The enduring art of marble sculpture

Many of our ideas about art come from antiquity. Even the word “museum” comes from the Greek mouseion, a place dedicated to the Muses, the goddesses of the arts and sciences. Indeed, the art of marble sculpture, its techniques, themes, and characteristics can also be traced back to the remarkable artistic achievements of classical Greek and Roman sculptors that have influenced generations of artists.

In the 5th century B.C., Greek artists perfected an idealized version of the human form, representing figures with youthful, serene faces and toned bodies in elegant, balanced poses. Painters and sculptors of later centuries were greatly influenced by this classical ideal and by the mythological subjects so often depicted by ancient artists. This was especially true when many ancient sculptures were rediscovered in the 16th, 17th, and 18th centuries.

The ancient Greeks and Romans honored individuals through portraiture, and this practice has endured through the centuries. Roman artists were especially renowned for rendering their subjects' true physical characteristics. Ancient sculptors also used costume, jewelry, and gesture to indicate a person's social or political status.

In the skillfully rendered Roman portrait shown above, the smooth oval face mimics idealized Greek sculpture, and the hair and diadem recall images of Greek goddesses. The protruding ears and slightly receding chin, however, imply the individual face of a real woman.

Similarly, in this 17th-century marble bust of an Italian noblewoman, shown below, Alessandro Algardi idealizes the face but also depicts the woman’s plump chin. Algardi worked in Rome and was strongly influenced by ancient classical statuary. His style embodied both classicism and the European Baroque artistic style of the 1600s with its theatricality, movement, and exuberance.

The fine details of the elaborate hairstyle and costly jewelry and dress display the artist’s true mastery of marble carving. Algardi sculpted the delicate lace mantle in low relief with subtle contours that reveal how the garment fell around the sitter's shoulders. The strand of pearls, which weaves across her chest and around her sash, is carved in extremely high relief and in some places entirely in the round.

Aphrodite, the Greek goddess of love (Roman Venus) was often represented in classical sculpture nude, influenced by a ground-breaking, life-sized nude statue of Aphrodite by the 4th-century B.C. Greek sculptor Praxiteles. The Roman statue of Venus, shown below left, is derived from the lost Greek original made about 350 B.C. Venus's proportions represent the classical ideal of the female figure.

The 18th-century statue of Venus adjusting her sandal, shown above right, was inspired by another statue type of the goddess in classical art. Like ancient sculptors, Joseph Nollekens chose to depict Venus nude to emphasize her beauty and allure. Carved fully in the round in a satiny white marble, the figure was designed to be viewed from multiple angles.

No other god or hero of Greek mythology is as frequently depicted in Greek and Roman art as is Herakles (Roman Hercules). He nearly always appears with a club and the skin of the Nemean Lion, which he killed as his first labor. As is typical for depictions of Greek heroes, the young Herakles is shown nude, since the Greeks considered nude males to reflect the highest form of beauty. Greek athletes exercised and competed naked, and the toned male body came to represent not just athletes but also heroes and gods.

The Lansdowne Herakles, shown above, very likely was a Roman copy inspired by a lost Greek statue from the 300s B.C. Found near the ruins of the villa of the Roman emperor Hadrian at Tivoli outside Rome, the Lansdowne Herakles was probably one of numerous copies of Greek sculpture commissioned by Hadrian, who loved Greek culture. The statue was named for Lord Lansdowne, who once owned the Herakles and displayed it in his home in London.

In mythology, Herakles was enormously strong, and even as an infant he killed a pair of dangerous serpents with his bare hands. By the early 1600s, the theme of Hercules and a serpent was revived in sculpture. Pietro and Gian Lorenzo Bernini, a master sculptor, depicted the ancient Roman Hercules as a mischievous infant who smiles, sits on the serpent (now a dragon), and breaks its jaw with his bare hands, as shown below.

In the sculpture shown below,  Hercules the god has been associated by his wreath with images of athletes. The god has thick, curly hair and a luxurious beard. As was often seen on statues of victorious athletes, he wears a wreath of wine leaves, finely carved from marble, and a fillet (ribbon) with the ends trailing over his shoulders.

In ancient Greece, wreaths were awarded as prizes for athletic and other competitions. Specific gods were associated with the different plants used to make wreaths. Elaborate gold wreaths were worn like crowns on ceremonial occasions, and these were sometimes placed in tombs.

Hercules’ attribute of a lion skin, a symbol of victory of his victory over the famous Nemean Lion, hangs from his left forearm. Traces of blue and purple pigments are preserved on the lion's head, reminding us that ancient marble statues were painted, although the delicate pigments have usually almost entirely worn away.

Dating to about sixteen centuries later, Antonio Canova's marble sculpture (above) shows Apollo crowning himself with a laurel wreath. Our term poet laureate comes from Apollo's laurel wreath, because Apollo was the god of poets and writers. Artists, writers, and rulers were also frequently seen in European art wearing or holding wreaths.

Integrating traditional techniques, French sculptor Auguste Rodin created this 20th-century marble sculpture of a dying man nailed to a rock, mourned by a naked woman kneeling in front of him, as shown below. The dramatic impact of this work results in part from the stark contrast between the highly polished bodies of the nude figures and the rough-hewn marble.

Rodin titled this piece Christ and Mary Magdalene, but he also called it The Genius and Pity (Pity being a personification, in classical style, of an emotion) and Prometheus and the Oceanid, a reference to the Greek myth in which the Titan Prometheus was chained to a rock by Zeus for giving man fire. Rodin, with both his nude figures and his titles, infused the composition with classical mythological and aesthetic themes as enduring as the marble that embodies them.

As the above examples reveal, the art of marble sculpture is timeless. Many classical themes have endured, influencing artists through the ages, from antiquity to the Renaissance and into the modern era.