Praxiteles of Athens, the son of Cephisodotus the Elder, was the most renowned of the Attica sculptors of the 4th century BC. He was the first to sculpt the nude female form in a life-size statue. While no indubitably attributable sculpture by Praxiteles is extant, numerous copies of his works have survived; several authors, including Pliny the Elder, wrote of his works; and coins engraved with silhouettes of his various famous statuary types from the period still exist.
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.
Marc Quinn is a British contemporary visual artist whose work includes sculpture, installation, and painting. Quinn explores "what it is to be human in the world today" through subjects including the body, genetics, identity, environment, and the media. His work has used materials that vary widely, from blood, bread and flowers, to marble and stainless steel. Quinn has been the subject of solo exhibitions at Sir John Soane's Museum, the Tate Gallery, National Portrait Gallery, Fondation Beyeler, Fondazione Prada, and South London Gallery. The artist was a notable member of the Young British Artists movement.
Katherine Ann Moss is an English model. Arriving towards the end of the "supermodel era", Moss rose to fame in the early 1990s as part of the heroin chic fashion trend. Her collaborations with Calvin Klein brought her to fashion icon status. She is known for her waifish figure, and role in size zero fashion. Moss has had her own clothing range, has been involved in musical projects, and is also a contributing fashion editor for British Vogue. In 2012, she came second on the Forbes top-earning models list, with estimated earnings of $9.2 million in one year. The accolades she has received for modelling include the 2013 British Fashion Awards acknowledging her contribution to fashion over 25 years, while Time named her one of the world's 100 most influential people in 2007.
An equestrian statue is a statue of a rider mounted on a horse, from the Latin eques, meaning 'knight', deriving from equus, meaning 'horse'. A statue of a riderless horse is strictly an equine statue. A full-sized equestrian statue is a difficult and expensive object for any culture to produce, and figures have typically been portraits of rulers or, in the Renaissance and more recently, military commanders.
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.
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.
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.
A sphinx is a mythical creature with the head of a human and the body of a lion.
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.
Hundreds of replicas of the Statue of Liberty have been created worldwide. The original Statue of Liberty, designed by sculptor Frédéric Auguste Bartholdi, is 151 feet tall and stands on a pedestal that is 154 feet tall, making the height of the entire sculpture 305 feet.
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 Crouching Venus is a Hellenistic model of Venus surprised at her bath. Venus crouches with her right knee close to the ground, turns her head to the right and, in most versions, reaches her right arm over to her left shoulder to cover her breasts. To judge by the number of copies that have been excavated on Roman sites in Italy and France, this variant on Venus seems to have been popular.
The Athena of Velletri or Velletri Pallas is a type of classical marble statue of Athena, wearing a helmet.
Stumbling Man is an outdoor sculpture by American artist David K. Rubins (1902–1985) located on the grounds of the Indianapolis Museum of Art (IMA), which is near downtown Indianapolis, Indiana. The sculpture is cast bronze and is in the shape of a man crouched upon the ground.
King and Queen is a bronze sculpture by Henry Moore, designed in 1952. It depicts two figures, one male and one female, seated beside each other on a bench, both facing slightly to the left. It is Moore's only sculpture depicting a single pair of adult figures. Moore's records suggest it was originally known as Two Seated Figures.
The Satala Aphrodite is an over-life-sized head of a bronze Hellenistic statue discovered in Satala. Probably created in the 2nd or 1st century BC in Asia Minor, it was acquired by the British Museum in 1873, a year after its discovery. It has been widely admired since its discovery and likened to the Aphrodite of Knidos by some scholars.
The Great God Pan is a bronze sculpture by American sculptor George Grey Barnard. Since 1907, it has been a fixture of the Columbia University campus in Manhattan, New York City.
Physical Energy is a bronze equestrian statue by the English artist George Frederic Watts. Watts was principally a painter, but also worked on sculptures from the 1870s. Physical Energy was first cast in 1902, two years before his death, and was intended to be Watts's memorial to "unknown worth". Watts said it was a symbol of "that restless physical impulse to seek the still unachieved in the domain of material things". The original plaster maquette is at the Watts Gallery, and there are four full-size bronze casts: one in London, one in Cape Town, one in Harare and one soon to be sited at Watts Gallery - Artists' Village in Compton, Surrey. Other smaller bronze casts were also made after Watts's death.
Thomas Jefferson is a 1911 bronze statue of a seated Thomas Jefferson created by Karl Bitter for the Cuyahoga County Courthouse in Cleveland, Ohio, United States.
