Sculpture

"A means of display highly characteristic of the Roman empire was the arrangement of statues in tiers of niches adorning public buildings, including baths theaters, and amphitheaters. Several of the most impressive surviving statuary displays come from ornamental facades constructed in the Eastern provinces. Bolstered by wealth drawn from around the Mediterranean, the imperial families established their own palace culture that was later emulated by kings and emperors throughout Europe."

"You are fifty years old and would worship a day old statue!"

"“But that is what this sculpture is all about, Marie,” Aki said. He was talking faster now, gesticulating. “I hold the mirror up to nature and within the mirror theres another mirror that mirrors the mirrored nature Ive created…reflections within reflections…art within art…the truth only agonizingly, momentarily glimpsed…and that which is most beautiful is that which remains unseen…come on, Marie. You will get to see my hidden world."

"Modern technology has revealed an irrefutable, if unpopular, truth: many of the statues, reliefs, and sarcophagi created in the ancient Western world were in fact painted. Marble was a precious material for Greco-Roman artisans, but it was considered a canvas, not the finished product for sculpture. It was carefully selected and then often painted in gold, red, green, black, white, and brown, among other colors."

"A friend peering up at early-20th-century polychrome terra cottas of mythological figures at the Philadelphia Museum of Art once remarked to me: “There is no way the Greeks were that gauche.” How did color become gauche? Where does this aesthetic disgust come from? To many, the pristine whiteness of marble statues is the expectation and thus the classical ideal. But the equation of white marble with beauty is not an inherent truth of the universe. Where this standard came from and how it continues to influence white supremacist ideas today are often ignored. Most museums and art history textbooks contain a predominantly neon white display of skin tone when it comes to classical statues and sarcophagi. This has an impact on the way we view the antique world."

"Pioneers in the field of sexology in the early 20th century such as Iwan Bloch, Havelock Ellis, Richard von Krafft-Ebing, and Magnus Hirschfeld, have referenced statue love in their research. A French journal dated March 4th, 1877 published a story which describes the case of a gardener who falls in love with a statue of Venus de Milo and was found attempting coitus with it (Krafft-Ebing, 1965/1978). Krafft-Ebing describes these types of acts: “Violation of statues...they always give the impression of being pathological...these cases stand in etiological relation with abnormally intense libido and defective virility or courage, or lack of opportunity for normal sexual gratification” (p. 351). Hirschfeld’s Sexual Pathology (1940) considers Pygmalionism as inclusive of more “primitive” human simulacra than statues: To be sure the nature of Pygmalionism does not exhaust itself in love of statues as such, but also in the artificial, and occasionally artistic, construction of a figure corresponding to the inner desire whose sight and contact, which may go so far as actions similar to cohabitation, bring about physical and psychic relief...I have seen dolls which a prisoner made as a substitute for a woman. We are justified only to a certain extent in speaking of hypereroticism in such makeshift intercourse. (p. 226) Hirschfeld goes on to differentiate between a type of “makeshift intercourse” and fetish: “hypererotic excitation is evoked usually not only through the similarity to humanity alone, but through some special property of the statue, much as the necrophile is attracted to the course by the cool skin...” (Hirschfeld, 1940, p. 227)."

"The stone unhewn and cold Becomes a living mould, The more the marble wastes The more the statue grows."

"In sculpture did ever anybody call the Apollo a fancy piece? Or say of the Laocoön how it might be made different? A masterpiece of art has in the mind a fixed place in the chain of being, as much as a plant or a crystal."

"Not from a vain or shallow thought His awful Jove young Phidias brought."

"A sculptor wields The chisel, and the stricken marble grows To beauty."

"Sculpture is more divine, and more like Nature, That fashions all her works in high relief, And that is Sculpture. This vast ball, the Earth, Was moulded out of clay, and baked in fire; Men, women, and all animals that breathe Are statues, and not paintings."

"The Paphian Queen to Cnidos made repair Across the tide to see her image there: Then looking up and round the prospect wide, When did Praxiteles see me thus? she cried."