In the visual arts, an S-curve is an S -shaped curve that serves a wide variety of compositional purposes. The term is usually applied to the standing human figure bending first one way and then back the other. It may also be applied more generally, for example in landscape painting and photography.
In Ancient Greek and Roman sculpture, the S-curve is a traditional art concept where the figure's body and posture is depicted like a sinuous or serpentine manner. It is related to and is an extension of the art term of contrapposto which is when a figure is depicted slouching or placing one's weight and thus center of gravity to one side. However, the S Curve involves more of the body than the contrapposto, and is therefore considered to be a more advanced technical development. The "S Curve" concept was probably invented by the famous Greek sculptor Praxiteles, son of Kifissodotos, who lived in the 4th century BC. [1]
The Indian tribhanga ("three bend") pose is similar, but generally more pronounced, often with the neck also curved to one side. This goes back to at least 100 BC. [2] The S-curve was revived in Gothic art from the 14th century onwards, especially in sculptures of the Madonna. [3] Gothic figures in ivory, typically of the Madonna, had already acquired a "Gothic sway" to one side to fit into the curved tusk, and curving the head or upper body back the other gave a more satisfactory result.
The figura serpentinata is a variant or development of the pose. The term is usually applied only to art from the Renaissance onwards, and Donatello is often regarded as its inventor. [4] While in all these periods the S-curve originated in sculpture, it was also used in two-dimensional figures in various other media.
An S-curve can help guide the viewer's eye through the image to the main subject at the end of the curve, but can also serve as a subject in and of itself. [5] It has been variously described as dynamic, [6] feminine, [6] restful, [5] and hypnotic. [5] The S-curve is particularly prominent in a vertical composition, where it may be stacked to form a double S-curve for maximum effect. [6]
Sculpture is the branch of the visual arts that operates in three dimensions. Sculpture is the three-dimensional art work which is physically presented in the dimensions of height, width and depth. It is one of the plastic arts. Durable sculptural processes originally used carving and modelling, in stone, metal, ceramics, wood and other materials but, since Modernism, there has been almost complete freedom of materials and process. A wide variety of materials may be worked by removal such as carving, assembled by welding or modelling, or moulded or cast.
Contrapposto is an Italian term that means "counterpoise". It is used in the visual arts to describe a human figure standing with most of its weight on one foot, so that its shoulders and arms twist off-axis from the hips and legs in the axial plane.
Donato di Niccolò di Betto Bardi, known mononymously as Donatello, was an Italian sculptor of the Renaissance period. Born in Florence, he studied classical sculpture and used his knowledge to develop an Early Renaissance style of sculpture. He spent time in other cities, where he worked on commissions and taught others; his periods in Rome, Padua, and Siena introduced to other parts of Italy the techniques he had developed in the course of a long and productive career. His David was the first freestanding nude male sculpture since antiquity; like much of his work it was commissioned by the Medici family.
Polykleitos was an ancient Greek sculptor, active in the 5th century BCE. Alongside the Athenian sculptors Pheidias, Myron and Praxiteles, he is considered as one of the most important sculptors of classical antiquity. The 4th century BCE catalogue attributed to Xenocrates, which was Pliny's guide in matters of art, ranked him between Pheidias and Myron. He is particularly known for his lost treatise, the Canon of Polykleitos, which set out his mathematical basis of an idealised male body shape.
Santa Maria Novella is a church in Florence, Italy, situated opposite, and lending its name to, the city's main railway station. Chronologically, it is the first great basilica in Florence, and is the city's principal Dominican church.
Nanni d'Antonio di Banco was an Italian Renaissance sculptor from Florence. He was a contemporary of Donatello – both are first recorded as sculptors in the accounts of the Florence Duomo in 1406, presumably as young masters.
The art of Europe, also known as Western art, encompasses the history of visual art in Europe. European prehistoric art started as mobile Upper Paleolithic rock and cave painting and petroglyph art and was characteristic of the period between the Paleolithic and the Iron Age. Written histories of European art often begin with the Aegean civilizations, dating from the 3rd millennium BC. However a consistent pattern of artistic development within Europe becomes clear only with Ancient Greek art, which was adopted and transformed by Rome and carried; with the Roman Empire, across much of Europe, North Africa and Western Asia.
Relief is a sculptural method in which the sculpted pieces remain attached to a solid background of the same material. The term relief is from the Latin verb relevare, to raise. To create a sculpture in relief is to give the impression that the sculpted material has been raised above the background plane. When a relief is carved into a flat surface of stone or wood, the field is actually lowered, leaving the unsculpted areas seeming higher. The approach requires a lot of chiselling away of the background, which takes a long time. On the other hand, a relief saves forming the rear of a subject, and is less fragile and more securely fixed than a sculpture in the round, especially one of a standing figure where the ankles are a potential weak point, particularly in stone. In other materials such as metal, clay, plaster stucco, ceramics or papier-mâché the form can be simply added to or raised up from the background. Monumental bronze reliefs are made by casting.
Since ancient times, Greeks, Etruscans and Celts have inhabited the south, centre and north of the Italian peninsula respectively. The very numerous rock drawings in Valcamonica are as old as 8,000 BC, and there are rich remains of Etruscan art from thousands of tombs, as well as rich remains from the Greek colonies at Paestum, Agrigento and elsewhere. Ancient Rome finally emerged as the dominant Italian and European power. The Roman remains in Italy are of extraordinary richness, from the grand Imperial monuments of Rome itself to the survival of exceptionally preserved ordinary buildings in Pompeii and neighbouring sites. Following the fall of the Roman Empire, in the Middle Ages Italy remained an important centre, not only of the Carolingian art, Ottonian art of the Holy Roman Emperors, Norman art, but for the Byzantine art of Ravenna and other sites.
The Doryphoros of Polykleitos is one of the best known Greek sculptures of Classical antiquity, depicting a solidly built, muscular, standing warrior, originally bearing a spear balanced on his left shoulder. The lost bronze original of the work would have been cast circa 440 BC, but it is today known only from later marble copies. The work nonetheless forms an important early example of both Classical Greek contrapposto and classical realism; as such, the iconic Doryphoros proved highly influential elsewhere in ancient art.
The Discobolus by Myron is an ancient Greek sculpture completed at the start of the Classical period in around 460–450 BC that depicts an ancient Greek athlete throwing a discus. Its Greek original in bronze lost, the work is known through numerous Roman copies, both full-scale ones in marble, which is cheaper than bronze, such as the Palombara Discobolus, the first to be recovered, and smaller scaled versions in bronze.
The Virgin of Paris or Notre-Dame de Paris is a title of the Blessed Virgin that is associated with a near life-size stone statue, 1.8 metres tall, of the Virgin and Child created in the early 14th century. The statue was transferred to Notre-Dame in 1818, it was first placed in the over mantal of the portal of the Virgin to replace the 13th century Virgin, which was destroyed in 1793. In 1855, during the restoration campaign of Viollet-le-Duc, it was installed in its current location at the south-east pillar of the transept, a historically meaningful site since an altar to the Virgin stood at the same place at the end of the 12th century. The statue was commissioned for, and remains in the Cathedral of Notre-Dame in Paris, where it survived the 2019 Notre-Dame fire. It is an example of the court style in Late Gothic sculpture.
Tribhaṅga or Tribunga is a standing body position or stance used in traditional Indian art and Indian classical dance forms like the Odissi, where the body bends in one direction at the knees, the other direction at the hips and then the other again at the shoulders and neck.
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.
A tondo is a Renaissance term for a circular work of art, either a painting or a sculpture. The word derives from the Italian rotondo, "round". The term is usually not used in English for small round paintings, but only those over about 60 cm in diameter, thus excluding many round portrait miniatures – for sculpture the threshold is rather lower.
The marble Kritios Boy or Kritian Boy belongs to the Early Classical period of ancient Greek sculpture. It is the first statue from classical antiquity known to use contrapposto; Kenneth Clark called it "the first beautiful nude in art" The Kritios Boy is thus named because it is attributed, on slender evidence, to Kritios, who worked together with Nesiotes or their school, from around 480 BC. As currently mounted, the statue is considerably smaller than life-size at 117 cm, including the supports that replace the missing feet.
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.
The Pitti Tondo is an unfinished marble relief of the Virgin and Child by Michelangelo in round or tondo form. It was executed between 1503 and 1504 while he was residing in Florence and is now in the Museo nazionale del Bargello in Florence.
The Beautiful Madonna from Toruń - a Gothic sculpture depicting Mary and Infant Jesus from Toruń. One of the most valuable, in terms of artistic value, images of the Madonna and Child made at the turn of the 14th and 15th century. In terms of typology and stylistics, this work is pars pro toto of a beautiful Madonna, an iconographic type shaped before 1400. The sculpted images of Beautiful Madonnas represent the Beautiful style, a stylistic trend shaped during the Gothic period in Central Europe.
Renaissance sculpture is understood as a process of recovery of the sculpture of classical antiquity. Sculptors found in the artistic remains and in the discoveries of sites of that bygone era the perfect inspiration for their works. They were also inspired by nature. In this context we must take into account the exception of the Flemish artists in northern Europe, who, in addition to overcoming the figurative style of the Gothic, promoted a Renaissance foreign to the Italian one, especially in the field of painting. The rebirth of antiquity with the abandonment of the medieval, which for Giorgio Vasari "had been a world of Goths", and the recognition of the classics with all their variants and nuances was a phenomenon that developed almost exclusively in Italian Renaissance sculpture. Renaissance art succeeded in interpreting Nature and translating it with freedom and knowledge into a multitude of masterpieces.