Sculpture 💛
Sculpture, an artistic form in which hard or plastic materials are worked into three-dimensional art objects.
The designs may be embodied in freestanding objects, in reliefs on surfaces, or in environments ranging from tableaux to contexts that envelop the spectator.
An enormous variety of media may be used, including clay, wax, stone, metal, fabric, glass, wood, plaster, rubber, and random “found” objects. Materials may be carved, modeled, molded, cast, wrought, welded, sewn, assembled, or otherwise shaped and combined.
Sculpture is not a fixed term that applies to a permanently circumscribed category of objects or sets of activities. It is, rather, the name of an art that grows and changes and is continually extending the range of its activities and evolving new kinds of objects.
The scope of the term was much wider in the second half of the 20th century than it had been only two or three decades before, and in the fluid state of the visual arts in the 21st century nobody can predict what its future extensions are likely to be.
In the ancient world and during the Middle Ages almost all sculpture was artificially coloured, usually in a bold and decorative rather than a naturalistic manner.
The sculptured portal of a cathedral, for example, would be coloured and gilded with all the brilliance of a contemporary illuminated manuscript.
Combinations of differently coloured materials, such as the ivory and gold of some Greek sculpture, were not unknown before the 17th century; but the early Baroque sculptor Gian Lorenzo Bernini greatly extended the practice by combining variously coloured marbles with white marble and gilt bronze.
The following is a list of works of sculpture, architecture, and painting by the Italian Baroque artist Gian Lorenzo Bernini. The numbering follows Rudolph Wittkower’s Catalogue, first published in 1955 in Gian Lorenzo Bernini: The Sculptor of the Roman Baroque.
