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.
David is a masterpiece of Italian Renaissance sculpture, created from 1501 to 1504 by Michelangelo. With a height of 5.17 metres, the David was the first colossal marble statue made in the early modern period following classical antiquity, a precedent for the 16th century and beyond. David was originally commissioned as one of a series of statues of twelve prophets to be positioned along the roofline of the east end of Florence Cathedral, but was instead placed in the public square in front of the Palazzo della Signoria, the seat of civic government in Florence, where it was unveiled on 8 September 1504. In 1873, the statue was moved to the Galleria dell'Accademia, Florence, and in 1910 replaced at the original location by a replica.
Baccio Bandinelli, was an Italian Renaissance sculptor, draughtsman, and painter.
David is the title of two statues of the biblical hero by the Italian Early Renaissance sculptor Donatello. They consist of an early work in marble of a clothed figure (1408–09), and a far more famous bronze figure that is nude except for helmet and boots, and dates to the 1440s or later. Both are now in the Museo Nazionale del Bargello in Florence. The first was Donatello's most important commission up to that point, and had a religious context, placed on Florence Cathedral. The bronze remains his most famous work, and was made for a secular context, commissioned by the Medici family.
Bronze is the most popular metal for cast metal sculptures; a cast bronze sculpture is often called simply "a bronze". It can be used for statues, singly or in groups, reliefs, and small statuettes and figurines, as well as bronze elements to be fitted to other objects such as furniture. It is often gilded to give gilt-bronze or ormolu.
Carrara marble, Luna marble to the Romans, is a type of white or blue-grey marble popular for use in sculpture and building decor. It has been quarried since Roman times in the mountains just outside the city of Carrara in the province of Massa and Carrara in the Lunigiana, the northernmost tip of modern-day Tuscany, Italy.
The Farnese Hercules is an ancient statue of Hercules, probably an enlarged copy made in the early third century AD and signed by Glykon, who is otherwise unknown; he was an Athenian but he may have worked in Rome. Like many other Ancient Roman sculptures it is a copy or version of a much older Greek original that was well known, in this case a bronze by Lysippos that would have been made in the fourth century BC. This original survived for over 1500 years until it was melted down by Crusaders in 1205 during the Sack of Constantinople. The enlarged copy was made for the Baths of Caracalla in Rome, where the statue was recovered in 1546, and is now in the Museo Archeologico Nazionale in Naples. The heroically-scaled Hercules is one of the most famous sculptures of antiquity, and has fixed the image of the mythic hero in the European imagination.
The Thinker is a bronze sculpture by Auguste Rodin, situated atop a stone pedestal. The work depicts a nude male figure of heroic size sitting on a rock. He is seen leaning over, his right elbow placed on his left thigh, holding the weight of his chin on the back of his right hand. The pose is one of deep thought and contemplation, and the statue is often used as an image to represent philosophy.
William Ordway Partridge was an American sculptor, teacher and author. Among his best-known works are the Shakespeare Monument in Chicago, the equestrian statue of General Grant in Brooklyn, the Pietà at St. Patrick's Cathedral in Manhattan, and the Pocahontas statue in Jamestown, Virginia.
In culture, a "fig leaf" or "fig-leaf" is a literal or figurative method of obscuring an act or object considered embarrassing or distasteful with something of innocuous appearance. The use of an actual fig leaf for the purpose originates in Western painting and sculpture, where leaves would be used by the artist themselves or by later censors in order to hide the genitalia of a subject. Use of the fig plant in particular came about as a Biblical reference to the Book of Genesis, in which Adam and Eve used fig leaves to cover their nudity after eating the forbidden fruit from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil.
Randolph Rogers was an American Neoclassical sculptor. An expatriate who lived most of his life in Italy, his works ranged from popular subjects to major commissions, including the Columbus Doors at the U.S. Capitol and American Civil War monuments.
Pietro Tacca was an Italian sculptor, who was the chief pupil and follower of Giambologna. Tacca began in a Mannerist style and worked in the Baroque style during his maturity.
The Cast Courts of the Victoria and Albert Museum in London, England, comprise two large halls. Unusually for a museum, the Cast Courts house a collection not of originals, but copies. Here are to be found reproductions of some of the most famous sculptures in the world. Most of the copies were made in the 19th century and in many cases they have better resisted the ravages of time, 20th-century pollution and over-zealous conservation than the originals. In a few cases, such as the late 15th century Lübeck relief of Christ washing the Apostles' feet, the original has been destroyed and the cast is a unique record of a lost work.
Boy with Thorn, also called Fedele (Fedelino) or Spinario, is a Greco-Roman Hellenistic bronze sculpture of a boy withdrawing a thorn from the sole of his foot, now in the Palazzo dei Conservatori, Rome. There is a Roman marble version of this subject from the Medici collections in a corridor of the Uffizi Gallery, Florence.
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.
The Medici lions are a pair of marble sculptures of lions: one of which is Roman, dating to the 2nd century AD, and the other a 16th-century pendant. Both were by 1598 placed at the Villa Medici, Rome. Since 1789 they have been displayed at the Loggia dei Lanzi in Florence. The sculptures depict standing male lions with a sphere or ball under one paw, looking to the side.
The Cloak of Conscience and Tolerance is a sculpture by Anna Chromý carved from a single block of white marble excavated from the Michelangelo Quarry in Carrara, Italy, where Michelangelo sourced the marble for his iconic David. Anna Chromy's creation represents her largest work of art since Chromy turned to sculpture from surrealist oil paintings in 1992. As a result of her work on Cloak, Chromy was the first woman to be awarded the Premio Michelangelo, the annual award for sculpture, in 2008.
The End of the Trail is a sculpture by James Earle Fraser. Fraser created the original version of the work in 1894, and he subsequently produced numerous replicas in both plaster and bronze. The sculpture depicts a weary Native American man, wearing only the remains of a blanket and carrying a spear. He is hanging limp as his weary horse with swollen eyes comes to the edge of the Pacific Ocean. The wind blowing the horse's tail suggests they have their backs to the wind. The man in the statue is based on Seneca Chief John Big Tree, and the horse was adapted from one in another work, In the Wind. The statue is a commentary on the damage Euro-American settlement inflicted upon Native Americans. The main figure embodies the suffering and exhaustion of people driven from their native lands.
Christus is an 1833 white Carrara marble statue of the resurrected Jesus by Bertel Thorvaldsen located in the Church of Our Lady, an Evangelical Lutheran Church of Denmark in Copenhagen, Denmark. It was commissioned as part of a larger group, which includes 11 of the original 12 apostles and Paul the Apostle.
An Athlete Wrestling with a Python was the first of three bronze sculptures produced by the British artist Frederic Leighton. Completed in 1877, the sculpture was a departure for Leighton, and heralded the advent of a new movement, New Sculpture, taking a realistic approach to classical models. It has been described as a "sculptural masterpiece" and as "possibly Leighton's greatest contribution to British art". Despite its indebtedness to the Classical tradition, it can be understood as one of the first stirrings of modern sculpture in Britain as well as in Europe. The Athlete was arguably the most influential piece of English sculpture of the 19th century.
Piazzale Michelangelo, Florence
Victoria and Albert Museum, London
Langelinie Promenade, Copenhagen
Avenue du Prado, Marseille (1903)
