Jean Arp.
The historical evolution of the nude in art runs parallel to the history of art in general, except for small particularities derived from the different acceptance of nudity by the various societies and cultures that have succeeded each other in the world over time. The nude is an artistic genre that consists of the representation in various artistic media of the naked human body. It is considered one of the academic classifications of works of art. Nudity in art has generally reflected the social standards for aesthetics and morality of the era in which the work was made. Many cultures tolerate nudity in art to a greater extent than nudity in real life, with different parameters for what is acceptable: for example, even in a museum where nude works are displayed, nudity of the visitor is generally not acceptable. As a genre, the nude is a complex subject to approach because of its many variants, both formal, aesthetic and iconographic, and some art historians consider it the most important subject in the history of Western art.
Classical Greek sculpture has long been regarded as the highest point in the development of sculptural art in Ancient Greece, becoming almost synonymous with "Greek sculpture". The Canon, a treatise on the proportions of the human body written by Polykleitos around 450 B.C., is generally considered its starting point, and its end marked with the conquest of Greece by the Macedonians in 338 B.C., when Greek art began a great diffusion to the East, from where it received influences, changed its character, and became cosmopolitan. This phase is known as the Hellenistic period. In this period, the tradition of Greek Classicism was consolidated, with Man being the new measure of the universe.
