Marble sculpture
Sculpture made by carving marble, a fine-grained stone that can hold precise forms and take a polished finish.
Pointing machine: A mechanical device that transfers measured points from a model to a block of stone. It helps sculptors reproduce a clay or plaster model accurately in marble.
Venus de Milo: An ancient Greek marble statue of Aphrodite, discovered on the island of Milos in 1820. Its incomplete arms and refined drapery make it a defining example of ancient marble sculpture.
Parian marble: A fine-grained, translucent white marble quarried on the Greek island of Paros. Its translucency made it especially prized for Greek statues and refined surface detail.
Michelangelo: An Italian Renaissance artist known for sculpture, painting, architecture, and poetry. His marble figures made anatomical power and unfinished stone central to his artistic reputation.
Bronze sculpture: Sculpture made by casting or working bronze, an alloy composed mainly of copper and tin. Bronze can be cast into forms that marble carving cannot achieve as readily, such as extended limbs.
Subtractive sculpture: Sculpture made by removing material from a solid mass. Marble carving is a subtractive process: each cut permanently removes stone.
David (Michelangelo): A marble statue of the biblical David carved by Michelangelo between 1501 and 1504. Its scale and anatomical detail demonstrate the expressive range of a single marble block.
Pentelic marble: A white marble quarried from Mount Pentelicus near Athens, often marked by faint golden tones. It supplied major ancient Athenian monuments and sculpture.
Donatello: An Italian Renaissance sculptor whose works include bronze, wood, and marble figures. His marble reliefs and statues helped reshape sculpture in fifteenth-century Italy.
Wood carving: The practice of shaping wood by cutting away material with hand tools or machinery. Wood’s grain and lighter weight create different constraints than marble’s crystalline structure.