Innovators in Sculpture

By Dianne L. Durante

How did artists progress from Egyptian sculptures to a work such as Frishmuth's The Vine? To find out, we focus on innovations that gave the artist who created them - and all those who followed - greater power to make viewers stop, look, and think about their works.

This jargon-free book is a great introduction or refresher for an

• Language: English
• Publisher: Dianne L. Durante
• Release date: Mar 1, 2023
• ISBN: 9781088114858

Dianne L. Durante

At age five, I won my first writing award: a three-foot-long fire truck with an ear-splitting siren. I've been addicted to writing ever since. Today I'm an independent researcher, freelance writer, and lecturer. The challenge of figuring out how ideas and facts fit together, and then sharing what I know with others, clearly and concisely - that's what makes me leap out of bed in the morning. Janson's *History of Art*, lent to me by a high-school art teacher, was my first clue that art was more than the rock-star posters and garden gnomes that I saw in Catawissa, Pennsylvania, and that history wasn't just a series of names, dates, and statistics. Soon afterwards I read Ayn Rand's fiction and nonfiction works, and discovered that art and history - as well as politics, ethics, science, and all fields of human knowledge - are integrated by philosophy. My approach to studying art is based on Rand's *The Romantic Manifesto*. (See my review of it on Amazon.) As an art historian I'm a passionate amateur, and I write for other passionate amateurs. I love looking at art, and thinking about art, and helping other people have a blast looking at it, too. *Outdoor Monuments of Manhattan: A Historical Guide* (New York University Press, 2007), which includes 54 sculptures, was described by Sam Roberts in the *New York Times* as "a perfect walking-tour accompaniment to help New Yorkers and visitors find, identify and better appreciate statues famous and obscure" (1/28/2007). Every week I issue four art-related recommendations to my supporters, which have been collected in *Starry Solitudes* (poetry) and *Sunny Sundays* (painting, sculpture, architecture, literature, and more). For more of my works, see https://diannedurantewriter.com/books-essays .

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CHAPTER 1: Size Matters

Note: If visuals help keep you chronologically oriented, see the timeline in Appendix 4.

Innovation #1: Life-size sculptures

To understand our first innovation, we need a bit of context. Specifically: the earliest known sculptures date to 30,000 or 20,000 BC. The few that survive are all small enough to hold easily in your hand (Figs. 1.1, 1.2).

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Neolithic sculptures, each about 4 inches, each dating to 15,000-10,000 BC. Fig. 1.1: Venus of Willendorf. Naturhistorisches Museum, Vienna. Photo: Don Hitchcock / Wikipedia. Fig. 1.2: Bison carved on reindeer horn. Museum of National Antiquities, St-Germain-en-Laye. Photo: Jochen Jahnke / Wikipedia

If you’ve ever tried to carve or model a lifelike human figure, even on a small scale, you know it’s an arduous task to get the basic proportions correct and make the anatomy believable . To do it on a large scale is even more difficult. And in sculpture, size matters. A work that’s life-size has an in-your-face impact that a four-inch sculpture does not. Around 2,500 BC, Egyptian sculptors began to create life-size works. (Fig. 1.3). At the Metropolitan Museum, the granite figure of Hatshepsut is the earliest monumental Egyptian sculpture that’s more or less complete (Fig. 1.4).

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Early Egyptian monumental sculpture. Figs. 1.3: Menkaure and His Queen, ca. 2490-2472 BC. Photo: Boston, Museum of Fine Arts. Fig. 1.4: Hatshepsut, ca. 1479-1458 BC. Photo: MetMuseum.org

Egyptian art was produced from 3000 to at least 300 BC. That’s 2,700 years, more than the time from the birth of Christ to the present. During those 2700 years, Egyptian artists turned innovation into convention.

The conventions

Figs. 1.5, 1.6, and 1.7 were created over the course of 2,200 years, but even at a quick glance, the similarities among them are striking. They share a number of features that recur in all monumental Egyptian sculptures of standing figures. We’ll look at some of these conventions for contrast with the sculpture we’ll be focusing on in Chapter 2 and later.

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Conventional Egyptian figures, hair, and faces: Figs. 1.5-7. Figs. 1.5, 1.8, 1.11: Striding Figure, ca. 2575-2465 BC. Figs. 1.6, 1.13: Hatshepsut, ca. 1479-1458 BC. Photos: MetMuseum.org. Fig. 1.7: Torso of a king, ca. 332-30 BC. Fig. 1.9: One of three seated statues, ca. 1961-1917 BC. Fig. 1.10: Statue of Yuny, ca. 1294-1269 BC. Fig. 1.12: Colossal statue of a pharaoh, ca. 1919-1885 BC. On loan from Aegyptisches Museum und Papyrussammlung, Staatliche Museen zu Berlin. Fig. 1.14: Yuny and His Wife Renututet, ca. 1294-1279 BC. All taken at the Metropolitan Museum

Working from head to toe, the conventions are:

The hair is stiff, like a wig (Figs. 1.8-1.10).

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Conventional Egyptian hair: Figs. 1.8-1.10. Credits: see above.

Faces are almost interchangeable, with similar shapes and features. No indication is given of age or emotion, or of variation in bone structure (Figs. 1.11-1.14).

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Conventional Egyptian faces: Figs. 1.11-1.14. Credits above.

The shapes of the human bodies represented are also almost interchangeable in proportions and surface modeling. In the four torsos in Figs. 1.15-1.18, the shoulders are always broad, the pectorals are high and well defined, and the chest tapers to a narrow waist.

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Conventional Egyptian torsos: Figs. 1.15-1.18. Credits above.

There is little variation in dress. Men wear pleated kilts; women wear simple, tightly fitted sheaths (Figs. 1.19-1.21).

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Conventional Egyptian costumes: Figs. 1.19-1.21. Credits above.

The arms are attached to the sides of the figure, and the stone is left between the legs. The only exception is when figures are carved from wood (Figs. 1.22-1.25).

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Conventional arm and leg positions of Egyptian sculptures: Figs. 1.22-1.25. Credits above.

If the figure is standing, the left foot (always the left) is forward. The torso is aligned above the right foot (Figs. 1.22-1.25, above).

In Figs. 1.22 and 1.24 (above), you can see that the figure is attached to a backdrop — a wall — so it seems to be still part of the stone block. Fig. 1.25 has the remains of a smaller backdrop, not visible in this photo.

One minor feature perfectly illustrates how much Egyptian sculptors abided by conventions. Through more than two millennia, the toes on Egyptian sculptures are consistently long, thin, and without joints or knuckles. They look rather like breakfast sausages (Figs. 1.26-1.29).

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Egyptian toes. Fig. 1.26: Striding Figure, ca. 2575-2465 BC. Fig. 1.27: Headless statue of Babaef as a younger man, ca. 2475-2450 BC. Fig. 1.28: Colossal statue of a pharaoh, ca. 1919-1885. On loan from Aegyptisches Museum und Papyrussammlung, Staatliche Museen zu Berlin. Fig. 1.29: Statue of the Goddess Sakhmet, ca. 1390-1352 BC. All at the Metropolitan Museum.

Conventions about subject and style dominate the art of ancient Egypt to such a degree that you have to be a trained Egyptologist to distinguish between sculptures that were created two millennia apart.

In the next chapter, we’ll see an innovation by Greek artists that builds on Egyptian sculptors’ monumental works, but brings a new idea to the party.

CHAPTER 2: Look at Those Chiseled Abs!

At first glance, the sculpture in Figs. 2.1-2.2—one of the earliest surviving life-size Greek sculptures —looks like a first cousin to the Egyptian sculptures we saw in Chapter 1. But in the details of the New York Kouros lurks a major innovation.

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Early Greek lifesize sculpture. Figs. 2.1, 2.2: New York Kouros, ca. 590 BC. Photos: MetMuseum.org.

How is this sculpture like Egyptian sculptures?

Working from head to toe, here are the similarities between Egyptian sculpture and the New York Kouros.

The hair is stiff, like a wig (Figs. 2.3, 2.4).

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Egyptian and Greek hair and faces. Fig. 2.3: Egyptian seated figure, ca. 1961-1917 BC. Fig. 2.4: New York Kouros, ca. 590 BC. Both at Metropolitan Museum.

The arms are attached to the torso. In the Greek sculpture, however, they’re attached only at the hands, not all the way along the arms (Figs. 2.5, 2.6).

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Egyptian and Greek arms. Fig. 2.5: Egyptian striding figure, ca. 2575-2465 BC. Fig. 2.6: New York Kouros, ca. 590 BC. Both at the Metropolitan Museum.

The shape of the torso is similar, from the broad shoulders to the tapering waist (Figs. 2.7-2.9 and 2.12).

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Egyptian torsos. Fig. 2.7: Striding figure, ca. 2575-2465 BC. Fig. 2.8: seated pharaoh, ca. 1919-1885 BC. On loan from Aegyptisches Museum, Staatliche Museen zu Berlin. Fig. 2.9: Kneeling statue of Amenoemopetemhat, ca. 664-610 BC.

The left foot is forward (Figs. 2.10-2.11).

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Egyptian and Greek foot position. Fig. 2.10: Egyptian striding figure, ca. 2575-2465 BC. Fig. 2.11: New York Kouros, ca. 590 BC. All at Metropolitan Museum.

Clearly this Greek sculptor was very familiar with Egyptian sculptures, and even looked to them as models. But he also shattered conventions that had kept Egyptian art static for two thousand years.

How is the New York Kouros different?

The New York Kouros is nude (Figs. 2.1, 2.2, 2.11 above).

He’s not attached to a backboard (Fig. 2.11 above, vs. 2.10).

The torso of the New York Kouros is balanced between his feet — not resting over the right foot (Fig. 2.11 above, vs. 2.10). Because of that, even though his feet are flat on the ground, he appears to be moving forward.

The sculptor incised lines on the abdomen to indicate the rib cage (Fig. 2.12). Egyptian torsos appear more realistic (Figs. 2.7-2.9), but if you look at a series of them, there’s an astonishing sameness. Someone must have observed and recorded the surface appearance of a man’s abs, but other sculptors simply copied his work, century after century. If you don’t get this point, go through the Metropolitan Museum’s Egyptian galleries looking just at the torsos, trying to find one that’s significantly