Reply to "SCULPTURE"

Mesopotamia and Its Art
More than 4,000 years ago the valleys of the Tigris and Euphrates rivers began to teem with life--first the Sumerian, then the Babylonian, Assyrian, Chaldean, and Persian empires. Here too excavations have unearthed evidence of great skill and artistry. From Sumeria have come examples of fine works in marble, diorite, hammered gold, and lapis lazuli. Of the many portraits produced in this area, some of the best are those of Gudea, ruler of Lagash.

Babylonian and Assyrian sculpture is impressive in its vitality, massiveness, and rich imagination. Huge fanciful lions or winged bulls with human heads stood guard at palace entrances. Inside, the walls were carved with scenes of royal hunting parties, battles, and festivities. In Persia too, especially at Persepolis, fine sculpture was produced.

The Glorious Sculpture of Greece
The glory of Greece was its sculpture. The roots of Greek sculpture reach into the earlier cultures of Crete, Mycenae, and even Egypt. The figures of the 7th and 6th centuries BC lack life and movement; their faces wear the frozen smile peculiar to archaic sculpture. Even so, these early craftsmen, whose names are lost with the temples they decorated, show sensitivity to the qualities of marble and a superb sense of design. As if to make up for the lack of life in their statues, archaic sculptors sought naturalism by painting them.
Greek sculpture rose to its highest achievement in the 5th century BC, when the spirit of Greece itself was at its height. ( see Greek art for examples )

From the Romans to the Renaissance
The Romans lacked the intellectual and aesthetic sensibilities of the Greeks. Their strength lay in military prowess, engineering, road building, and lawmaking. Their emperors required realistic portraits and triumphal arches to impress their own people and the subjugated nations of their far-flung empire.
The triumphal arches of the Emperors Titus and Constantine, adorned with scenes of victory and battle, have inspired similar efforts in Europe and America, from the Arc de Triomphe, in Paris, to the Memorial Arch of Valley Forge.

By the 2nd century AD, however, Rome and sculpture both had lost their vigor. As collectors, copyists, and imitators of Greek sculpture, however, the Romans handed on to later generations the partial fruits of Greek labor. ( see Roman art for examples )

Christianity and a New Art
In the 4th century the Roman Empire accepted Christianity as its religion. This meant a new kind of art. Sculpture, like painting, music, and philosophy, turned for inspiration to the church, and the church, faced with the need of interpreting the new religion for great masses of people, used the arts to good advantage. The vast majority of people could not read, and sculpture and painting became their books--as stained glass windows would a few centuries later.

Art was austere, symbolic, and otherworldly from about the 8th to the 1 2th century, the middle period of the Middle Ages. It was decidedly abstract, not realistic. Religious in subject matter, sculpture was closely related to church architecture.

The Renaissance in Italy
The term Renaissance, meaning "rebirth," is used to describe the vigorous cultural activity of 14th- and 15th-century Italy and the revival of classical learning. Following Italy's lead, France and northern Europe also turned their interests from the rewards of heaven to the opportunities of their own world. In doing so they found themselves akin in spirit to the Romans and Greeks before them. In their new love of life and search for knowledge they reached back a thousand years for every shred of instruction and inspiration. The Italians needed only to dig into the ground beneath them to find examples of the splendid sculpture of Rome.

Michelangelo 1475-1564, Italy
Pieta, Detail of the Face of the Madonna
Marble